FBI Surveilling U.S. With Drones | Hacker News Reader

FBI Surveilling U.S. With Drones

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137 pointssmaili93 comments

I work in the field of unmanned aircraft. I'm always amazed by the enormous disconnect between public perception and what I see going on inside the industry.

I've talked directly to members of several police departments about why they want unmanned aircraft. In Brevard county FL, for example, they want infrared cameras to help find patients with Alzheimer's disease that have wandered away from home. Several police departments want a cheap way to take aerial photographs of accident scenes so they can move wreckage and debris off the roads faster and keep traffic flowing. In general, it's for surprisingly mundane tasks. I happen to live in Colorado, and I'd love to use our products to help with forest fires, but the FAA won't let us.

Of course, any tool can be abused. It seems like that's the primary fear that people have with this new technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil

"Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal."

I think wanting to detect lost alzheimer's patients isn't quite equivalent to accepting the premise that germanic purity should be preserved.

The FBI won't be looking for Alzheimer's patients.

That's just a code word used by drone operators...

Hey Central - we have another "Alzheimer's patient" who has driven out of his low-class zone to a more affluent one... send a squad car over to help "remind him" of his place.

Are you proposing that unmanned aircraft can only be used for evil purposes?

I see huge potential for use in agriculture. I talk to wine growers in California and we figure out how much money they can save using one of our products instead of using a tractor. I see that as a good thing, but perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.

I agree with you, there's great potential good for this tech.

The evil that is coming from it and will continue to come from it is perpetrated by those that, as said earlier, accept the premise of the State/government that they work for.

If it's a person's job to use technology such that it results in innocents being killed, injured or sucked up into a byzantine legal system and that person keeps doing that job, that's an example of the banality of evil.

Making quads to replace manual labor isn't banal or evil.

Which is why the discussion should be about the policies and rules we need to allow good uses, but prevent bad ones.

We already have policies and rules that are considered "good" by the people that implement and execute policy. That's the problem.

> If it's a person's job to use technology such that it results in innocents being killed, injured or sucked up into a byzantine legal system and that person keeps doing that job, that's an example of the banality of evil.

I guess McDonald's fits that bill as well, as diabetes and obesity are among the biggest killers in the US.

Gluttony has always been a human failing. The National Security State is a relatively new one.

Can you please pinpoint the year that you think the "National Security State" is new?

Because it's been going on since time immemorial.

The National Security Act of 1947 is the beginning of the modern American national security state. Compare to human gluttony, it's a relative newcomer.

You would be thrilled about what the ancient Romans did then.

But if you want to stick with the U.S., you might find that stuff that President Lincoln did quite atrocious from a civil liberties point of view as well.

I'm well aware of the history of espionage, thanks. Lincoln and the Romans had no wires to tap, hence the "modern" national security state.

Some marketing fits the bill; without that, McDonalds is just an option to hurt yourself, while being spied on or killed by drones it NOT a choice, which does make a difference.

> perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.

Possibly. Since we've already gone godwin, IBM sold computers to Germany. Those machines were used for something we do these days as a matter of routine - a census. It's hard to get more banal than a census. Yet that census was invaluable in identifying and segregating large chunks of people based on ethnicity. It was so instrumental to the Third Reich that James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor.

The tech is just a tool. It's who you give it to and what they do with it that matters. The question is, what do you do about it? You can't really restrict the dispersion of technology. Every attempt to do that so far has failed, for everything from munitions to cryptography. You can make certain uses illegal. That doesn't seem to be stopping the government or police these days. All that seems to do is put a lot of private citizens in jail. The only solid solution I can come up with is to come up with countermeasures of some sort.

How to solve a problem like human nature. It's quite a humdinger.

> "James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor."

Specifically the "Order of the German Eagle", if anyone else was confused about this.

Thomas Watson, not James Watson.

That quote has to do with the authorities presenting bad things as good things. In order to apply it, you must first establish that what is being presented is bad.

If you agree that what is being presented is good, then this quote does not apply. Instead, then, we have to have a discussion about what policies need to be in place to prevent the things that we agree are, in fact, bad.

The quote has to do with the fact that most people engaging in evil don't even think about it. When a State says, "These are the bad guys. Go get them.", there's a sizable percentage of the population that can rationalize away the evil committed by "The Mission" because for whatever reason, they either lack the ability to reflect on what they're doing or they choose not to reflect on what they're doing.

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." -Hannah Arendt

And what does the quote have to do with the current discussion? The implication is that the given examples are evil.

