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

by Arthur Holland Michel

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.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Technology, Politics, History, Military Fiction, Conspiracy Theories

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2019

Reviews

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All​ begins with the history of modern surveillance methods​, such as WAMI (wide area motion imagery). It felt rather dry and repetitive even though the technology itself is fascinating.... and frightening. I enjoyed the second part of the book more than the history, where the author discusses possible trajectories for massive surveillance in the coming future, and what we as private citizens need to know in order to protect ourselves and create laws in which this technology will not be abused. Certainly there are benefits to WAMI and Wide-are Airborne Surveillance Systems. By using AI with these cameras, they can alert us to crimes before they take place in order to dispatch the appropriate police force to the scene. They can alert us of forest fires when they first begin, rather than waiting until they have spread uncontrollably. They can help track down terrorists and find missing people. These are just some of the benefits to having an all-seeing, unblinking eye in the sky. And yet. And yet, most of us are not all that comfortable with the idea of being watched at all times.

​Mr. Michel points out though, how much we are already being surveilled, and willingly, through our smart devices, especially our mobile phones (not to mention all that we share on social media). I was very interested to learn that as far as overhead surveillance, there are no laws limiting it in America. Anyone can use a drone to spy on people through an open window. That is creepy!

Because I could not find much information about the author's credentials, I had a hard time granting him full trust. I do not know how much authority he has to speak on this subject, though he does seem to have interviewed many people "in the know" and did a sufficient amount of research. There are copious notes in the back to support his claims. Even so, I am unable to put complete trust in the validity of the book, wary as I am of where I get my information. I think had I been able to find out more about the author than just his place of employment and names of publications he has submitted articles to, I would have been more invested in this book and enjoyed it more.

[Eric_W · Rating 5 out of 5]

It wasn't long into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that Rumsfeld realized the quantum difference between earlier wars and the new situation. Formerly, satellites and airplanes would take still pictures which would then be analyzed and bombed or whatever. Airfields and buildings did not move so there was time. Even tanks moving on a road had limited options where they might proceed and their speed was easily known. Now, the bad actors didn't even belong to a state, they were an amorphous group of individuals who could disappear from a location with the start of an ignition. 

Predator drones had been around for a while and had increased in sophistication. They could now fly higher and had cameras with resolution such that they could pick out an earring from 20,000 feet. What Rumsfeld wanted was video to follow a moving target. Enter "Stare". These video cameras coupled with a drone like the Predator could follow a man for hours, circle and wait if need be. One great missed opportunity was the targeting of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. He was spotted and followed but for some unexplained reason it was decided not to fire on him. A lost opportunity, but then perhaps it was figured he hadn't done anything yet.

Technical problems in developing the Gorgon Stare were overcome by melding commercial hardware and software. Cell phone cameras were linked together in an array that provided 176 times the megapixel of just one cell camera and then they discovered the best software for manipulating the huge number of images the cameras collected was in video game boxes. The result was stunning.

The result was wide-area extremely sensitive cameras and recording. It has been tested by several agencies under the guise of those manufacturing the devices, usually done in secret because of fears the public might not be especially receptive to the idea of being under constant surveillance. Proponents point to assorted successes: catching bad guys after crimes have been committed by following them back to their dwellings, maximizing resources in wildfires, traffic control in real time, even something as prosaic as helping drivers find parking spots at large events. NASCAR hired one to watch over a race and the operator, bored to tears, realized after watch a car spend two hours trying to find a parking place when he could see several available, that had drivers had access to his information, and they had purchased just one soda during the time saved, that NASCAR would have paid the fee for the surveillance several times over.

There are myriad uses for such wide-area-surveillance, the technology for which has exploded. It used to be thought that 100 megapixels (your phone camera has about 10 megapixels) would be plenty. The latest model now sports 40 GIGApixels and there is no end in sight. The cameras are smaller, the processing power and storage cheaper. The civilian applications are numerous. One demonstration over an unnamed city in the south suggested the expensive (but getting cheaper) flights could pay for themselves in catching traffic violations. Hit-and-run drivers were identified as were the causes of accidents not to mention blown through stop signs and traffic signals. Another use has been to monitor the health of underground pipelines. The technology is already there to share usage, so you could have firefighters monitoring wild fires while others watched traffic patterns, and still others looked for crimes being committed especially now that artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated and able to make split-second decisions. 

