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Comment by Sideloader | Hacker News Reader

Hmm...from a tech porn perspective it’s a cool little gadget. But given the shadow surveillance and police state that was erected post 9/11 and how often “national security” outfits have been caught playing fast and loose with the laws of the land, there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.

I wouldn’t trust governments and intelligence services in the post-democratic west with this technology any more than I’d trust their counterparts in “classic” totalitarian states.

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>Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.

Neither of those seem to be examples of habeas corpus being thrown out. Neither were "disappeared" and the court systems were used against Assange and nothing has happened to Snowden as of yet except for the legal system being used to try to keep him from earning money from his book.

Whoa that's a bit of a US Centric broad brush there. "Most Western Countries" - there's more to the West than the US, UK and less than half a dozenish who have or are doing that. I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

> I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

How would you know? The point of disappearing people is that they disappear, and you don't know how.

The OP’s claim was that governments have given themselves the right to disappear people. That’s a legal change which couldn’t be done without the standard public process. Also, in general, when people are arbitrarily detained or disappeared, the outside world does hear about it, even in highly authoritarian regimes (see eg the Amnesty website for plenty of examples).

US agencies operate in "Most Western Countries".

- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44313905

- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP/...

- https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...

- https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/death-athens-rogue-nsa-o...

> I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

True, but that's comparable only if these countries had the same responsibilities (it's like comparing people, say a soldier vs a librarian). Ireland for instance has no Air Force, and has to call on the RAF to provide air defence (as it happened when Russian Tu-95s intruded). Likewise, the rest of Europe relies entirely on NATO's firepower against Russian belligerence.

You can certainly shape a better society internally and have equitable social justice if you're free from the distraction of having to defend against external aggression.

> Likewise, the rest of Europe relies entirely on NATO's firepower against Russian belligerence.

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "Russian belligerence"? Do you have some example of Europe relying on NATO's firepower against it?

NATO is seen as a deterrent to Russian expansion into the old Soviet territories as some of the states that are now democracies have joined NATO.

In the absence of a European defence infrastructure like NATO that's pretty much all they have.

Russian belligerence being invading the Baltic states. Crimea and eastern Ukraine were less clear cut than supposed for historical reasons but many in the East live in fear of the same happening to them.

But how is NATO not a military force? It’s kind of equivalent to the US military (except it includes them)... EU is similar to United States. Both are unions of independent states

Ireland does have an Air Force, called the Irish Air Corps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Air_Corps

None of what you say aligns with disappearing people. NATO can easily do its role without that. In fact you can argue that NATO states like US/UK/Turkey which have disappeared people are very unlikely to do it against peer adversaries like Russia, China etc because of the risk of blow back. It's far more common to it to groups deemed as terrorist, Latin American countries etc.

Similarly countries like Sweden and Japan are well armed and not in the business of disappearing people.

That's a very broad interpretation of disappearance and I don't agree with it. NATO isn't in the business of disappearing people either - Assange and Snowden have not disappeared. But Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has disappeared. Kidnapped when he was 6 years old by agents of the CCP and nobody knows where he is now, although China officially says he's doing well.

By painting with such broad strokes, we are comparing entirely different types of actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappeared_(Northern_Ireland)

Eh yes that's the UK as I mentioned.

The people doing the dissappearing were from Ireland though.

This is just ridiculous. Why if you were going to illegally spy on people would you use a highly visible and noisy drone when the vast majority of the population live in urban areas where CCTV cameras are common and phone lines conveniently run out to steel covers in the streets (and the entire population is carrying GPS enabled tracking devices full of security flaws?)

There's "oh no our liberties" but that train came and went and this particular device has nothing to do with it.

It's not either-or.

I'm not overly worried by what the government plans to do with this tech, more than any other tech they use for nefarious purposes.

I _am_ worried by the endgame of publicly available drone tech though, because it's very difficult to see how technically or legislatively we can avoid a future with tiny untraceable drones with long battery lives, that record audio and video and can go anywhere. The arms race that is going to be necessary to secure your home and workplace against these is going to be very expensive and ugly, and many people are going to have to settle with every conversation and sexual encounter they have being in public, if only for the lulz.

Privacy, like the fight against piracy, isn't going to be defeated because it's desirable or not, but rather just because the technology and temptation is inevitable.

There are probably bigger worries in the surveillance area already (smartphones etc). I’d be more concerned about their potential use for assassination. How heavy does a bomb have to be?

Assassination of whom? The result isn't exactly discreet, it's not going to be used locally to target inconvenient persons in the UK. If we're talking about conflicts, then I don't see how it's better or worse than a predator.

What if you wanted to kill a foreign head of state and not to reveal who did it? Would this be easier to hide than with a Predator?

There are much easier methods to hide than a drone. They typically use vulnerable or compromised individuals with no paper trial back to the perputrators to do these sorts of assassinations.

Drones are fucking loud, and the video stream can be detected while transmitted via the air (with an sdr card or something similar). Signals can also be jammed, and combined with gps jamming, the drone will "get lost", and probably land at its current location (and hopefully not just drop out of the sky when the batteries are empty).

And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better ham radio operator or a better engineering student can do with sme preparation.

> And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better ham radio operator or a better engineering student can do with sme preparation.

I suppose there are not that many engineering students or ham radio operators in the poorer parts of the cities, where I for myself think that these things will first be used internally. At least video-cameras you can try and bring them down with simple rocks [1] or by cutting the electricity down on that pole (that is if they're not battery-powered), not so easy with these type of machines.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=74&v=E1ABR4UpDSU&feature=you...

Yeah it’s designed for the battlefield so amongst all the bangs it’ll most definitely go unnoticed

Indeed. And while we're at it take things to their logical conclusion; seriously consider the implications of this tek + combined with 'AI' for not only navigation but for policing decisions.

When you remove the human element from policing, there is thus then no human empathy in the decision to use force ie- to arrest or kill, if that is the 'command' said AI internally commands itself to do.

This is hardly surveillance technology.

Yes it's a camera drone for the military. Big deal. It's also extremely noisy.

The government can put cameras wherever and on whatever platform it damnwell wants - and is allowed to. Really the only way to control the consequences is to restrict those places, platforms and what is done with the data, through laws and regulations. You know, like in a democracy.

If that's not possible, a camera on a particularly cute drone is the least of your problems.

It's basically a camo DJI Mini that probably costs fifty times as much.

Cute little drone, the Mini. I keep having to tell myself I don't need one.

>there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

I'd say there's a 100% certainty this will happen.

> there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

These things and considerably smaller were fielded 10 years ago by the US; you could bid on SBIR contracts to remedy some of their defects.

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