Eye in the Sky
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Hey, Latif here. I am currently spelunking in the Radiolab archives. There are tons of gems in here. And I'm excited to tell you about the one we have resurfaced this week for your listening pleasure. But before I do...

A quick announcement. Our very own senior producer, Simon Adler, is continuing his epic mixtape series with a live event in New York City in the green space. It is called Mixtape to the Moon, How the Cassette Changed the World. He's doing two performances the evening of June 22nd. I've already seen the show. It's great. It's so great, in fact, that I'm going to see it again tomorrow.

And if you're not in New York City, you can still see it. You can live stream it. Check it out at WNYC.org slash the green space. Green has an E at the end. So it's G-R-E-E-N-E. WNYC.org slash the green space. Okay.

Let's talk about the episode, shall we? I feel like sometimes when I am introducing these reruns, it's like, ooh, here is a lovely little piece of candy for you. Have fun, you know? This is not that. This is not a fun-sized candy bar. This is, it feels more like I'm like unsheathing a double-edged sword for you to kind of marvel at and ponder over.

And even though this double-edged sword was produced in 2015, it is still now as sharp as ever. The story was reported by Manoush Zomorodi, Andy Mills, and Alex Goldmark. Here it is, Eye in the Sky. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab.

I'm Robert Krolowicz. This is Radiolab, and I have the host of Note to Self with me. That's another WNYC podcast that comes out of here, a brilliant one.

And the brilliant test person who does it all, Manu Samarody, is with me. Hello, Robert. And I asked you to come in just because I wanted you to sort of set this up if you could. Oh, happy to. So we did, Radiolab and Note to Self, did a joint episode last year called Eye in the Sky. It was a disturbing story, but... It's kind of like a spy thriller, actually. Definitely a spy thriller. And it turns out a lot has happened since that episode was first put out.

Right. There have been developments which truly surprised me, and I don't want to give you any details. So just listen to what's about to happen, and then don't go away at the end. Stay. Okay.

We'll begin. So how did you guys find out about this? How did you get into it? I think it was somebody was reading about it. This is Manoush Zamarodi? It was you reading about it. Right. And that's her producer, Alex Goldmark. And I just said, his name is McNutt. And I just wanted to do a show where I get to say that name at least 10 times, please. But then we actually read it and it was weird and interesting and brought up lots of issues. Ooh.

Technology is remaking what is possible for individuals and for institutions and for the international order. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. So here we are at this moment in time where we're faced with these decisions about what we want our future to look like, be like. There are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.

Today we're going to look at the can and the should with our friends down the hall, Manoush Samarodi and Alex Goldmark. They run a great podcast called Note to Self. They will be our guides into the world.

Of. McNutt. Yes, my name's Ross McNutt. So the McNutt, as I refer to him, he's an ex-military guy. Did 20 years in the Air Force. I enjoyed it. I did a lot of good. Like combat military? He was an engineer in the military. Yeah, I mean, I think he's actually special military. My background, I've got a PhD in rapid product development out of MIT. And what I do is I teach young people how to build new systems. ♪

And the new system, that's the system that we want to talk about, that kind of began in 2004. Ross was teaching a course at a military college. It was at the Air Force Institute of Technology here at Wright-Patterson and Dayton. He says one day in 2004, the whole school gathered together for a rally. And our commander got up in front of the whole school and said, we need to do something to help the war effort.

Terrible violence today in the Iraqi city of Basra. So at that time in the Iraq war, before the surge, things were not going well. Suicide bombs ripped through police buildings and city streets. IEDs going off all over the place. Constant news about IEDs going off everywhere, soldiers being blown up. In one week, I got blown up three times. And to be honest with you, in 2004, it looked like we were going to lose.

So Ross, he gets together some of his students, some of his colleagues, and they decide, you know, let's sit down and see if we can find a solution, quickly find a solution to figuring out who is planting all these roadside bombs. Yeah. Bombs going off are pretty easy to detect in images. The problem is how do you go from a bomb going off backwards in time to be able to figure out who planted it? So somehow, uh,

it just came out. Was it like you guys sitting around? It was at a bar. We were working on the back of a napkin and drawing out different ideas and throwing them around and seeing what happens. They were just like, hey, let's use planes. Let's try this. Let's try that. And then they hit on it. This one stuck and we sort of drew this out on the back of an envelope. Making it took a little while. I had 38 students working for me for two years. But eventually they developed what became known as...

