Strange pic of SF reveals heavy surveillance over APEC

A Bay Area photographer captured an unusual photo of San Francisco this week that reveals the amount of surveillance hovering over the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

Ian Servin used his Sony A7 III mirrorless digital camera with a basic 50mm lens to document the swirling light trails from the numerous surveillance aircraft over APEC and the city. The composite is a stack of 150 images shot with 30-second exposure that he took from his apartment in Oakland. He then used Photoshop for the layering, applying the “lighter color” blending mode to create the final image.

”In terms of how many light trails there were, this is definitely unique,” he told SFGATE in email. “There are a lot of additional aircraft over SF this week for APEC, primarily CHP has fixed wing aircraft and helicopters monitoring downtown and they frequently have multiple aircraft up at one time.”

Servin said that he normally notices lights from the arrivals and departures from San Francisco International Airport and Oakland International Airport, and typically sees just a single law enforcement aircraft in the air at any given time. For APEC, however, the number of aircraft circling the city is far higher, he estimates. 

“In this case, they are doing proactive surveillance,” he wrote. “You can identify the aircraft via ADS-B, a signal most aircraft broadcast in-flight that augments the radar systems used by Air Traffic Control and is picked up by amateur-run groundstations and fed into flight tracking platforms like FlightRadar24, FlightAware, ADS-B Exchange and others.”