FAQ

Persistent Surveillance Systems is led by Dr. Ross McNutt who earned his PhD from MIT in a program aimed at bringing technological solutions to difficult social problems. Dr. McNutt is the sole owner of the company and does not have outside investors.

Then Lt. Col. McNutt built this novel technology while in the U.S. Air Force during his tenure running the Air Force Center for Rapid Product Development. He was tasked with helping to mitigate the impacts of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) on U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians in 2004. By 2006, Lt. Col. McNutt had led a team to develop this revolutionary system that imaged a city and enabled analysts to locate those planting bombs by following their pre- and post-activities. The system was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2010, and the resulting data saved countless lives.

In 2007 Lt. Col. McNutt retired but felt that the system had the potential to help people within troubled U.S. cities. Since then, he has been working tirelessly to develop an affordable system with appropriate privacy protections in place to support U.S. citizens.

For more information, see our History page.

In the United States, this system has been used in short term operations in Philadelphia, PA, Baltimore, MD, Charlotte, N.C., Compton, CA, and Dayton, OH. The program has also supported disaster relief operations following Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Matthew, and boarder security operations in Nogales Arizona. Internationally, this technology system has operated in Juarez, Torreon, and Mexicali Mexico, and in Kampala Uganda. Previous versions of the program operated in Fallujah and Ramadi Iraq, and Kabul Afghanistan supporting the U.S. Military.

PSS and its related companies support a significant number of contracts to support various civil, military, and corporate organizations but those efforts are separate and distinct from the Community Support Program and its affiliated operations and data. PSS and its associated companies run a major Air Force flight training program supporting Air Force Flight Doctors, as well as developmental flight testing for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). PSS uses its profits from these efforts to help support troubled cities through its subsidiary, the Community Support Program (CSP).