Leaked SF Police Drone Footage Reveals New Urban Surveillance Reality

Just after noon on a Saturday last month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter hovered roughly 200 feet above a San Francisco apartment complex, silently tracking a man who had no idea he was being watched from above. The suspect, hiding behind a parked car, lay flat on the pavement as police closed in. The 5-pound drone had already followed him across the city, zooming in on his black SUV’s license plate and keeping the vehicle centered in its video frame until he pulled over. Now, it captured the entire takedown from a bird’s-eye view.

As officers approached, the man shifted to the other side of the car, but another Skydio drone quickly filled the gap. This was one of four quadcopters that had tracked him over the previous hour. It had been diverted from a nearby McDonald’s, where it had been monitoring two people who had exited the suspect’s car minutes earlier. Now, it provided a second angle on the unfolding arrest. Within seconds, three officers converged, two drawing their weapons, before tackling the man as half a dozen more arrived on the scene. According to police records provided to WIRED by the San Francisco Police Department, the entire operation stemmed from an alleged “auto boost/strip” incident, involving the suspected theft of car parts or another object from a vehicle.

This revealing glimpse into modern drone-enabled police surveillance did not come from a voluntary release by the SFPD. Most U. S. police departments, including San Francisco’s, rarely release drone footage even in response to public records requests. Instead, the highly sensitive video of the physical takedown was accidentally livestreamed onto the open internet through Skydio’s website. Two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD was leaking real-time feeds from five of its surveillance drones. Anyone who found the public web address could access both color and thermal video, location metadata, and even the names and email addresses of the drone pilots.

Curry and Robert reported their discovery to Skydio about two days after finding it, and the feed was quickly taken offline. By then, however, they had watched police carry out multiple arrests and searches, as well as track cars and individuals from the sky. “There’s a certain trust given to the police to use these things correctly,” Curry says. “When you’re watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests. The fact that all of this was exposed feels like a really big issue from a privacy perspective.”

The leaked footage captured two forced detentions, a police visit to an apartment in a high-rise building, and an apparent search of an alley populated with homeless individuals. It also documented numerous other instances where police used drones to surveil people, vehicles, or buildings. While the feed remained live, Curry and Robert archived the public stream of data and videos, later sharing the results with WIRED.

The archive provides a detailed record of SFPD drone operations over roughly 48 hours in mid-June. It includes 60 videos from 20 separate flights, each mission recorded from three feeds: a color camera, a thermal camera rendering people as heat signatures, and a view from the drone’s rooftop dock. WIRED analyzed all 20 color videos using software that detects people, vehicles, and other objects. The review found that the cameras had filmed hundreds of people and vehicles across the flights. In a single frame, as a drone hovered over a downtown intersection, the software counted 34 people crossing the street or standing on the sidewalks. Across all videos, the footage showed clear faces of dozens of individuals.

Together, the videos amount to more than three hours of aerial color footage and roughly the same amount of thermal footage. The archive also includes second-by-second telemetry logs for every flight, totaling more than 5,000 GPS points tracing over 44 miles. These logs record each drone’s latitude and longitude, altitude, speed, heading, and battery level from takeoff to landing. Six SFPD pilots’ names and email addresses also appear across the logs, raising further questions about operational security and public transparency.