FBI uses drones inside U.S. for spying, director says | Hacker News Reader

FBI uses drones inside U.S. for spying, director says

latimes.com

126 pointsdaegloe61 comments

The FBI currently uses Helicopters and people generally don't complain about them violating their privacy. However, this may be because Helicopters are rather hard to miss if one is parked over your back-yard. Drones can be much smaller and quieter than any manned aircraft, and some even have the capability of entering buildings. In the near future we can expect drones the size of insects to enter use.

Suggestions:

1. A drone presence should be legally treated the same way as the presence of an FBI officer. Namely, to enter private premises they should require a warrant.

2. Legally require drones used in public spaces to be equipped with lights/speakers to make their presence as detectable as a helicopter. I'd rather not live in a society where insect-sized drones could be eavesdropping on any conversation or watching everything you do without your knowledge.

#2 sounds like suggestions that electric car manufacturers have "fake engine sounds" coming out of speakers, so deaf people can hear the normally-silent car coming.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090921/0141396258.shtml

I think you mean blind people.

I see what you did there.

I think I meant "blind people" too.

I strongly agree with #1.

If you really don't want to live in a society with insect-sized drones doing, well, whatever they want, you're not going to have much choice in a couple of decades (at most).

#2 would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Enforcing things like #2 is what the press is for. Write a law, try to find instances of the authorities breaking it (or look for whistleblowers!), cause a stink. The difficulty of the second and third parts of that formula shouldn't be a reason to not write the law (presuming it's a good one).

...and then your car gets blown up, and they call it an "accident". The press is, and has been, the 4th branch of the government, so I would really hope that our last refuge isn't found on the pages of CNN.

You just need your own set of insect-sized drones to find and destroy other insect-sized drones.

This is a very Diamond Age notion.

(In Neal Stephenson's book, microscopic robots capable of everything from surveillance to entering humans and destroying them from within are an ever-present part of the atmosphere in parts of the earth. Many are there simply to hold the others in check. A fog sometimes results when a battle erupts between groups of drone owners.)

A balance of drones and anti-drones of increasingly smaller and harder to detect sizes does seem quite possible at this point. Certainly, drones are going to get progressively smaller and cheaper and could soon be used by practically anyone to spy on anyone else. Children's toys (e.g. RC helicopters with cameras) have already gone past a 1950's CIA agent's wildest dreams. Either anti-drone defenses are going to develop to keep pace or we're going to have to fundamentally change our notions surrounding privacy.

Regarding 1, how high, vertically, does my private premises extend?

Is it the 500' described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights ?

So the drones should not be able to take picture of anything below 500 feet above ground without a warrant, but they could fly over 500 feet without taking pics/vid. OK?

No. Air rights extend only as high as the land owner reasonably uses. A landowner with a 3-story house has a rightful claim to higher airspace than a neighbor with a single story house. The specific height has not been determined in a courtroom, but it's likely to be a short distance (~10ft) above any structures on the property.

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

So, can a govt drone fly 100' over my house and photography me sunbathing nude in my fenced backyard?

In the U.S., the current legal precedent requires a warrant for aerial surveillance, independent of height. The exception to that rule would be during an active event -- like if a bank robber happened to be running through your neighborhood trying to get away.

According to the FAA, 1 inch. Remember the recent story of some schmuck piloting a quad-copter less than a foot from his neighbor's window? There was much arguing of whether said neighbor would be within rights to shoot the thing out of the air, and the HN consensus was, "nope".

Drones, like guns and cars, are just tools, and themselves not inherently evil.

I don't see a problem with the FBI using unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, so long as they do it within the confines of the law (and not some preposterous interpretation by a secret court). As long as a they have a specific warrant, this is just a clever application of technology, and a far cheaper alternative to a helicopter with crew.

We already have traffic cameras and satellites, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy outdoors.

Also, it isn't like these devices are able to pilot themselves, they're just remotely controlled aerial vehicles. What if the FBI put a video camera on a weather balloon?

> Drones .. are just tools, and themselves not inherently evil.

The tools aren't evil, but our authoritarian corporatocracy might be.

Don't ascribe malice to what can be adequately explained by righteous and shortsighted self-preservation.

If the overly righteous and shortsighted preservation of a police state isn't evil, I don't know what is.

I highly doubt the motivation of the past and current administration are "evil". I highly doubt that Bush or Obama wanted a massive surveillance state and a "minority report" type of future. The problem is that righteous and shortsighted people are rarely aware of being shortsighted. They built an infrastructure of turnkey tyranny to protect us from what may very well be a real threat, and swear that there's a system of checks and balances to protect us not because they are "evil" but because they are righteous. Their righteousness blinds them to their shortsightedness.