A good book to read in connection with Paul Scharre's An Army of None Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. It's fascinating if a bit frightening; another case of technology outstripping policy. (Bear in mind the Supreme Court is populated with justices who don't know how to use email.)

Check out https://www.pss-1.com/what-is-wide-ar...

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one scary book. Published 6 years ago, the state of the art must be so much further along. With AI appearing on the scene. our privacy will be a distant memory, maybe it already is. The main topic, wide-area motion imagery (WAMI), has its genesis from the movie “Enemy of the State”, according to the author. The all-seeing eye, able to track back in time to find Gene Hackman’s truck and follow it to his hideout is the model. Zoom in to find a target while still looking at everything is quite the trick. The development is pushed along by the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finding the makers and implanters of IEDs is the goal and the technology advances rapidly. War does tend to raise the bar on tech development. Useful in war, the tech is brought back to the civilian world. Just imagine the power of fusing this overhead tracking with your social media, your computer use, and your cellphone track. I give this one Five Stars I took so many notes. A lengthy review might follow but here are a few comments:

Wide-area motion imagery records a very large area in such high resolution that users can zoom in on areas of interest while the camera continues recording the entire view.

I just read that NYC is going to use drones to watch over Labor Day parties. Drones are useful in emergency situations but overhead preventive surveillance feels wrong.

Gorgon Stare—is still thousands of times more powerful than that employed on regular police and FBI aircraft. How could any law enforcement agency not desire such a technology?

…there are mounting efforts to bring the all-seeing eye to US law enforcement, part of a drastic expansion of aerial surveillance of all kinds in our skies.…. someday, most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance.…Any surveillance technology, if it is powerful enough, will always take on a life of its own. Once it’s out, the all-seeing cat never goes back in the bag.

Not only that — it evolves. Labs, intelligence agencies, and private firms in America and abroad are working to develop the next generation of surveillance technologies, designed to watch the broadest possible area at the highest possible resolution. As a result, wide-area surveillance is getting cheaper, lighter, faster, and more powerful.

Get ready for complete loss of privacy:

…artificial intelligence that can do the watching for us. Such a machine is as close as anything to a holy grail in the world of spycraft. If a camera that watches a whole city is smart enough to track and understand every target simultaneously, it really can be said to be all-seeing; it may even be capable of predicting events before they happen. And when such a camera and its computers find their way into new domains, and become fused with the surveillance systems in all other areas of modern life, what you get is nothing short of omniscience.

The idea of Hydra selecting and targeting those with ideas that don’t conform doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore:

For those behind the cameras, the totalist approach to surveillance is a boon. For those on the ground,…it leaves little room to hide. To be sure, aerial surveillance can certainly be used for purposes we can all agree upon, from firefighting operations to disaster relief. 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, particularly if the one doing the watching is a computer. The billion-pixel question is, where do we draw that line?

[Papaphilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. Part education, history, and a warning. Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All is a wonderful mixture of explaining sky view technology and the ramifications of both good and evil with this technology. Arthur Holland Michel does an amazing job of presenting a balanced view how this technology can be a boon to our fighting forces and crime fighting, but how fast it can get out of control, not from evil intent, but the Frankenstein effect of the unintended consequences of not understanding how this can impact privacy and civil society. He is obviously very worried about this potential problem, but also not so ready to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.

This is not a call to arms, but a warning of vigilance for protecting privacy and civil rights. Arthur Holland Michel notes how much of the new technology is shrouded in secret. some of it for national security is understandable, but how about law enforcement hiding this from the citizenry. The analogies used bring home the need for both oversight for police use as well as societal information to protect the rights of all. The technology is new, but not the much older larger questions of the boundaries of use.

Great read and this is a must book.

[Kitten Kisser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am already viewed as being odd because I don't have a smart phone or post updates on FB all of the time. I try to tell people how we are providing too much information for anyone to view. So here I am, feeling mostly safe in my privacy only to learn that the air above me is considered public space & as such anyone can watch me. Even worse, it is my job to ensure my privacy is protected from above. You've got to be kidding me.

