A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance

Skydio didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

In the footage WIRED reviewed, drones capture dramatic moments like police chasing and restraining targets of the aerial surveillance. In other videos, officers can be seen through the window of an apartment in a high-rise, which police records describe as both a “check on well-being” or a “missing person” investigation in different drone flights filming the same incident. In another, police can be seen talking to homeless people in an alley, what police records describe as a “person with a knife” investigation.

The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.

A drone flight in response to what police records describe as a “person with a gun” investigation seems to fixate on a seemingly intoxicated man stooped on a sidewalk. Another drone, called in response to an alleged “prowler” incident, hovers over a young person wearing headphones and sitting on the roof of a building, zooms in on them, then flies away. “That one felt like an invasion of privacy, just so uncomfortable,” Curry says. “Like this person thinks they’re by themselves on this roof and has gotten away from everybody, and then there’s a police drone watching them.”

In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.”

Curry and Robert say they first became curious about Skydio last month after seeing an announcement from a Florida police department that it was adopting the company’s drone system, and then learning how widely the company’s drones have been deployed across the US. As web-focused security researchers, they decided to check out the company’s systems. In one routine step, they used the tool GetAllURLs, which pulls all archived web addresses for a given domain from sources including AlienVault Open Threat Exchange, requesting all Skydio links. Almost immediately, they found the San Francisco police drone feed.

Soon they were watching live footage of scenes like a man with a hand wrapped in a bloody white cloth talking to police and then a detention of a suspect at a gas station by a group of plainclothes policemen. At that point, it started to become “pretty clear that this probably shouldn’t be public,” as Robert put it. “Like, I don’t think there’s any reason that someone from the public should be able to watch in real time as someone is getting grabbed by undercover cops.”

In fact, police departments have very often treated drone footage as too sensitive to release, even under freedom of information laws. Chula Vista, California, whose police department pioneered the “drone as first responder” model, spent years fighting a public-records lawsuit seeking access to its drone videos, arguing that the footage is investigatory and could expose private details about people caught on police cameras. (A California appeals court rejected the city’s position that the videos could be categorically withheld, a ruling that became statewide precedent after the California Supreme Court declined to review it. The case was sent back to the trial court to determine which videos, if any, must be released.)