The thread topic is "FBI Surveilling U.S. With Drones".

That does not answer my question. Yes, I can quite easily come up with many ways in which that quote is relevant to the topic. But what were your intentions? The problem with dropping a quote without context is that people end up countering points they think the person was trying to make. The person you responded to said "Hey, here's a bunch of good uses of drones that we currently can't do." The implication of dropping your quote there is, "I don't want you to do those things."

Or maybe you did not mean to imply those things. Which is rather my point that without context, there's not much value in dropping a quote. I find quotes are great to illustrate or support discussion. But they are not discussion itself.

> But what were your intentions?

I fail to see why my intentions matter one whit in a discussion about increased surveillance by the government.

I was asking what your intended contribution to the conversation was. What point were you trying to make?

The point was made in my first post:

"the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.""

People who use your products or subsystems for evil are NOT going to tell you about it. Yes, you can do great stuff with drones. But to bring that up in the context of BAD stuff possibly being done with them, can seem naive and (inadvertently or not) help covering for bad stuff.

Let's say there is a topic about how a flaw in the SSL implementation of browser X can be used to take over the machine of a user by sending them to a specific link; and someone says "yeah but without that bug SSL is quite useful actually". It's at least kinda missing the point, and in a way that's in the playbook of PR firms to boot. To start out with "I am amazed at the disconnect" and the continue trying to create a disconnect is kinda rich, if you think about it.

And this will continue as long as they put up a fierce fight to prevent themselves from also being watched.

Do you ever think though that flying aircraft holds a special place in the fears of men? I think that if it flies people are automatically scared of it. I might just be biased.

I think if it doesn't randomly drop hellfires around, you can get used to it. We do not live in constant fear of birds after all.

Birds do drop hellfires constantly.

They don't want IR cameras to help people with alzheimers, they want to spy in our houses. It's insulting you would pretend to believe them. You are a weapons manufacturer, not a humanist helping the world or a scientist working to save lives. Oh and as a Canon City person, keep your sympathy for us fire victims and direct it to all the women and children already killed in the drone wars.

And the difference between using an unmanned drone and a manned helicopter is...?

I can tell when a helicopter is above me, and there is a much greater cost of operation making it impractical to use helicopters for constant surveillance in giant drag nets of innocents.

Having spent some time near an army base where they train drone pilots, I assure you that you can tell when a drone is above you too. They're not silent or invisible. Your comments border on delusional, like arguing that the existence of telescopic sights on rifles means that all telescopes are weapons.

A 747 at 12km is silent from the ground in every populated area I've ever been in; how could an MQ-9 at 15km possibly not be silent?

You're right about that, I'm thinking of a different model. OTOH the price of an MQ-9 is a lot higher than that f a helicopter, and it's not the case that you can just throw thousands of them up in the air for a panopticon.

Somebody needs to watch the 'Collateral Murder' video again.

OP actually works in the industry. Like full time. But I'm sure that you, random Internet commenter with no apparent expertise in the field, know better than he does. Thanks for your well-informed, well-cited input.

If the surveillance is continual --- none of your examples appear to be but presumably continual surveillance is the desire of the government -- then it isn't practical, as we have seen historically, to have policy prevent bad uses.

Some tools enable such terrible things that whatever good they may also do is inconsequential.

If any time a drone is launched, it's recorded to a publicly available website with its intended mission, freely available, I'd have far fewer qualms with their implementation. I don't disagree that there are good uses for these technologies. Just with how we don't not only know nothing about them, but we don't even know how to know anything about them, and often have no way to learn anything about them at all.

Yup, this is exactly right. Most of us don't necessarily have a problem with drones, or even wiretaps. We have a problem with secret drones, and secret wiretaps without any functioning system of accountability.

Totally agreed. Everyone hates surveillance until their daughter goes missing. On one hand it's a nessessity for security in a world where the average person is given tremendious killing power, and on the other hand uncontrolled surveillance is probably the biggest threat to government change, democracy and freedom.

There needs to be a system of checks and balances on the people who use surveillance. Heavy penalties, transparent operations, etc... Until this system gets balanced out everyone's going to be on edge for a while.