This book shows how we got to where we are & why & has some pretty good ideas as to where we are likely headed. For example, a third license plate on the roves of our vehicles for the never blinking eye in the sky. Sure, there are very good applications for such an ability like terrorism & fighting crime. But, it obviously comes with a price. Not to mention the results of the bad guys getting their hands on such technology or when it becomes so affordable your neighbor can have a look-see.

So you have nothing to hide. Neither do I, but that's not the point. We have a right to privacy. With eyes in the sky & infrared technology, along with social media updates & smart phones, there is not one single place that is private, even indoors.

Apparently I'm not so crazy after all.

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Research and organization was a good technical read. For the non-technical components, such as the legal and moral obligations associated with surveillance technologies, I thought the author did a poor job of discussing these issues. When the technology experienced a setback from being deployed, the author generally brushed it off as a “political issue”. I was really interested in the debate about these technologies, but these topics were generally one-sided.

[Chris Dietzel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was okay but could have been much better. The author is well-informed and researched but has no handle on how to make nonfiction interesting. This felt more like a textbook than engrossing nonfiction.

The author also has a habit of picking and choosing what information he presents.
- He notes an intelligence report that indicates thousands of potential terrorists have been killed with the aid of 'Eye in the Sky' technology but fails to note a subsequent intelligence report that found that approximately 90% of those people were entirely innocent.
- He says it might be a coincidence that a high-ranking officer in the Air Force that was in charge of one of these programs, retired and went to a private contractor and then that contractor was awarded billions of dollars to support this program. (Probably just a coincidence!)
- He also states that this technology will be used domestically, that it's just a matter of how much it will be used here. That's intellectually dishonest because he's starting on a false premise that it has to be used here at all and accepts the government stance that it will be.

[BethAnn BookBumming · Rating 5 out of 5]

You never know when you’re being watched or listened to. These days it’s best just to assume you always are.
The song lyrics from a Nirvana song comes to mind;
“Just because you're paranoid
Don't mean they're not after you”

This book was highly informative, I feel like everyone needs to read it if they get the chance. 👀🔎

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

“...no tool of raw power is intrinsically good or evil in its essence, but that, rather, everything depends upon how we choose to use it.”

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
- ...history and future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens.

THE AUTHOR’S GOAL OF THE BOOK
- With this book, I wanted to give both the technology’s proponents and detractors an opportunity to air their arguments as to why we should or should not welcome our panoptic future with open arms.

WHAT IS ‘WAMI’ (OR OTHER NAMES FOR THIS TECHNOLOGY)?
- It’s called WAMI (pronounced whammy), which stands for wide-area motion imagery.

- WAPSS (for wide-area persistent surveillance system), WFOV (wide field of view), WAAS (wide-area airborne surveillance). I call it the all-seeing eye.

‘SODA-STRAW’ PROBLEM OF TRADITIONAL AERIAL SURVEILLANCE
- soda-straw problem, because watching a target with the camera zoomed all the way in gives operators such a narrow field of view

- A leaked 2011 Scientific Advisory Board study concluded that the narrow-field view was one of the primary drawbacks of advanced drones.

- the challenge of knowing when to zoom in and when to zoom out as “part art, part luck.”

WHY NOT LOOK AT WIDE AND NARROW AT THE SAME TIME?
- The Livermore team’s idea was, Why not do both? Build something capable of achieving the same wide-area coverage as a traditional still-photography satellite, but that recorded video with enough magnification power to watch every individual moving target within that area simultaneously.

“CHIP-OUTS”
- Instead, the camera would transmit only 65 soda straws of live footage—“ chip-outs”—cut from the entire frame of view down to analysts on the ground, giving each a Predator-like view that they could independently steer to any area within the camera’s field of vision.

TRACKING JUST REQUIRES A COUPLES OF PIXELS
- Though vehicles and people only appeared as small specks of a few pixels, that was all one needed to follow them anywhere they went.

ORIGINAL INTENT WAS TO STOP IED ATTACKS
- Ultimately, five airplanes were dispatched to Baghdad in the summer of 2006, and the program was incorporated into an entirely unpublicized special-operations unit, known as Task Force Dragon Slayer, which was focused on countering IEDs and mortar attacks.