Project Angel Fire. And here's how it worked. They take a small plane, and on the belly of the plane, they hook up this array of cameras. It's sort of swivel around. It's a camera system we design and build. Super high-end. And then... The pilot... He takes off...

flies the plane high over Fallujah. In the military, we were up at about 15,000 to 16,000 feet to stay out of the missile range. Let's say I'm an Iraqi on the ground in Fallujah and I look up. What would I see? You wouldn't see us. You wouldn't hear us or you wouldn't see us. So you've got this plane flying just below the clouds, doing an orbit over Fallujah. Circle, circle, circle. For six hours at a time. And every second... Click, click, click, click.

Click. Every second, it takes a still image of the entire city of Fallujah, 25 square miles, and then beams it down to an operator. We take a picture, process it, downlink it, process it, downlink it, every single second. So the plane is snapping, picture after picture after picture. But here's what makes the system so powerful. The operator on the ground has, let's say, an entire day's worth of these high-res pictures of the entire city of Fallujah. And then let's say there's an explosion. ♪

Officials say at least 20 people were killed in explosions at a market... Six people and wound 11 others. First, the operator would pull up the most current image of the city, zoom into the place within Fallujah where it happened, and then click, click, click, in one-second increments, go back in time and see who was there, what happened. When was the last time somebody fiddled around in that roadside? Yeah, and you're like, okay, I've gone back two hours, and...

Ah, it's that car. Fast forward, click, click, click. They can now follow that car forward in time to see where it goes. And you see that it went to a house in another neighborhood two miles away. Well, that's where you dispatch your troops to right then. Basically, we'd be able to send either the special forces in or the Marines in and sort of take appropriate action.

Now, look, the military doesn't release statistics on how well some of its military technology works, but there are officers who will be quoted saying that, yes, Project Angel Fire saved lives. But the reason why we decided to do this story is because it's not just a military thing, right? Like, with a lot of these technologies, they maybe start in the military, but then they trickle down all the way down to all of us. And actually, in this case, it trickled down to...

to Dayton, Ohio. Ross Group Incorporated? You think that's it? By his first name? Yeah, it'd be weird. Oh, you gotta go with the nut. Producer Andy Mills and I actually went to Dayton, Ohio to visit Ross at his business. Persistent Surveillance Systems. There it is! Persistent Surveillance Systems. Right. That feels Orwellian. Yeah.

These are the lenses and the motors here basically control it. So first we went over to his workshop where he actually works and makes the cameras. These are more powerful than some of the best military systems. Like we could see him actually making them and how they get attached to the bottoms of the airplanes. Oh, so many airplanes. Then we went over to the hangar where he has all the airplanes. They're beautiful. So overall we've got 27 airplanes we operate. He owns his own airport. Yeah. Yeah.

After you guys. Oh my God, it's big. And then he showed us their command center. And this is where you have a bunch of people sitting in front of these enormous screens. This is like your viewing room? Yeah. And this is where all the plane pictures end up. Because Ross's basic idea in taking this technology from Fallujah to a city like Dayton, Ohio...

is basically this. The U.S. cities have just as large a problem as we do in Afghanistan and Iraq, only it's not IEDs, it's crime. We've had a lot of major events this year. We've had four officer-involved shootings so far this year. Our homicides are up this year. So this is Dayton Police Chief Richard Beale. B-I-E-H-L. I talked to him last summer. A couple years ago, Ross called him up and was like, look. A city like Dayton, Ohio, we've got 28,000 crimes a year.

about 10,000 part one crimes. Murder, rape, assault. 10,000 part one crimes comes out to be $480 million a year. But McNutt is like for about the price of a police helicopter. We believe that we would be able to decrease crime by 30 to 40%. 30% decrease in that is $155 million a year.

The Dayton police were like, "All righty, let's give it a shot." We basically set up a test in June of 2012 for a five-day flight. Just see for ourselves what it was capable of doing. They sent the plane up in the air, started doing its thing, just like in Fallujah, and within just a few hours,

There is a call of this breaking, entering, and progress with a description of a van. It was an older white box truck, just a regular random moving truck. This is Angie Horn. She's the one who called 911. She was just home on her lunch break, and she sees a moving van pull up in front of her neighbor's house. The guy gets out, breaks in, starts moving furniture out. So we, you know, we immediately called the police. They got there relatively quickly from what I remember, but he had already taken off.

