Leaked San Francisco police drone footage reveals the new reality of urban surveillance

Only in the afternoon On Saturday last month, A Skydio X10 Quadcopter He flew 200 feet above an apartment complex in San Francisco, watching police Chasing a man hiding behind a parked car. The target of this pursuit was lying on the sidewalk, apparently unaware that he remained in full view of the flying eye above his head. In fact, the 5-pound drone had already followed him across town, zooming in on the license plate of his black SUV, and keeping the vehicle locked in the middle of its video frame until it stopped. Now he saw the police approaching him and surrounding him.

As officers approached, the man adjusted his hiding place and moved to the other side of the parked car. However, at that moment, another Skydio drone zoomed in on his location, one of four Skydio Quadcopters that had followed the man in just the previous hour. This person was called away from a nearby McDonald’s, where he had been observing two people who had gotten out of the suspect’s car a few minutes earlier – and was now starting to watch him from a second angle.

Within seconds, three officers approached the man, two of them pointed their weapons at him, and then tackled him when six other police officers arrived at the scene. Police records provided to WIRED by the San Francisco Police Department show that the entire street and sky response followed what SFPD described as an alleged “boost/spontaneous stripping” incident — suspected theft of car parts or anything else from the vehicle.

Drone footage posted at a public web address shows how a quadcopter zoomed in on the SUV’s license plate, tracked it through traffic, and then followed the driver as he exited the vehicle and entered an apartment complex. The suspect hid behind a car, then adjusted his hiding place, yet was still visible to a second drone that arrived at the scene — one of four that tracked his location in one hour and then caught police tackling him — all in response to what SFPD describes as an alleged “auto boost/stripping” incident, or the theft of car parts or something else from the vehicle.

Materials reviewed by WIRED

This glimpse into modern drone-enabled police surveillance, including highly sensitive video of the man’s physical takedown, was not voluntarily released by the SFPD — which, like most American police departments, rarely releases drone videos even in response to public records requests. Instead, it was accidentally broadcast live on the open Internet via the Skydio website. This is where two security researchers, Sam Curry and Mike Robert, discovered that the SFPD was leaking all the real-time footage from five of the surveillance drones, including color and thermal imaging, accompanying location metadata, and the drone pilots’ names and email addresses, to anyone who found the public web address where the videos were hosted.

Carey and Robert say they reported their discovery to Skydio about two days after it was discovered, and it was quickly taken down from the internet. By then, researchers had witnessed police carrying out what appeared to be multiple arrests and searches, as well as tracking cars and individuals from the sky, all visible on a fully public web address.

“There’s a certain trust in police to use these things properly,” Carey says. “When you watch a live drone feed, you can look at dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests. The fact that all of this has been exposed seems like a really big deal from a privacy perspective.”

The leaked video shows two forced arrests – it is not clear from the footage whether there were any actual arrests – a police visit to an apartment in a high-rise apartment building, an apparent search of an alley populated by homeless people, as well as several other, more ambiguous instances where police used drones to monitor individuals, vehicles or buildings. While the broadcast remained live, Carey and Robert began archiving the public stream of data and video and later shared the results with WIRED.

The archive seized by Carey and Robert provides a detailed record of SFPD drone operations over a period of approximately 48 hours in mid-June. It includes 60 videos from 20 separate flights, with each mission recorded from three feeds: a color camera, a thermal camera that displays people as heat signatures, and a third view from the drone’s deck dock. WIRED analyzed all 20 color videos using software that detects people, vehicles and other objects in images. The review found that cameras captured hundreds of people and vehicles across the 20 flights. In one shot, as a drone hovered over a downtown intersection, the program counted 34 people crossing the street or standing on the sidewalks. The footage in all the videos showed the clear faces of dozens of people.

Together the videos amount to over three hours of color aerial footage and roughly the same amount of thermal footage. The archive also includes second-by-second telemetry records for each flight—more than 5,000 GPS points in all tracking over a range of about 44 miles—recording each drone’s latitude and longitude, altitude, speed, heading, and battery level from takeoff to landing. The names and email addresses of six SFPD pilots also appear throughout the records.