- Constant Hawk’s initial deployment was only intended to last 90 days, but it performed so well that the aircraft remained active in Iraq until the US withdrawal in 2011.

TECHNOLOGY GETS OUTFITTED ON DRONES (INSTEAD OF SMALL AIRPLANES)
- The new camera, named simply Wide-Area Airborne Surveillance, would combine elements of both systems. It would generate a wider view than either of the existing systems, enough to watch a whole “city-sized” area, and it would send live footage to the ground. It would be optimized for both live overwatch missions and after-the-fact analysis. It would have a secondary infrared wide-area camera. And, unlike Constant Hawk and Angel Fire, it would be mounted on a drone.

80% SOLUTION
- Big Safari’s (USAF) ability to move so quickly stems largely from a development philosophy that engineers call “the 80 percent solution.”

- In the Big Safari mind-set, “good enough” is better than too late.

- The unit’s (Big Safari) informal motto is “Those who say it cannot be done should not get in the way of those doing it.”

‘WIDE-AREA AIRBORNE SURVEILLANCE’ BECOMES ‘GORGON STARE’
- In the Greek mythological tradition, the Gorgons are three monsters from the underworld.

- In The Odyssey, Odysseus is seized by “cold fear” at the very thought that “dreadful Queen Persephone might send / the monster’s head, the Gorgon, out of Hades.” As it turned out, that was the whole idea. “Ultimately,” Meermans said of the name, “it made a lot of sense.”

A “DARPA HARD” PROBLEM
- In the defense community, there is a term, “DARPA hard,” that refers uniquely to the type of engineering that happens at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the storied military-development unit that tackles blue-sky science and engineering challenges that other government agencies might consider too daunting or risky.

- the existing wide-area surveillance cameras were not sufficiently powerful to follow anything smaller than a vehicle. But networks, Leininger explained, are made up of people, not cars, and an effective camera ought to be able to track individuals on foot.

- the cameras ought to cover a much wider area than the current cameras.

STITCH TOGETHER PICTURES FOR A BETTER IMAGE
- the same characteristics that made the chips ideal for small hidden spy cameras might also be useful for building a very large camera. Though each chip had only a few megapixels, they could be stitched together into a large mosaic that sat behind a single lens. A camera with enough chips could, in theory, produce much larger images than Constant Hawk or Angel Fire.

NOW GET A BETTER IMAGE PROCESSING SOLUTION
- All told, the full camera would consist of 368 imagers, more than twice as many as MASIVS. This left the problem of the computer, which would need to be capable of supercomputer levels of power to stitch together the 368 camera feeds, orient, and smooth out the imagery. The solution for that challenge also came from another unexpected corner of the commercial world: the video game industry.

- To run its MASIVS video feed smoothly, MIT had built a processing unit using graphics chips from a PlayStation.

“WOW, THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION!”
- In its final form, ARGUS had 1,854,296,064 pixels, enough imaging power to spot an object six inches wide from an altitude of 25,000 feet in a frame twice the width of Manhattan. It generated 27.8 gigabytes of raw pixel data, enough to fill six DVDs, every second. Downloading the raw data in real time would require an internet connection 16,000 times faster than the fastest wireless internet service available in the United States in 2017.

GORGON STARE II IN AFGHANISTAN
- Gorgon Stare II deployed to Afghanistan in 2014.

- A single drone could take in 40 square kilometers, meaning that it could cover almost the entire city of Kandahar—and up to 100 square kilometers if it flew at higher altitude. It could probably beam chip-outs down to as many as 30 ground units at once.

FUTURE MISSION NEEDS
- The Air Force has even begun exploring the idea of a replacement for Gorgon Stare. An internal study on the topic from 2018 noted 11 types of targets the Air Force wants to track more effectively with this new system, including forces in densely forested areas and individuals on foot in urban settings.

AERIAL SURVEILLANCE IN THE US
- the airspace over America falls into the same legal category as other public spaces like sidewalks, roads, parks, and beaches—and it isn’t illegal to take photographs of private property, or private citizens, from public space. As such, we have no expectation of privacy from above.

- When it comes to law enforcement, police are likewise free to use aerial video surveillance without a warrant or special permission.