Now, normally in a case like this, the police would be like, "Well, how do we follow him? We don't know where he went." But in this case, the police contact persistent surveillance systems and ultimately they get connected to this guy.

My name is Alex Blassingame. I'm the senior analyst for the company. Alex pulls up the image of Dean, zooms in, clicks backwards about five minutes until he sees this little grainy white dot appear in front of her neighbor's house. This is the vehicle here that we're wanting to track. I'm sorry, what vehicle? I barely see anything. Right.

So the image looks real blurry, but the human brain and the human eyes are very, very evolved to pick out movement. You gotta understand that from two miles up, a car looks just like a random shape. People, they look like pixels. Alex has trained himself to pick out movement.

I'm going to put a tag down on where he's at. He places an orange circle over that random little shape and then click, click, click. He moves forward, forward, forward. To follow him to his real-time location. Alex follows it up some roads, finds out that it is parked in a parking lot. Six blocks away. He calls up the people in the field, goes, go over there. They get there. They see the guy. They see a truck full of stuff. They send a different cop over to pick up the witness. Witness goes, yep, that's the guy. Oh, the lady who called. Yeah, this is minutes later. No kidding.

That could have been a murderer, right? That could have been an armed robber. It could have been a lot of things. This is so weird. This is like having a superpower. This is actually better than Batman. You can't go back forth in time if you're a superhero. I just feel sad. It's like we're all just these little dots.

It just seems like the antithesis of what a lot of police departments seem to be trying to do in the aftermath of Ferguson and Staten Island and other horrific things that have happened, which is getting the police on the streets, making personal connections, creating relationships. There's nothing in this system that prevents you from having effective community policing at the same time.

And, oh, by the way, this may dramatically help that community relations. The reason they're putting body cams on police officers is to try to get the police officers to be more respectful because they can be seen. Well, this lets us watch all the officers in a 25-square-mile area all at once. But then you can watch so many other people all at once. Here's other things that people in Dayton do. Like Romeo and Juliet, they sometimes meet without their parents' permission in the playground.

and smooch. There are going to be divorce lawyers who are going to be tracking errant spouses. There are going to be traffic police who are watching who goes through the red light. There are going to be realtors who are wondering who are, how many tenants do you really have in that building? And I guess the thought might be that if the information exists that will show what my pixel was actually doing, then I'm a little less likely

There is a clear tradeoff between security and privacy. And, you know, in our major cities where we have, you know, tens of thousands of major crimes, you are a lot less free when you can't leave your house at night. There's obviously a huge advantage to knowing what you know, but then there's a huge disadvantage

thing to knowing what you know. Knowledge all by itself is sort of pregnant with funny... You know, here's my problem with all of these privacy stories. It's like when you're talking about these technologies, the advantages are always so concrete and the trade-offs always feel so abstract.

I feel like there is something being lost here, but I can never quite put my finger on it. It's weird. Oh, Jad, that weirdness that you're feeling? Yes. It's going to get a lot weirder. We'll be right back.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, and we'll continue our collaboration with Manoush Samarody and Alex Goldmark from Note to Self. And our subject is, and remains, Eyes in the Sky. And the situation when we left it is that Manoush and one of our producers, Andy Mills, had gone down to Dayton, Ohio, to talk with Ross McNutt, check out his technology. And after the Dayton demo, how were you feeling about things? Well, I was feeling like...

You have not convinced me. I am not going for this. And then I saw Juarez, Mexico. Well, I mean, that's what made me start to think otherwise. Juarez, especially at the time we did this, they averaged 300 murders a month and 52 kidnappings a week. 300 murders a month? Yeah. Yeah.

McNutt and the gang, they got a contract. We've been asked not to say for whom. And they went down south, set themselves up in a hotel room, got the plane up in the sky, and then whoever the client was started bringing them crime reports. So this is kind of what you never want to see happen, but this is kind of why the system was up. Alex pulls up on the screen this very grainy aerial shot of Juarez. This is Juarez, Mexico.

It looks like any city, right? You've got like grids of streets and cars and houses. And then like over on the left of the screen, he points to this dark little square. It's a vehicle that's going down the street. This is a female police officer. She was actually headed to work on this morning.

So we'll kind of go through it here. He starts at the beginning and you see there's her house and her car is parked outside. You see that like teeny little pixel gets in her car. She pulls out of her driveway. That was her home. Starts to drive to work. And then... Right when she leaves...

If you look up here... He points to the upper left of the screen. Several cars were parked up on the corner. As soon as she left her driveway, those cars become active.

