Eyes In The Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All

by Arthur Holland Michel

Overview

The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens

Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system—and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare—allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before they happen.
     In battle, Gorgon Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when this technology is deployed over American cities—as it already has been, extensively and largely in secret—it has the potential to become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens. 
     Drawing on extensive access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its many perils.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544972001
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	666,800
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

ARTHUR HOLLAND MICHEL is a Peruvian-born writer and researcher. He has written about drones, artificial intelligence, culture, and immigration for Wired, Vice, Fast Company, Motherboard, Al Jazeera America, and an Oxford Research Encyclopedia, among other outlets. He is the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone, a research institute that he co-founded at Bard College in 2012.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/18/2019

Michel, codirector of Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone, provides an unsettling but balanced look at technological advances in aerial surveillance. He provides helpful background to the issue, by explaining that the devastation wreaked by IEDs in early 2000s Iraq impelled the Pentagon to search for new ways of detecting concealed bombs and tracking the insurgents responsible for them. The result was the invention of powerful aerial surveillance systems, bearing such ominous names as Angel Fire, Constant Hawk, and Gorgon Stare, and in one case, as Michel vividly describes, capable of spotting “an object six inches wide from an altitude of 25,000 feet in a frame twice the width of Manhattan.” Avoiding the pitfall of coming across as anti-technology, Michel points out the potential benefits of these inventions beyond their original applications, such as in fighting forest fires and finding hurricane survivors. Despite such positives, he issues a trenchant warning about the opportunities for abuse. Alarming but not alarmist, this study leaves readers with an informative and persuasive look at how society might regulate cutting-edge technology to assure both individual privacy rights and the government’s ability to guard public safety. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A startling, disturbing, and deeply reported account of the powerful new technologies that promise safety and imperil privacy on an unprecedented scale.” —Jeff Morley, Salon “There is endless value in gathering data from every angle—especially from above. Arthur Holland Michel‘s new book, Eyes in the Sky, powerfully unpacks the evolution and morality of modern aerial surveillance. For the military and beyond, Holland Michel deftly outlines how we can delicately balance the technology’s limitless potential with its resultant impacts on our daily lives.” —General (ret.) Stanley McChrystal, former commander of Joint Special Operations Command and author of Team of Teams “A groundbreaking book about the promise and peril of wide-area motion imagery on and off the battlefield. Arthur Holland Michel’s thoughtful and probing work calls for urgent consideration of the rapidly expanding uses—public and private—of automatic surveillance technology.” —Linda Robinson, author of One Hundred Victories   “Eyes in the Sky is an immensely readable and vitally important account of the development and deployment of surveillance technologies that will have profound implications for free societies. It belongs on the desk of every policymaker and on the bookshelf of every informed citizen.” —Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project “On almost every page, EYES IN THE SKY offers astonishing details that seem to belong in science fiction. But they’re true.  The same technology can be used to battle forest fires or literally track your every move. Can we control these machines? As Arthur Holland Michel makes clear in this riveting and important book, we now have a choice: confront the threat or sacrifice our basic freedoms.” —Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control "Eyes in the Sky is an invaluable guide to a new era of 'smart' persistent surveillance." —Trevor Paglen, artist and author of Blank Spots on the Map "Engaging and timely, Arthur Holland Michel’s portrayal of the ubiquitous eye in the sky shows how it makes us all safer, but also may mean the end of privacy. His work uncovers the groundbreaking history of some of the world’s most advanced imagery surveillance programs and demonstrates a dizzying array of technological capabilities that have the potential to permanently alter many aspects of our society forever." —Richard A. Clarke, author of Against All Enemies and former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism —

From the Publisher

2019-04-14
A look at airborne spycraft and how, "someday, most major developed cities…will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance."

Drone surveillance unsettles civil liberties advocates, but they will have much more to discuss regarding an eye in the sky that observes everyone all the time. That all-seeing entity is the subject of this disturbing account from Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. The military mostly employs drones for observation, but their cameras are helpless against improvised explosive devices planted along roads. Dealing with IEDs requires 24-hour surveillance of huge areas. Suspicious actors can be followed. Once an IED explodes, one simply rewinds the tape, watches insurgents plant the bomb, and then retraces their steps to the base of operation. Cameras with this ability require immense computer power and expensive technical backup, but diligent research has produced several systems now deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The cameras remain a work in progress. The author excels in explaining their bumpy development but reveals little about their effectiveness on the battlefield; this is classified information, so spokesmen provide only vague, optimistic details. What Michel makes vividly clear is that civilian authorities yearn for this technology, and entrepreneurs supplying the military are anxious to branch out. The FBI and many police departments are flying prototypes, which have sometimes proved successful in tracing criminal activities. Is this a preliminary to the all-seeing eye of Nineteen Eighty-Four? "To be sure," writes the author, "aerial surveillance can certainly be used for purposes we can all agree upon….But there is a very real line beyond which the all-seeing eye becomes a dragnet that is incompatible with the tenets of civil liberty." So far, public opposition has quashed local efforts at permanent surveillance, but this will change as accuracy improves and law-and-order advocates extol the benefits. Michel concludes with a review of legal safeguards that, in a perfect world, will accompany these programs.

A skilled, mildly alarmist overview of another dazzling if intrusive technology.

Kirkus Reviews