- The only caveat to police aerial surveillance activities is that they must employ a “publicly accessible technology,” a term that has been defined, somewhat vaguely, in a small number of court cases.

ONE PLATFORM, MANY DISTINCT USERS (SAME COULD BE SAID FOR MILITARY)
- But if a city was to use a wide-area surveillance aircraft as a shared tool, accessible to any authorized party who needed an eye in the sky—the police, the fire department, the traffic authority, and so on—and if the cost was likewise shared among these agencies, that price tag seems much less daunting. After all, that was part of the idea behind Gorgon Stare—instead of serving a single unit on the ground, a solitary Reaper could serve dozens of operations concurrently.

MARINE CORPS EMPLOYMENT
- The Marine Corps is preparing a WAMI system with the code name Cardcounter for a small “tactical” drone, probably the RQ-21 Blackjack. The camera will be capable of watching a 16-square-kilometer area—as much as the first Gorgon Stare—during the day or night, but it will do so from a drone that is more than 40 times lighter than the Reaper.

PROJECT MAVEN
- The goal of the program is simple: to get the best possible algorithms into the battlefield as quickly as possible.

WAMI FROM SATELLITES
- With automated WAMI from space, one would be able to detect anomalous behaviors and map networks of terrorists, criminals, or anybody else across entire countries.

“CROSS-CUEING”
- Combining data from different sensors is at the heart of how the Pentagon finds targets in the first place. In a process known as “cross-cueing,”

- A core tenet of the Pentagon’s intelligence strategy for the 21st century is to offload the melding of this disparate intelligence to computers. The idea, known as automated sensor fusion, is that a single piece of software—fueled by AI—would collate data from a range of different sensor types to produce a single intricate portrait of the target.

- Advanced fighter jets like the F-35 Lightning II and the newest F/ A-18 Super Hornet, for example, come equipped with software that blends data from the aircraft’s various different sensors into a single view of its surroundings.

FACTOIDS
- The US Air Force spent 630 hours watching Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the elusive leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, before killing him with a strike in 2006.

- Whereas a single Predator assigned to a 40-square-mile area could monitor only 5 percent of moving vehicles on the ground, 95 percent of vehicles could be tracked with the wide-area system.

- (The US government, as a signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, has not been able to conduct actual nuclear trials since the treaty went into force in 1992, so it has had to test its warheads virtually.)

- But since [non-geo sync] satellites orbit Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, they can watch a target for only about 90 seconds before crossing behind the horizon, like a setting moon.

- The NSA’s Gilgamesh airborne cell-phone interceptor can pinpoint the location of a mobile to within a couple of meters, while another of its aerial systems, Shenanigans, can reportedly absorb the data from every WiFi router, internet-connected computer, and smartphone in a medium-size town in one fell swoop.

- In the same vein, the NGA has software that tracks what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter in the areas being watched with systems like Gorgon Stare, putting the airborne imagery in the context of information that could be useful for analyzing factors like a city’s “stability dynamic”—the intelligence community’s term for the likelihood that mass violence might erupt at any given time.

- In the months leading up to the 2022 World Cup, Qatar’s security agencies plan to use a fusion system called ARMED that will comb through social media posts, text messages, and intelligence reports on known terrorist networks, searching for people who might be likely to commit an attack. When a prototype of ARMED was run against a trove of data from the days leading up to the 2013 Boston Marathon, it placed the Tsarnaev brothers, perpetrators of the bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, in the top 100 individuals deemed most likely to commit an atrocity.

BONUS
- Wide-Area Motion Imagery (WAMI): https://youtu.be/ptSeU-OnI8E

- ‘Enemy of the State’ (1998) movie seen by Livermore Lab scientist and inspired him: https://youtu.be/MJQ30fPYec8

- Author talks about concepts in the book: https://youtu.be/GK-dcp73QzA

- (2011) Gorgon Stare article and video; describes how the system works: https://www.military.com/video/milita...

- Bloomberg video on Baltimore aerial surveillance mentioned in the book: https://youtu.be/wRa-AucbN6k

- Perdix drone swarm: https://youtu.be/fOajJMm01lw

- PBS ‘NOVA’ segment on ARGUS: https://www.pbs.org/video/nova-drones...