So this is a stakeout. Yeah, they were waiting for her to leave. He's so zoomed in that you can see it's like a tic-tac moving down the street. And then two more tic-tacs come alongside. Until they get right about here. He's clicking forward on the photo and you see... That right there is a speed bump. These cars just inch closer. So she'll kind of hesitate there, which is unfortunate.

So she's driving down the street and there's these cars following behind her. And then there's this car up ahead of her. A vehicle that had been parked here for 15, 20, 30 minutes all of a sudden backs out into traffic and seemingly slows them down. Almost gets in an accident right here, which gives these guys enough time to catch up. This is where they're going to pull up beside her. And then suddenly...

Alex says, "This is the point where..." Here the first car pulls up and shoots her multiple times. She was shot in the head. Multiple times in the head right here. She's actually gonna roll through the intersection. Her car continues to go even though she's been shot in the head. There is a parked car behind this tree and you'll actually see this parked car move when she runs into it. And then these guys take off. Yeah.

It was not fun to watch. It was upsetting. But what happens next made me really start to understand what this technology is capable of. I just wanted to real quickly just show you some of the other things. Ross walks in. He takes that moment, horrible moment, and then he starts to like shoot back and forth in time. So suspect car one, here's his path before the murder. Here's his path after the murder.

He actually takes the two cars from that murder, and you see, he draws on the map, you see that they meet up with two other cars. See that guy there? That were involved in a different murder. Now, one murder becomes two, two cars become four. Car stops. And if you follow all four of these cars, drawing lines as they move through the city, you find out who they meet up with. Four becomes eight, eight becomes...

becomes 16, so on and so on. And you have all these lines crisscrossing the city. And then you see that a whole bunch of those cars are headed to one place. This house, this house appears to be their cartel headquarters. And that's when you start to think, well, that's how you have to take something like this down. It's not a one shot thing like solving the crime. It's about cracking an entire system.

In fact, this is Andy here. When I was doing some research into this, I made a bunch of calls and I spoke with this one governmental source who told me that this information that Rasa just showed us, it was one of the primary tools used to dismantle an entire cartel in Juarez. And that apparently the leader of that cartel was responsible for something like 1,500 crimes.

So I got to ask again, so how are you feeling at this point? Are you happy or scared or I don't know? I felt ashamed of myself because I thought, oh, the reason why I'm so excited about it is because it's in a country where I don't live and I'm an outsider and I think of it as being messed up. So it's okay for them, but it's still not okay for us. What did you think, Andy? I mean, like this is where I stopped being a good journalist because I picked a side. Yeah.

It feels wrong to not solve these crimes that we can solve. And what if this plane is on top of New York? Good. God, really? For me, it became... But do you remember, like, after 9-11, when you'd walk down the street and you'd hear the F-16s circling over the city? And I just remember the feeling in my stomach was, like, nausea. Like, I felt sick. It felt...

It felt like we had no autonomy over ourselves. And at that point, I was scared enough that I could live with it. But right now, I don't feel that way. And look, it's a very privileged position to be able to say that we shouldn't have it. I get that. I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like, I became a convert because somebody got kidnapped today. And if we had an eye in the sky, we might be able to get the kid back in a few minutes, hours.

Compared to like you see the stats on Amber Alerts, they're not good. Yeah, but what we're talking about is like and I'm not saying that I'm like anti-McNutt at all. But what I'm saying is like it's very easy to paint it as we're going to get bad guys and I just don't think it's that simple.

The McNutt and Co., they seem like decent people. They have set limitations for themselves. They have said they will not use photography that could get any closer. They've made a moral choice with that. How do we know other people will make the same moral choice? You're saying that even though this thing might solve a ton of crimes, might save lives, it's still not worth the risk because it just asks a level of trust in

in government that we shouldn't give. Is that what you're saying? For now, yes. So back to Dayton. What happened in Dayton? Well... I was pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed. After that five-day demo, the police chief, Richard Beale... I recommended that we enter into a contract with Persistence Availability Systems. And so...

They took it to the city commission. Hi, this is Kerry Gray. Oh, hey, Kerry. It's Manoush in New York. And according to Kerry Gray... Director of the city commission office for the city of Dayton, Ohio. The committee saw the presentation and they liked it. The city commission was interested in the presentation. But they decided that before they go forward, they should have a public forum so they could just, you know, sort of hear from the people. There was about 75 or so people there. And he says that the people of Dayton, like...

much like the people of Radiolab and Note to Self, were very divided. A quarter of the people were supportive of this technology and they were frustrated with the amount of crime. Their belief was, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't care what people see me doing. We want this implemented and we want it implemented very broadly. So a quarter of them were like, you know, bring it on. They were basically in the Andy camp.