Not much of a surprise, although calling your low level agents "drones" is bad management :-) More seriously though, the FBI and police have, since the 60's, had helicopters which they use for surveillance and initial investigation. When my father-in-law stayed at our apartment in LA he said he felt like he was back in Viet Nam (there had apparently been a convenience store hold up that evening with the suspects fleeing on foot). So having aerial things flying around and looking during an investigation is going to be pretty much a non-issue to most Americans I suspect. The DHS gigapixel camera in the sky ARGUS [1] was a bit creepier for me.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/06/argus_is_...

The real issue is scale--it costs a lot of money to put a helicopter in the air, and that's a good thing because it ensures restraint in use.

Maybe Americans won't notice that aspect and assent to this sort of thing because it's "just like what's already going on". But if so, they'll be missing that due to the economics, it'll be a totally different ball game.

I would imagine the helicopter costs less than the drone.

That's not a great rational to not use drones.

You're throwing away tons of money maintaining helicopters that you don't need most of the time because it's too hard to regulate the use of drones?

That's like forcing police officers to only use 18th century muskets so they don't shoot too much

Well, in the US tasers proliferated, and so has taser use....

the weapon's "cost of use" is much smaller than a firearm so it gets used much more casually as a compliance tool rather than as a last ditch tool to keep officers safe.

well, it is far safer and easier to taser someone rather than tackle, club, or otherwise physically subdue them.

Safer for the officer, definitely.

Curiously though, not for the person being tased.

I take it you've never received a knife stick blow to the head?

This is like saying "I take it you've never been shot", like knife stick or gun is the only other option. xD

Do you really think they would have subdued the (already held down by 5 officers) kid asking John Kerry uncomfortable questions with a knife stick if they didn't have tasers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bVa6jn4rpE

Pretty sure they would have just handcuffed him and walked him out of the auditorium, untazed and concussion free.

I'd love to see some numbers, but my hunch is that they taser a lot more people now than they would have physically subdued, just because it is lower risk to the officer. Before they might try to handcuff the perp first, but now if there is any indication at all in their opinion, they can just taser.

> That's like forcing police officers to only use 18th century muskets so they don't shoot too much

I think you could actually sell me on that.

True, automating surveillance has always been about efficiency in terms of $ spent on enforcement vs value at risk. While LA keeps at least 2 and maybe 3 helicopters pretty much in the air all the time, they can't actually be everywhere all the time. But a couple of dozen drones could in fact provide continuous surveillance of parts of the city (as could ARGUS [1]). I know that at least one police force made the argument that the city could approve either the drone or more officers. I'll have to go track down some of the debates to see if anyone has made your point about scale on the record.

[1] A contact suggested that the ARGUS demos were done at an altitude to not appear creepy since if you fly that thing at 10,000' its picking out daisies in your hard that are missing petals.

For now drones cost more than helicopters. On NPR the other day they mentioned the drones used for border security are 18 million each. Maybe that will change with time, and maybe it won't. The only reason to use a drone vs a helicopter over American soil at the moment is the stealth factor of a much smaller bird in the air.

Thanks for pointing that out. The current cost of high-end surveillance drones is higher than helicopters, yes. I do wonder if that $18 million is only for the drone, or for its associated infrastructure on the ground as well, though.

My point was more theoretical than based on current costs. To me, it seems prices will almost certainly drop fairly quickly. There are many fewer constraints in building a vehicle that doesn't have to hold a human. As the technology is produced in greater numbers, and as the technology is refined, I imagine the cost will plummet. And as the process becomes more automated, it will require less personnel as well. I imagine there will also be "light drones" that cost much less, if there aren't already.

If there's a counterargument for the price dropping, I'd love to engage with it, but I'm having trouble coming up with it myself.

I'd love to see some real numbers. My suspicion is that the amount of surveillance per dollar spent already heavily favors the drone and will only get better, but I could be wrong. In a situation in support of an ongoing event, I imagine the helicopter is currently a lot more useful.

Good quality optics aren't getting any smaller as far as I can tell. So a good surveillance drone is always going to have to be a certain size to carry that payload. I can see them getting cheaper than helicopters but not cheap.

Smaller drones with worse optics should be cheaply producible. With large numbers of such drones, lower altitude surveillance with greater redundancy of coverage would become affordable. The computational costs associated with patching together the key-hole views provided by a swarm of fungible drones could be offloaded to ground-based computational resources.

In my opinion, the result will be a net shift towards favoring many small cheap drones coupled with fancy off-board image processing. Though, one or two large expensive drones capturing monolithic images with great onboard optics should remain the better option for some situations.

I think unmanned aircraft will always be more expensive than their manned counterparts of similar size. The base flying platform will be a similar cost, with or without the ability to carry a person. And there must be additional computer, radio, and sensor equipment in addition to the base airframe.

