Bay Area sheriff seeks drone for thermal imaging and surveillance
muckrock.com
muckrock.com
Of course people with terrariums and other heat sources may be victims in the cross fire of the War on Drugs.
Incidentally, afaik, current US law says aircraft must fly five hundred feet above any man made structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
Before this decision they could do a thermal image of your home and if it gave off a certain heat signature, the police could use that a probably cause to get a warrant to search the home.
Now, they need a warrant just to do the thermal imaging.
Do cops currently do thermal scans of random citizen's homes? Probably.
Can they go to a judge and say "the thermal scan says this house has a marijuana grow-op in it, give me a warrant"? No.
In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the sole authority to control all airspace, exclusively determining the rules and requirements for its use. Typically, in the "Uncontrolled" category of airspace, any pilot can fly any aircraft as low as he or she wants, subject to the requirement of maintaining a 500-foot (150 m) distance from people and man-made structures...
So the law says that the FAA gets to determine the rules, and the current rules that the FAA has implemented require a 500 foot distance from structures. However, it would seem that the FAA could change these regulations tomorrow without any changes having to be made to federal law.
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, should a noise complaint be filed? I'd say no.
If fraud occurs at my business and is undetected, is it not a crime?
Politically, I am against drug prohibition. Legalize it all, and demand warrants for non-visible spectrum imagery of homes. But the idea that a crime isn't a crime if no one notices just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Noting that the criminal or (now deceased) victim observed the crime is neither useful nor insightful.
Fraud can be detected with perfectly normal well understood investigation techniques. No literally peering through walls is required. It is an important difference because fraud investigation techniques were conceivable when the laws we run our legal system with, laws put in place to protect us from it, were created.
Nobody is proposing we deploy these sorts of technologies to patrol for these crimes. Once we are reasonably certain that a particular crime has occurred, break out the UAVs for all I care. And get a warrant first. That is how the system was intended to work; if you breach that intention you breach the implied contract citizens have with their society.
Any crime should have an effect that is noticeable in a reasonable way. If there are absolutely no other methods of even determining if a crime has happened, then it is not a crime. A crime must have an effect, and an effect is noticeable. If there are other methods, the use those.
Regarding murder, you suggest "if someone is missing, start an investigation." Of course, the error in your logic is that we do have evidence of drug crime -- and plenty of it. There is no question that Alameda county is full of grow-ops, which produce drugs for the surrounding region. I know, because I live here. There are many, many busts every year. Mountains of evidence.
The reason to limit this sort of investigation is found in the 4th amendment, and it is more than adequate when applied here. Kyllo v. United States is very clear on this point.
My point, stated succinctly: If a law cannot be enforced without violating the 4th amendment, it is not a legitimate law.
Alternative expression of my point: "When the police cannot catch you legally, they are not permitted to catch you anyway"
Application of my point: If grow houses cannot be found without using drones, which violate the 4th amendment (or should), then grow houses should be legal. Bans on grow houses should only exist if there are legal ways of finding them. If there are legal methods of finding grow houses, than illegal methods should not be employed. Of course grow houses can be found without drones, so no drones should ever be employed.
The purpose of this rule of thumb (notice that I never claim that this principle could be effectively coded into law) would be to provide the population with an effective way of telling Sheriffs to "Fuck off" when they say "We need to violate your 4th ammendment rights to enforce this law.".
You have, however, missed mine.
They could be missing already, or be unregistered kids, or recently arrived unregistered migrants. Not everyone who is murdered is noticed missing. Also, very few of the people who are missing have been murdered.
If someone detects a murder by extremely technological means, say while using muons from cosmic rays to image though a structure like they are doing at Fukashima at the moment http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i15/e152501, then that murder is still a crime whatever the method of detection.
Now it is reasonable to argue that growing weed should not be a crime in the first place, but to argue that growing it indoors should not be a crime on the basis of the level of technology required to detect it, does not seem to make any sort of sense.
I feel that I should emphasis that I am not proposing a change to existing law. I am merely advocating the point of view that new fancy technologies should, by default, be considered unreasonable searches.
He finally quit and sold the house specifically because he was tired of having agents show up on his door step every month, sometimes with guns drawn.
What about LED grow lights? Also, one could rig a heat pump so that the extra heat would be dumped into a backyard "heated pool." This would probably be undetectable.
Police know people are lazy and/or complacent.
Suppose a related idea would be that the image captures from airport body scanners could be intercepted. I have not seen any reference to such an action, at all. Anyone have ideas about an attack vector for those?
As long as we're not talking about cutting other officers and patrols, I would fully support police stations hiring a couple of people to alternate flying a dozen or so drones around the city. Just put some charging stations on top of light poles or city buildings, and have them automated to fly back when power is sufficiently low.
I really don't get why people are averse to such things so long as we keep in mind that they are tools are to help people. They're not magic robots that can not completely take the place of people. If we ever get to a point where it even seems like that, then that's another conversation to have. But we're not there yet, and I see no reason to not use tools if they seem worthwhile.
/edit: I understand that any tool can be abused, but can someone explain to me why this is met with such anger? Barring thermal or other vision modes, what's the huge difference in this and patrolling? (Aside from not being seen.)
There aren't easy answers but it ultimately goes back to the 'Why do you need to hide anything if you don't do anything bad?' argument. And we already know plenty of answers to that argument.