- Google’s online computer-vision service, Vision API: https://youtu.be/eve8DkkVdhI

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I was completely unaware that my family in Adelaide had been, and may still be, filmed from the sky in a resolution able to track their movements. At a point, it is not surprising, but on another level, it is kinda terrifying. Holland here traces the origins of modern aerial surveillance from various projects - including one directly inspired by the dystopian vision of Enemy of the State (confirming another reason to dislike dystopian fiction - they just give the military ideas!), through this the technology used, some careful speculation about what the security classified at the moment might be, and then what the future might hold (the last two are somewhat, obviously, intertwined).
The historical information was the most memorable, and the book gives a real sense of how military R&D proceeds through bureaucracy and rivalry, and arcane contract chains. The structure is not as linear as a topic this complicated probably needed, and while Hollands sources are excellent, there are big gaps in the information around classified materials - including information about how the technology has actually gone in meeting the stated goals of "saving lives" (indirectly, by killing people, of course) in Iraq. In the end, there aren't new things that Reddit hasn't already worked out here (and one interesting aspect, is how large global platforms like Reddit facilitate 'watching the watchers' - everybody, including security agencies - have fewer powers now), and Holland doesn't really engage deeply with the bigger issues of what it means to live in constant surveillance.

[Alexander Temerev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, this one was good. A model of OSINT, complete with names, timelines and stories. I really enjoyed it.

[Jerome · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye opening read on new surveillance technology

Well written and researched book on the development and deployment of new surveillance technology. Explains how and why these systems developed, how they are being used and possible future of the systems.

[Elmwoodblues · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watch a spot long enough, and if something happens there, you will see it.
Watch two spots at the same time, and if someone goes from Spot A to Spot B, you see the connection.
Widen your view, and watch thousands of spots at the same time, all connected on the same screen. Record everything. If something happens at Spot Z, rewind the tape and see who was at Spot Z, and where they came from. Fast forward the tape, and see where they went. It becomes very hard to hide, both in space and it time.

This all sounds magical and great when you want to find out where the guys that planted that IED came from, and where they went. Like tanks or assault helicopters, or hacked emails or software viruses that destroy infrastructure, war isn't nice, and should be fought to win.
But maybe this is not so great when you are going to the ball game after you called out sick from work, or you stop off for a cold one on the way home (again), or your teenage daughter comes in from the pool and remarks about the little black speck in the sky that has been circling all day. Arthur Holland Michel does a good job of giving us the background, the tech, and the history of yet another wonderful tool with the potential for misuse, and he lays out the need for involvement and discussion by the very people who pay for, and may one day be suppressed by, such technology. An important read.

[Bryan Mcquirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Panopticon for everyone...all seeing, all knowing.
Michel does a great job of presenting the threat to privacy that these new surveillance technologies present. The reality is that Focault's panopticon can created and will used against the entire society both domestically and internationally...against their will.
This is not an overly technical book and is easily accessible to those who have little previous knowledge of these surveillance technologies.
This book should raise concerns among the citizens over the potential abuses of these technologies by government and private entities, especially with the long history of government agencies and actors using new technology to violate the rights of citizens.

[Reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly dry but thoroughly researched and clinical in presentation. Author coldly provides historical details and potential scenarios for the future.

Book missed opportunity to cite a number of excellent, muckraking documentary films research - consider watching National Bird or Robert Greenwald’s Unmanned, Tonje Schei’s Drone, and Madiha Tahrir’s Wounds of Waziristan as they provide much-needed perspective on how drone warfare really works.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hackle-raising book about the slowly creeping potential of the US surveillance state and what it will mean for all of us. Michel goes into depth about how the origins of the Gorgon Stare program began, from the humble origins of the Predator and Reaper drone-mounted cameras in the early stages of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars up to 2018. The implications of these programs, coupled with advanced spy satellites, machine learning and automated computer analysis, and persistent spy satellites, is a blood-chilling look into the future.

If there is one problem with the book, it is that Michel's acute analysis of what risks this technology poses to average people is marred by the belief that it can be solved by both governmental legislation and private companies acting as firewalls to prevent the illicit use of this technology. I find this argument to be rather lacking, especially given Michel's pessimism regarding the fact that this technology IS coming back home to the US, whether you like it or not. I fail to see how the US government and security agencies, which have historically used all manners of surveillance technology to track political and social dissidents, will bother to legislate protections for the bulk of American citizens, if not giving outright carveouts for the purpose of this spying.