So, no, I still can't see them as evil. Just foolish.

Who is, by this definition, evil? You could probably call Hitler or anyone else "righteous and shortsighted, and thus not evil." It makes the word useless, because it no longer refers to anything that exists in reality (just in fairy tales.)

I believe that evil only exists in fairy tales. There are better words to describe the immoral actions of others, including Hitler.

But the evil in fairy tales is only the way it is because the characters who perpetrate it are purposefully one-dimensional, their motivations and justifications left unrevealed so as to not give the reader too much empathy for them. Even their evil, on level-headed scrutiny (ignoring the story narrator's attempt to sway you to one side of an us-vs-them debate with rhetoric), is "righteous and shortsighted." Which is to say--even their evil isn't "evil."

And if you've reduced a word to signifying nothing at all, perhaps you're just trying to run away from allowing the things it does signify to be labelled? If the "evil" in fairy tales is, deep down, the same kind of justified, empathizable action that real people in our real world do every day, then why can't the thing the real people do also be called evil?

I'm guessing that, after a few rounds of clarification, your real problem with the term might be its true definition: evil is basically a useful bit of meta-ethics jargon meaning "something that is subjectively offensive to the part of my utility function I assume my culture shares with me, as evidenced through mythos and communicated social norms." It's that "subjective" part that people get tripped up by--"evil" (and its opposite "good") are only defined given a utility function and a culture of empathizable peer-beings who share some part of that utility function. Without the utility function, you might have something unclipperific[1], but not something evil. Without the empathizable peers, it might be something you find personally offensive, but this feeling won't be shared to others via sympathetic anger (offense at losing in a fair competition, for example, feels like "rage", not like "observing an evil being perpetrated.")

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/fv3/by_which_it_may_be_judged/

I go the other direction. I believe a person can be evil and do evil while believing themselves good. The results of your actions are what matters, not what you thought when you committed them.

It seems to me that "evil" is such a poorly defined word that any argument that depends on a particular definition will fail to compel anyone who doesn't already see things the way you do. All the turnkey tyranny and righteous shortsightedness seems like a (perhaps fairly banal) type of evil to me, but it really just comes down to using different definitions of the same word.

Evil is a very poor word to use outside of some sort of metaphysical sense or fairy tale.

I think the use of the word "evil" to describe the actions of our well meaning but thoroughly righteous and shortsighted government is counterproductive. If evil exists outside of fairy tales, it does so inside of us. All of us.

If evil exists outside of fairy tales, it does so inside of us. All of us.

Yes, and? You seem to think you're making quite the profound point.

I agree with you, but the statement "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy outdoors" is interesting. If someone were to fence off their back yards with a high privacy fence, would they really have no reasonable expectation to, say, sunbathe in the nude without a drone (or helicopter for that matter) zooming in on them and snapping pictures?

A quick search shows a lot of case law related to this (especially related to cases of people who were growing marijuana outside, unsurprisingly). But I didn't see a distilled answer.

I've done a bit of googling on this myself, and all I can find is that evidence could be thrown out in a criminal case based entirely on aerial footage, but that is rarely the only evidence provided. You likely don't own the airspace above your property, certainly not above a thousand feet, and technically no one owns outer space, so I would say that in 2013 or beyond, your expectation of privacy in your back yard is likely to dwindle severely over time.

If Google Maps used the image, they'd have to blur your sunbathing.

In the US your backyard isn't necessarily considered to have an expectation to privacy.

The principle in question is Curtilage, the relevant holding was United States v Dunn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtilage

The fence argument is interesting, the factors they'd need to consider are outlined in the Wiki article. It's also why a professor of mine who was a lawyer told us in DC that if we ever got a MPD citation for drinking in public on our porch that he'd take the case for free, as he felt the law would clearly be unconstitutional - and said he'd have fun doing it.

Nuclear weapons, like guns and cars, are just tools, and themselves not inherently evil. Ergo, there should be no restrictions on anything related to nuclear weapons.

False equivalence and a slippery slope. How did you get from "big RC helicopter with video camera" to nuclear weapons?

Let's assume that it is slippery slope. Where do you draw the line between tools that are 'just tools' and tools that are not 'just tools'?

Inanimate objects can't be evil.

Guns don't cause crime, cars don't cause accidents, and nuclear weapons don't kill people: their (usually) negligent operators do.

Your argument is basically a straw-man argument/non-argument. No duh that inanimate objects can't be evil. Yet they can be used for evil purposes. And some are more likely to be used for evil purposes than others. How does that really make a difference?