It's a different story for smaller systems, of course. Anything under 100 lbs will certainly (eventually) cost less than a manned aircraft.

Why do the "smaller systems" only get a brief mention at the end of your comment? There are relatively few uses for an unmanned but full size aircraft. The advantage to using a drone is that it can often do the same task previously done by a large, manned aircraft but at a fraction of the cost and complexity due to its reduced size

Imagine being able to send out ten drones to scour a mountain for lost climbers, and on the same day that they got lost (rather than waiting until tomorrow to make sure they really are lost and it really is worth spending thousands launching a single helicopter)

Mostly because I'm more familiar with the larger versions. Physics really hurts the capabilities of the small platforms. There's just not enough energy in current batteries to carry useful sensors and fly long enough. Not trying to say they aren't useful, just that their applications are limited due to limited flight times.

I think you're absolutely right that the price is going to keep dropping, and that's the scariest part to me.

Wait till criminals start using weaponized drones. Then life's going to get really interesting.

I don't know the numbers, so this is just a guess, but I imagine the total cost of ownership gives a single drone a huge advantage and a fleet of them even a bigger one. For each helicopter you have two expensive pilots, maintenance costs, and crazy insurance, plus a lot of high octane fuel.

For each drone you have one expensive pilot, and maintenance costs also. Plus you have to factor in that the range is extremely limited, the speed is 1/15th of a chopper. Taking those factors into account the chopper is cheap, considering what you can do with it compared to a drone. The cheap toy drones that can stay up for 20min max, are like 90K. Pretty limited use cases, although they do open up new capabilities . Comparing them to a heli and saying they will save cost is not the right argument. It's like saying the city should replace their garbage trucks with bikes and trailers, cause you'll save so much money on maintenance.

WTF?

These are the drones they're talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator

Not these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadcopter

I assure you know one is talking about predators.

>On NPR the other day they mentioned the drones used for border security are 18 million each.

The thing is, drone doesn't necessarily mean a full size unmanned aircraft with extended loiter times. A surveilance drone could be something massively cheaper and more targeted.

The RQ-11B Raven has a unit cost of around $35k, and honestly, even it's over-specced for a lot of what LEAs would want drones for.

http://www.army-technology.com/projects/rq11-raven/

You can build something fairly similar with obviously reduced capability for under $1K. The most expensive component that law enforcement would be after would be thermal imaging, even adding that capability would be far cheaper than running a helicopter.

If all we care about is cameras on the border then cameras on large poles would seem to be the most cost effective route. Why bother with something that moves, has fuel and operator costs?

Just some anecdotal evidence, but drones surveilling citizens seems to resonate more with the 65+ aged members of society than does the recording of all internet & phone traffic.

Moments later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) said drones were a huge privacy threat to Americans.

Yet, regarding NSA activities, Feinstein said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-d...)

Playing to the Californian voters who are currently pestering local law enforcement trying to acquire and deploy drones no doubt.

I don't understand your statement... is she playing to CA citizens who want the drones or who are against the drones?

The statement is indeed ambiguous, however CA citizens are pestering local law enforcement regardless of their intent (be it for or against). The amount of people fearing 'illegals' is certainly not small, however the amount of people fearing overzealous police departments is also not small.

This smells like an attempt to get the story out before it became public via a leak. From here on out politicians can treat it as old news.

This is a little creepy and Skynet-ish, but compared to the massive CF that is NSA's unconstitutional, invasive, pile of private information, it's just a distraction.

It's no different than when the police fly over your house in a helicopter and look down.

EDIT: I should have said "no different, legally, than when". This does allow surveillance on a greater scale, and maybe that will change people's feelings about it. But the information asymmetry isn't as great as it is with NSA. Ordinary citizens are allowed to fly drones, so why not the FBI?

It is massively different. All of the ways in which technology changes law enforcement have the same problem. The primary protector of our liberties has been economics: the government couldn't afford to follow many of us. If we weren't mostly law-abiding citizens, LE would be easily overwhelmed.

But technology changes all that. Putting a helicopter in the air with a police pilot is a huge expense. Putting a thousand drones in the air is cheaper. And the benefit doesn't stop there. Computers can correlate data, follow individuals, listen in, eliminating the need for an army of support people. A few agents at their desks can lay out the overall plan, and software can implement "Big Brother".