Woohoo! But then there was another group, slightly smaller but not by much. Maybe 15%. That was the Robert Mnuchakam. Who believed that this was a grotesque invasion of privacy and some of the people spoke in very impassioned terms. So... Yay!

I think calling it grotesque invasion of privacy would pretty much reflect the way this group was feeling. This group too. And that there was no way that you could trust government with this volume of information and this breadth of information. So you had your pros and your cons, the rest of the people, like the majority. Maybe had some feelings one way or another, but just didn't have enough information. And so they came and kind of

asked questions. Like, how long will persistent surveillance systems keep the images? 90 days. How far can they zoom in? Can they see my face? No. So they had a lot of questions, which Kerry seems to think that they could have answered. They could have gotten everybody on board.

But in the end, even though the room was basically divided into three parts, the naysayers were so loud and so impassioned that they sort of defined the conversation. As we do. So we took that lesson to understand that there was going to be some significant education that was going to be needed and some significant hurdles that were going to have to be crossed before that we were able to do a broad-based implementation. And...

Based on the amount of time that was going to have to be spent, we decided there were other more immediate techniques that could be used, that could be invested in. And we took the money that could have been spent on this and spent it on some other activities. It seems like what you're saying is that, like, it was just going to be too hard to get people over the hurdle. So, like, it's not worth it. Yeah, I think that's probably accurate. So the plane is off the table, so to speak. It's off the table for right now.

But that doesn't mean that it's never coming back on the table.

Which I think is fair to say is frustrating to him. Right now we've got about $150 million worth of proposals sitting out there for a large number of cities. Baltimore, Philadelphia. We've been to Moscow, we've been to London. We're waiting for them to make decisions. We've done Compton. We've been to Rome. So Compton's like maybe. Juarez is like maybe. Dayton is like maybe. There's a whole lot of maybes out there. And what McNutt and his team are doing now, and this is actually what they were doing when we went to visit them, they're...

They're analyzing... What we're doing here in Dayton is we are looking at a turnpike or something? Yeah, traffic in New Jersey. They're studying traffic problems. We look at congested areas, which are typically, especially in that part of the country, exits and on-ramps, any kind of junction in a highway. No, sometimes you just want to scream.

Since we did that story, things have happened, Manoush. Indeed they have. And so I've invited you back here to fill us in on further developments, of which there have been gigantic ones, very recently. Yes, and McNutt says not just since we aired that episode, but because we aired that episode. What do you mean? Well, after this episode first went out, it turns out that there were a couple very wealthy philanthropists listening to Radiolab, and they were

And they picked up the phone. They called him and they said, we would like to be the people that bankroll you.

you giving this a try in an American city somewhere. So they just said, we'll write you a check. If you can land the city, we'll give you the money? Pretty much. Wait a second. Who are these people? They are Laura and John Arnold. They're young. They're in their early 40s. They're in Texas. And by the time that they contacted McNutt, he had already done, as we said, he'd already done a very extensive look

at cities across the nation, looking for the one that had the biggest crime issue. And as he puts it, the strongest political leadership, somebody who would be...

willing to put up with the firestorm that would inevitably ensue. Baltimore fit the bill. It had a mayor who said she was very tough on crime. Shootings were actually up in Baltimore by 72% last year. So he went back to Baltimore and said, if I can get the money for this, are you game? And they were like, sure. Sure.

So the rich folks were willing to give money to the mayor of Baltimore to put a plane in the sky to take pictures of Baltimore for a discrete period? No, not quite. So it didn't go to the government or any elected officials. Nobody needed to sign off on this in the city of Baltimore other than the police commissioner, which is why he was able to do it without telling any of the city council members or...

Wait a second. Wait a second. So Baltimore's police department, without telling the mayor or the city council or anybody, decides to contract with this fellow supported by two people in Texas to put a plane in the sky to gaze down at Baltimore and everyone in Baltimore. And they just don't mention this to the mayor. Yeah. Did McNutt move to Baltimore and do this? Oh, yeah. He moved to Baltimore and they set up across the street.

from the police station and had about a dozen analysts sitting there for two months looking at everything that was going on in Baltimore. So they did see some stuff during this period? Like, give me an example of something bad that happened that they...