Overall a decent book, if a little dated by this point. Read if you want an overview of the US spying program using these advanced drones and satellites.

Final rating: 2.75/5

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Surveillance State . . . sounds like a paranoid illusion, doesn't it? Maybe a movie like "Enemy of the State"? Think again.

Oddly enough, it seems the film "Enemy of the State" was a key component in the creation of Gorgon Stare and related wide-area surveillance systems. While the technology seen in the film was almost entirely fantasy, a person involved with surveillance technology asked himself, "Why not? Why don't we create systems that would allow that kind of tracking and recognition?"

This happened to coincide with a rise in the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan and Iraq. Having improved remote tracking systems would make it possible to track the people who buried the IEDs back to their homes or the places where the IEDs were put together. It could also reveal the networks of people needed to effectively implement the stealth bombing program.

It didn't take long for the vendors of these systems to see utility in the civilian realm. Urban crime fighting has many similarities to insurgent warfare. Being able to identify and track a shooter, a hit-and-run driver, or a drug ring could be very helpful.

The other side of that is, what protections do we have, those of us who aren't committing criminal acts? Do we really want to trade "security" for constant surveillance? Do we want to risk increasing conflict between the watchers and watched?

Well worth the read (though it may make you wonder if you're being watched from above).

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eyes in the Sky by Arthur Holland Michel focuses on the development of Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) for surveillance for both military and domestic uses and takes the reader through both a technical and policy overview of how it is has been developed and what the future holds. This is not a conspiracy theorist book but one that is at technical look at current capabilities for programs like Gorgon Stare and more advanced programs that have followed it and where they might go next. It is a balanced discussion of the benefits and the tradeoffs of the surveillance state and if you grew up watching Enemy of the State there are some great tie ins with the movie. Focusing on the counter tactics for improvised explosive devices and the test run of spying on Baltimore for 9 months serve as the two foundations for the surveillance discussed in the book. This book also looks at the smaller surveillance programs including the predator drones and what implications that has for military surveillance as well as CCTV and social media feeds for domestic. Overall a fascinating read for those who are interested in how and what this surveillance will do.

[Joseph Rizzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's an almost certainty that you are consistently underestimating the government, and the private sectors ability to track and surveil you. This book sheds an amazing amount of light on the reality. Planes, drones, and other airborne machines mounted with high resolution imagery, have been, are, and will be used in US skies, just as they have been in foreign drone wars. They have the ability to see a 6" object from 25,000 feet in the air, tracking hundreds of square miles at a time with just one airborne. This is not illegal on current US books. The privacy concerns are obvious. The benefits and security that come with it are real. It can help in fighting crime, forest fires, missing persons, disaster relief, etc. It also has the potential to be greatly abused for cracking down on political opponents and dissidents. It is scary. The author lays out a number of potential ways that we can start now laying the groundwork for rules to keep in check the public and private entities that are using these technologies.

[Anne Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-organized and written treatise on the development of wide-area motion imagery (WAMI), how it has been used, how it may be developed further and used in the future, and the potential civil rights pitfalls of its use in the civilian environment. A technology I wager most have never heard of, reading this book will not only make the readers aware, but also elicit a lot of thought about just how this technology might affect their lives. The author has apparently taken great pains to get as much "up close and personal" information as he can, in spite of the secrecy that surrounds much of the development and deployment of WAMI. I found the information both exciting in the potential for good to come from this technology, and unnerving in the potential for abuse of it.

Beware. Once you've read this book, you may find yourself constantly looking over your shoulder and into the sky while wondering, "Who's watching me now?"