But wait, there's more. As tech makes us wealthier, it also makes our government wealthier, while lowering the cost of drones, bandwidth, servers, software, etc. So in a decade, we could have perhaps ten thousand drones instead of one thousand. How long drones pick up cell phone transmissions for better tracking? After all, its publicly broadcast data.

> It's no different than when the police fly over your house in a helicopter and look down.

It's at least an order of magnitude cheaper and easier to do. Thus, it will be much more prevalent.

It's like looking at how many people have printers at home when there are $50 inkjets out there compared to a world where the least expensive printer was $3500. And in which the consumables for the $50 inkjet were also less than 1/10 the price.

EDIT: I'm referring to the near future, not the present. Currently, drones are still quite expensive. It's like a time when inkjet printers were just developed, and only 100 were produced. Once production ramps up and the technology is refined, the price plummets.

I saw you make this argument elsewhere in the thread. Do you have a source? I would expect the opposite to be true- at least until drones become more prevalent. There is a lot more that goes into these systems than a model-sized self flying aircraft.

On a somewhat related note, there was a recent AMA on reddit from a drone pilot: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ghkm7/iama_drone_sens...

I guess I got a little ahead of myself. In my comment, I was referring more to the near future than to the present. I think you're correct--until this becomes common and has undergone a few rounds of revisions, the numbers I gave are not in line with the current situation.

I still maintain the numbers as a likely reality in the near future. Once drones become common, they will be much cheaper than helicopters. If there are facts I'm missing in that assessment, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks for sharing the AMA--checking it out now!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLiZxjQrVg&feature=player_em...

No, that kid isnt me!!! But note the age.

Detail here:

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1335765

More here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DHoLYf5pMA&feature=related

A sample of easily available code here:

https://code.google.com/p/simple-flight-controller/

Larger versions available.

For some in to RC models, these things are trivial to build. Adding cameras is old hat nowadays. Only problem I see is long range control. But that might just be my lack of knowledge

Except for at least one major thing:

ARGUS

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-free-speech-...

You can't reasonably do that with manned helicopters, it'd be wildly impractical. UAVs however are ideal for it. Particularly smaller, lighter, UAV helicopters that can hover in a zone for extreme periods of time recording everything in very high resolution. And over the next decade or two the technology will advance radically, enabling 24/7, simultaneous (the UAVs working in a grid tandem) surveillance at high resolution over all areas of every metro. It's not a question of if this will happen, but how soon.

Compared to surveillance of the internet and phone calls drones don't pose much of a threat to privacy. It's technically difficult to recognise people from aerial photos, although when combined with mobile phone geolocations and unlimited access to personal metadata that would be possible.

There are also entirely legitimate kinds of drone surveillance, such as land surveys, detecting diseases amongst crops, monitoring livestock or shipping or general environmental monitoring (temperature, atmospheric gasses, etc).

Maybe it's technically difficult now, but what happens when that technology inevitably improves? Once this becomes acceptable, what next? The "abuse of power" knob only ever seems to get turned in one direction.

Plus, who said it will remain about "surveillance" only? How about taking down people?

Hat sales will SKYROCKET.

Is anyone bothered that the government misuses a term meta data? They are collecting data about us. They aren't collecting information about our schema.

If it's data that describes a call rather than the data of the call itself then maybe the term applies...

This is data though. It's the same as them reading our phone bills. "Big data" movement was initiated to handle very large log files.

Of course, presumably it can work the other way as well. I look forward to small private copwatch organizations that can keep a camera on police interactions with the public through small UAVs.

The threat of ubiquitous surveillance through camera phones and drones has the potential to radically change policing tactics in the US and curb brutality.

I've heard that some police forces in Canada have been using small helicopters for emergencies and SWAT-type situations. I don't think that counts as surveillance, though.

I have a feeling over the next 2-3 decades, there will be a ton of revolutions in most countries, because governments will keep wanting to create total surveillance states, and eventually many people will get fed up with it, but it will be too hard to fight from the beginning, and it will just turn into revolutions later on.

My main concern is integration with existing manned aircraft and the dangers associated with that. Just the other day the news broke about a close call in Afghanistan between a passenger jet and a German Luna UAV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NOar...

The privacy issues have been the same issues brought up about manned aircraft surveillance. IMHO it's just a larger hill to mount a camera on. They could just as easily sit outside and watch you, or in a helicopter, or via remote sensors, or using one of the millions of cameras that watch us everyday. It's a much broader issue than just "should they use drones".

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