So here's one that we know about, which is that there was an elderly brother and sister. The woman is 90 years old. The brother is 82. And they were near this bus stop, and they actually got in the line of fire. They got gunned down by a shooter. And so they end up tracking a couple cars. But then later they think, the police say, actually, we think he got away on foot. I think it was a witness on the ground who said that they thought that he had left on foot. Oh.

And so rewind and they see a dot scrambling to get away from the scene. It goes down the street. It passes a Subway sandwich shop. It goes between these two houses, stops at a car that's parked. And then it ends up at they later discover the home of a woman. And turns out her boyfriend is somebody who has a long criminal record.

And so there are over 700 CCTV cameras on the streets in Baltimore. And so the idea is that it's sort of a support mechanism, right? Like they get the high level, then it goes to the street, then you've got the officers on the ground. So if the shooter shoots and then gets into a car and goes down Elm Street, you have cameras down on Elm Street and you can see maybe the car and then the driver's license and maybe even capture the face. Exactly. Exactly.

And did they eventually arrest this person? So he crossed state lines and the feds picked him up. Okay, so they've made the arrest. They go into court and they say to the judge, okay, we obtained information about this suspect in part through a spy airplane. Does the stuff that they gathered during this process

few months, is that now going before judges and becoming evidence in arrests and in prosecutions? Well, not yet. We talked to the state's attorney's office. They got a briefing about a month ago from the police about what McNutt had been up to. And they also told us that there are five open and pending cases where this surveillance technology was used. Police are using it. And

they say, this is the state's attorney's office, that they're looking forward to learning more about what McNutt actually does and that they are trying to determine whether in fact all those pictures could be used in some way at trial. But they're not ready to say, yes, this absolutely will pass legal muster in a trial. God, this is...

The other objection that I guess I was thinking about was that the defense, as a matter of justice, as a matter of the Fourth Amendment, you know this is going to come up at some point. Yeah. Then the defense lawyers would say, wait a second, this evidence against my client was obtained without not only his or her permission, but without anybody's permission. And the entire town is now, in effect, searchable.

during on sunny days. And did the founding fathers want that to happen? To be honest, the Supreme Court hasn't seen a ton of these mass surveillance cases. But actually, Robert, I mean, I happen to have the Fourth Amendment here and I want to read it to you. It says you can't, the searches and seizures are prohibited. Yeah, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause.

supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. So by that token, it's a people to be searched, everyone in Baltimore, places to be looked at, every place in Baltimore, oaths to be obtained ahead of time, blanket. Okay.

That's a pretty radical thing. Yeah. And when you put it like that, no wonder there's very likely to be an inevitable big legal public debate over whether this is the answer to Baltimore's crime problem.

An important update that I should tell you, just as Manoush and Robert predicted, that Baltimore experiment led to a big lawsuit that went to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. And in 2021, that court determined that this program indeed did violate the Fourth Amendment and was unconstitutional.

So that means this program, everything you heard about, it is not happening anywhere currently in the U.S. so far as we know. That said, it's hard to imagine technology like this will go back neatly, quietly, tidily back into the box.

I'm Robert Krolwich. And I'm Manoush Samarody from Note to Self. You can go to Radiolab.org for more information about the McNutt. Special thanks to Alex Goldmark, also to Dan Tucker and George Scholz. By the way, the piece that we just listened to was produced by Andy Mills. And thanks, of course, for listening. ♪

My name is Miss O'Hara. I live on Van Avenue in Dayton. I'm here to register my concern regarding the airborne surveillance that was discussed earlier. A great eye, lidless, breathed in flames. Do military contractors watch over the globe?

I'd also like to register my concern with the so-called surveillance program. This was the stuff of science fiction when Orwell wrote 1984. I'll be watching.

What policies does Dayton have in place to prevent using the data in a racially biased way? Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Akedi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhanyana Sambandang, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Anna Rasku-Ekbaz, Sarah Sandbach, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Sacha Kirijimomolki.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Finn calling from Storrs, Connecticut. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

On Notes from America, we have conversations with people across the country about how we can truly become the nation that we claim to be. Each week, we talk about race, our politics, education, relationships, usually all of them, because everything's connected. And you, our listeners, are at the center of those conversations. I'm Kai Wright. Join me on Notes from America, wherever you get your podcasts.