My point is that the focus must be on the operators of such devices, not the devices themselves. For example, the fact that Obama likes to use drones to take out American citizens (and I guess their children and cousins?) suspected of providing material support to terrorists should make us all angry because of the lack of due process, not that a fancy new technology is used.

There are all sorts of them. Most jurisdictions require a license to operate a car, and a slightly harder to get license to operate larger vehicles. There are similar things with planes and explosives and other sorts of chemicals. Guns are restricted in many areas, pistols are restricted in most areas, large knives are restricted in most areas.

> Nuclear weapons, like guns and cars, are just tools, and themselves not inherently evil.

True!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosions#Sov... / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

Beyond the obvious (digging big holes fast) there are proposals for using them to extinguish particularly bad oil/gas fires (perhaps Centralia, Pennsylvania could be a use case?), stimulating natural gas production (this one is likely to be unpopular these days), and destroying large amounts of chemical weapons (and while you're at it, a nuke ;)).

Don't forget space travel! Both from within the gravity well and intra-solar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

> Also, it isn't like these devices are able to pilot themselves,

If Google can figure out how to make a self-driving car, I think the government can (or has already) figure out a way to make self-flying drones.

I think from watching all the videos of self navigating quadrocopters that do tricks I can safely assume that a lot of people (including the government) can

The quadrocopters you're seeing on youtube generally have very specific navigation requirements that require lot of infrastructure and preparation in the area they're flying.

More so than drones I think. Internal flying vs external, the former has to deal with much more restrictions (physically) than the latter.

We're talking about today's drone use by the FBI. They most certainly don't have fully autonomous drones. Sure, give them a decade or two and they'll have miniature, weaponized drones soon enough.

Yes and the self driving car is operated within some sort of legal framework and for the time being has a driver. The law may likely include, at least for sometime, a provision that forces a human eye on the road before we allow anyone to jump in and go. Ultimately it comes down to operating within a set legal framework and having the appropriate licences and paperwork(warrants) in place. So while drones may be self flying there needs to be someone responsible and it must be done so with reason.

Most people don't find it unreasonable to see the FBI using drones for surveillance as sparingly as Mueller claims in his testimony, it's later when they have something like a few thousand ARGUS-like platforms constantly surveying everything all of the time that makes it an egregious violation of privacy. Traffic cameras and license plate scanners are a prime example of the way law enforcement perceives its mandate to advance such things.

It is inevitable that they will use drones to spy on us. It is cheap and easy, why send teams of people to track someone 24/7 when you can have a robot do it for you. Unless new laws are brought in this will become regular practice. We have all seen the drones DARPA are working on.

What makes you think we can legislate our way out of this?

I think it will take more than legislate alone but I think it would be a step in the right direction. I just really want some transparency. Recording where everyone is going and having a mass database of it and then PRISM collecting all information about who you call and your online activities is a very worrying idea and it is 70% implemented.

All it will do is make life difficult for autonomous vehicle startups, while the incumbent drone manufacturers will continue to design, produce, and sell drones to the FBI, for a massively lucrative markup.

Edit: just saw your edit. Technology essentially prevents physical anonymity, and if it doesn't today, it will within the next decade for sure.

I agree that what we all need is transparency.

The technology isn't going away, and public key crypto to protect your identity doesn't exist (visually) so...

...wear a hat? :)

You have no expectation of privacy in public. Otherwise, the paparazzi would be out of a job.

Not that I am a fan of paparazzis, but you are mistaking random people with persons of public interest.

If every person had a bunch of people following them, taking photos, video and notes, how long do you think that would hold up? And how is it different just because it gets automated and hidden?

It seems to have held up since the invention of cameras.

I see this as inevitable: the technology is nearly here, the market demand is certainly here, the dots will be connected, legally, or otherwise.

It seems to have held up

Bullshit. I asked you to imagine something, you just bumble off into nonsense.

As far as I can tell, Mueller didn't say the FBI uses drones to spy* on us. There may be specific reasons why/where drones are useful... don't really understand why this is news.

Law enforcement has been using airplanes and helicopters for decades for various purposes. What is so odious about unmanned versions of the same thing? As long as the missions are lawful, not sure why this is any different.

I suspect it will become different eventually, when drones are much, much smaller, and weaponized. But the FBI isn't using those yet, so I agree, this is just opportunistic reporting since everyone is talking about the surveillance state. Demonstrates that journalists, for the most part, are clueless and lazy.

Open question: is this what was chasing LA Times journalist Michael Hastings a few nights ago? Sharyl Attkisson thought she was paranoid, until her employer (CBS News) discovered her computers were indeed being hacked.

Helicopters.

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