EFF Demands Answers About Predator Drone Flights in the U.S.
eff.org
eff.org
In concept there's no difference between a police department flying a helicopter with an electro-optical surveillance turret and it flying a UAV equipped with the same. Why is one ok but the other not? It can't be about UAVs flying higher up so they can't be seen or heard, as helicopters are becoming quieter and sensors better so that they can view scenes from much further away without being heard either.
Similarly there are vehicle-mounted optronics masts available to police departments that can capture video footage of areas kilometres away. I know of an arrest and successful prosecution that happened recently in South Africa that relied on video of a crime that was captured by one of these vehicles 3.5 km from the scene.
The real issue here is persistent video (mostly aerial) surveillance, something which has theoretically been possible with police helicopters until now but has not been done because the logistics make it impossible. That will not necessarily remain true forever.
Fact is UAVs will be used by police departments under the same authorisation and rules that make it legal to use helicopters, purely because the cost and flexibility will be irresistible, so trying to ban the domestic use of UAVs is doomed to fail.
Instead, there should be public pressure to strongly regulate how, when and where police departments can collect video and what they're allowed to do with it. That will have the benefit of not only restricting what police UAVs can do but also police helicopters and vehicle-mounted optronics masts.
There should be clear regulations and the public should know what exactly is being done. That is what the EFF basically wants.
Other than that i think that using Drones for such purposes also can proof a good testing process.
You don't want to loose a drone over Iran, test it here under real circumstances.
However, and this is a big issue, drones are thus cheap making it possible to use them much more than police helicopters are now. It's just hardware, you can buy a lot of it. I dread thinking about a future where drones will be swarming everywhere, collecting information aspecifically, to collect and process and find every tiny violation, obliterating any sense of privacy.
I agree that's not a technology problem. And regulating technology won't solve it. But it should not be ignored either. Advancing technology does open a lot of debates about what we want life to be really like. A much-heard argument against a 1984-like scenario in the 80's used to be "it's too expensive". It isn't anymore. And drones are only a small part of that.
That's why I think focusing on drones obscures the real issue and makes it more difficult to have the serious and very necessary debate about whether we want to live in societies where the state is able to track you persistently in any public space.
We already have the beginnings of something similar in cities like London, where thousands of CCTV cameras are every bit as invasive of our privacy as a police drone flying overhead would be.
In other words this battle against the police use of drones like the Predator could be 'won' and it would probably not make any difference to the police's ability to track you with video and audio surveillance.
We have already let them ignore the 4th amendment with the TSA, stop-and-frisks, and warrantless wiretapping. If they think I'm going to take having remote control toys police me, they are in for a nasty surprise.
Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.
Of course then certain law enforcement types who feel they are above any law (ie. most of them) will disconnect or disable them.
After they accidentally kill people it will be written off as the cost of enforcing the law, ala the nightmare of the TSA which everyone seems to put up with for some unknown reason.
Remember this phrase in a few years "drones, oh well what can you do, fact of life, they make me feel safer".
BTW, federal courts have already said it's legal for cops to put cameras on your property without a warrant, so a drone is just an extension of that.
Hopefully the video on the drones won't go accidentally missing after they raid the wrong home and kill your dog while they arrest you for resisting arrest.
Again, how is a drone functionally different for law enforcement purposes to a helicopter with a surveillance turret? All the points you've made apply just as much to the latter platform as to the former.
Ever notice what happens when you give cops a tool - say for example a taser or pepper spray? It immediately gets put on the front line, used constantly to escalate things.
To assume drones won't be abused is just willful ignorance.
I am not assuming drones won't be abused, in fact I assume they will be. See my other comments on this post for my views on the undesirability of persistent police surveillance. But as I pointed out with my reference to vehicle-mounted optronic masts, that surveillance will happen with or without drones, so the focus should be on the surveillance and not on the drones.
As an aside, you failed to back up the claim that the 'commercial air traffic beacons' would be disabled.
Commercial traffic beacons are extremely easy for hobbyists to listen in on and decode - and that's going to annoy cops because people are going to know when they are being watched, just like a weather-alert radio. There's one super easy way for them to "fix" that little problem, because they know they are untouchable.
I'd guess future generations of top-shelf radar detectors might have traffic beacon decoders in them and then use a wifi network to your cellphone to download/share the IDs.
It's already dirt-simple to track ADS-B broadcasts along with smartphone apps that display the aggregated data.
The FAA is not an organisation that is pushed around easily, nor is the ICAO.
Beyond that, I don't see them physically being treated much differently from traditional police helicopters. I don't really see any evidence that police are disconnecting the transponders on those either.
OTOH, I do have some concerns about the massive increase in numbers that these may bring, due to the decreased cost. It seems to open up some avenues for abuse.
Still unnecessarily paranoid?
We already have Orwell's floating fortresses. The United States already has EIGHT. With three more under construction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_th...
The cost of construction is $4,500,000,000. And that does not include their mandatory support fleet, nor how much it costs per day to keep operating. But people are talking about cutting NASA and PBS instead of the military budget.
How about now?
And neither of the political candidates from the dominant parties are even considering scaling back the War Department, excuse me, the "Department of Defense". Holy doublethink, Batman!
1984 has already happened because people were insufficiently paranoid. The only reason people think it could never happen here, to us, to the United States, is because it already has.
In fact, in most cases drones are actually more expensive to buy and operate than fixed-wing surveillance aircraft, because their control systems are more sophisticated and require more maintenance, they need expensive ground stations which themselves require constant maintenance, they need dedicated comms links which also need maintenance and they can't fly in bad weather.
In the short to medium term I fully expect the police fascination with drones to recede dramatically once they realise just how expensive they really are. Sticking a pilot and observer in a helicopter or fixed-wing plane with an electro-optical turret is often a lot cheaper.
Build a startup, try to get rich, and never ever talk about anything serious!
It is about how we all individually see the problem, but do nothing about. It is a choice. Be a cog in the machine that makes your life livable, but makes everyone's just a little bit worse by doing so instead of trying to change the system.
A single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.
If we all, just the technologists all got together and said, hey, quit it with that war shit and refused to make new or maintain old war making machines, war would end almost immediately. But the system has made the consequences of an individual or a minority doing that disastrously bad for them if they do it alone. It is a cage of fear. Legitimate fear. Fear of what would happen if we end up standing alone in our rebellion.
But we don't. We read HN and talk about making money. And that economic output, that money will be used against us to make things worse for everybody but the plutocracy that controls the political duopoly.
It seems to me (with my extremely limited view of economics), that it would just create shortage of supply, and so the technologists that would continue to participate would make a lot more money. That in turn would make it more difficult for the techs that might agree with your position, but are currently in dismal financial circumstances for whatever reason, to refuse to create/maintain the "war machines."
Perhaps I'm too pessimistic, and am the problem you're speaking of. But it seems like a "boil the ocean" proposition to me, at least from any way I can try to envision it happening.
The 'Predator' moniker likely referred to the UAV's role in hunting down targets through surveillance, especially as there was no intention to develop an armed version when it first entered service. That need only arose after the US's experience in the Balkans in the late '90s.
If I cared about these issues, I would donate my money to someone else. If I care about my right's online, now I'm not sure who is supporting them because it doesn't seem to be the EFF...
The issue of drone flights and privacy absolutely relates to the mission of the EFF.
[1] See the EFF mission statement at: http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/?f=eff_creation.html