1.8TB of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage Leaks Online

Law enforcement use of surveillance drones has proliferated across the United States in recent years, sparking backlash from privacy advocates. But newly leaked aerial surveillance footage from Texas's Dallas Police Department and what appears to be Georgia's State Patrol underscore the breadth and sophistication of footage captured by another type of aerial police vehicle: helicopters. The transparency activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, posted a 1.8 terabyte trove of police helicopter footage to its website on Friday. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that they don't know the identity of the source who shared the data, and that no affiliation or motivation for leaking the files was given. The source simply said that the two police departments were storing the data in unsecured cloud infrastructure.