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Or any form of wide-area surveillance, which isn't necessarily the same as surveillance of mass amounts of people. From an article I read yesterday, the first documented use of FBI domestic surveillance planes was a bribery case that involved a payoff package tossed out of a train in the 30s.

So, these things do have other uses.

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Really any of the modern battlefield surveillance and situational awareness systems could theoretically be turned to the purposes of mass surveillance of civilian populations, given the motivation and resources.

Or that heartbeat detection system used in Nepal by NASA.

I would guess that system would actually be very bad at mass surveillance. The radar system would be tuned to detect very small movements (the heartbeat), and reject clutter in the category of anything not moving and static (debris).

So in a wide area with lots of movement, it's ability to determine if something was a separate object or person, and interesting on top of that would be severely limited.

But this is just a SWAG.

By itself, yes. Coupled with other systems, it could potentially be very useful for its ability to determine person-ness of a given thing.

A local police department outside one of the worst areas in the Northeast has the same surveillance systems they used in Baghdad. They like to brag about it in the papers.

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