Eyes in the Sky

Whether you’re a full-blown conspiracy theorist or only occasionally talk to the FBI agent watching you through your laptop, chances are you think you’re being surveilled by the U.S. government, a major corporation, or both. And you wouldn’t be totally wrong.

Eyes in the Sky is a fascinating book about one such surveillance technology that is already in use. Nicknamed the Gorgon Stare, this system of cameras is capable of recording the small-scale activities happening within an entire swath of a city. Originally designed for the military, its domestic applications include things like improving traffic systems, policing neighborhoods, and corporate security. And guess what—it’s already in use, monitoring American citizens like you.

Yes, the scary potentialities of the Gorgon Stare are alarming, but Arthur Holland Michel—who is one of the world’s foremost experts on drones—has a lot of recommendations on how to harness this technology for the greater good and prevent its misuse. And while the history of how it came to be makes for a jaw-dropping read, Michel’s thoughtful ideas are what make Eyes in the Sky such a compelling book. Check this one out if you’d like to learn more about the real Big Brother, and how we can stop it before it’s too late.

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.