[fivestarbookreview]

In case you don’t have enough things to worry about as you walk around your city, Arthur Holland Michel has written a fascinating expose of the newest type of airborne surveillance. Eyes in the Sky is an alarming enough title, but what Michel lays out is even more disturbing. Originally developed to combat IEDs in the Middle East, the most advanced wide-area surveillance technology is being tested domestically to surveil average citizens. When paired with powerful algorithms, the system can flag ‘suspicious’ activities like making a U-turn or carrying something heavy. Obviously the implications for civil rights are disturbing and the fact that the camera can track a car from miles up in the sky means that no one will have the expectation of anonymity in public spaces. Anyone can be found; anyone can be followed.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is broken up into three sections: 1) Technology development and the use of the Gorgon Stare program, 2) stories of how aerial surveillance is being used and the critiques of it in the US, and 3) where the technology is evolving and what concerns and regulatory issues should be thought about. The author was using the first two sections to lead up to his concerns and viewpoints in the last section. While he was trying to be objective, I would have liked to have seen more interviews and quotes from people who have been impacted by the technology and how the technology can be used for something other than law enforcement activities. The topics of law enforcement surveillance are even more relevant now than when the book was written and released as the public is more and more aware of law enforcement activities. This is such a small part of the current debates but does provide a good conversation starter.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read on the evolution and morality of modern aerial surveillance. Think everything from Predators (Iraq and Afghanistan) to wide-area surveillance cameras used in law enforcement (track murder suspects), battle forest fires, traffic control and beyond. Drones are here to stay, making us safer but destroying any sense of privacy. Although it almost reads like science fiction, Eyes in the Sky is well-researched and immensely readable. If you want to see what the future holds for us – with some of our top secret programs, it’s already here – learn what Gorgon Stare is all about. This book is an “eye-opener,” guaranteed to satisfy your nerd instincts.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised to find how much my recent reading on artificial intelligence was applicable to (and reiterated within!) this book. It’s not just an account of the latest developments in surveillance technology but also a balanced consideration of the pros and cons for our society as well as a set of recommendations on how to regulate a paradigm-shifting technology in order to protect the values we’ve always stood for. Even if you’re inclined to approach regulating this technology in a different way than the author suggests, this book provides a thorough review of how the technology has evolved along with numerous actual and potential use cases to inform your thinking.

[S.M. Boren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased this book from @bookofthemonth to read. All opinions are my own. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟Eyes In The Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How it Will Watch Us All by Arthur Holland Michel. This book makes any conspiracy theory I had about our Government that much more real. "Big Brother" is always watching. The movie Enemy of The State may be very real, very soon. An amazing story that will really make you think about what you are doing when you think no one is watching. Review also posted on Instagram @borenbooks, Library Thing, Twitter @jason_stacie, Facebook, Amazon, www.goodreads.com/stacieboren and my blog at readsbystacie.com

[Sarah Carty Dalgetty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spooky. Not as much about Gorgon Stare specifically, but more a presentation of the arguments of the various stakeholders (engineers, business owners, policymakers, law enforcement, military, public officials, and of course, the public) on the existence of Wide-Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) and its implications. I found the example of the Baltimore Police Department's program particularly unsettling. Touched on a lot, and concluded briefly with a rough sketch for how to deal with this powerful surveillance tool: create transparency, regulation, and inclusion where currently, there exists little, especially in contrast to the rapidly advancing refinement of this technology.

[Bmb · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are almost no laws to prevent the launch of Wide Area Moving Imagery (WAMI) systems. So it should be no surprise that Baltimore's police department hired a random libertarian to surveil their city without authorization or oversight. With WAMI you can travel back through time, allowing police in cubicles to trace the paths over several days of anyone who, say, showed up to protest police surveillance. I also enjoyed the anecdote about the guy who found out his wife was cheating on him by... tracking her with a drone.

[Nicolás Amtmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky to read this book before its release and let me tell you it is fantastic. The author explores the field of aerial surveillance with great detail while always maintaining an objective perspective. I would recommend this book whether you are new in the subject or have read other materials about this topic.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive look at ariel surveillance. There are new high tech methods that are not satellite based and while they were developed for the military, there are many domestic uses for them. This presents a dilemma of privacy concerns verses the ability to detect crime and follow the perpetrators back to their hideouts or starting points. A very interesting read and well written.

[Kory Klimoski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book. Great history of surveillance program. I liked how they author explained how the tools were developed and the process that was taken in development of the program. The book had special meaning to me because of the years I spent in the program.

The reader spoke very fast in reading the book. I actually had to turn the speed down to be able to understand him.