Police Surveillance Helicopter Footage Leaks Online, Exposing More Than 1TB of Data—Here's How

Police surveillance helicopter footage leaks online, reportedly exposing over 1TB worth of video from authorities that were allegedly stored in cloud storage that failed to feature sophisticated security.

Police Surveillance Helicopter Footage Leaks Online

As per the report by Wired, the activist group that goes by the name Distributed Denial of Secrets or the DDoSecrets published the police surveillance aerial footage on its website on Nov. 5, Friday.

One of the founders of the group, Emma Best, even spoke to the news outlet that broke the story, saying that the identity of the source of the police footage has yet to be known.

On top of that, Best further noted that the person who shared the surveillance footage with their group did not show any motive to leak the videos.

Instead, the source only revealed that the footage from the police was seen being stored in a cloud storage infrastructure that allegedly carries a lousy security system.

Over 1TB of Police Surveillance Footage

Wired went on to share what the news outlet saw from the leaked police data, noting that the footage includes videos of folks simply standing in front of their residences and even vehicles lining up to order their meal at McDonald's.

What's more, the news outlet also said that the footage shows that the helicopters of the police do not only take videos during the day but also operate at night.

In addition, the report claims that most of the surveillance footage from the leak came from the Dallas Police Department of Texas.

As such, Wired reached out to the said police department to show some screenshots from the leak, wherein the public information officer of the station, Brian Martinez, confirmed that it was from "the department helicopter."

Martinez further explained that the said footage is available for access to anyone upon request under the Open Records Act. However, the officer refused to talk about their cloud storage, citing security concerns.

Aside from the Dallas Police, other departments suspected to be part of the leak have yet to confirm if the footage was from their helicopter.

DDoSecret and Police

It is worth noting that this is not the first time that the activist group, DDoSecret, leaked sensitive data from the police.

Last Aug. 13, 2020, the hacktivist group was also behind the massive leak of sensitive police documents from over 200 locations.

The leaked collection spanning nearly 300GB of files was dubbed as "BlueLeaks."

Meanwhile, according to The Verge, the authorities went on to consider the group behind BlueLeaks as "a criminal hacker group," as seen in their documents.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Teejay Boris