In very small letters.
Posted on 03/22/2013 8:56:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
WASHINGTON – Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed concern on Wednesday about the domestic use of drones, saying the often-tiny, unmanned flying devices could carry undesirable consequences regarding the right to privacy.
Republicans and Democrats acknowledged that drones offer law enforcement a potentially valuable tool that could even be used by farmers to survey their acreage at a relatively inexpensive cost.
But the device, also known as a UAS, an acronym for unmanned aircraft system, also has the ability to travel nearly undetected into areas where it is unwanted – people’s homes or businesses – and record private information, making it seem like something out of 1984, a novel by George Orwell.
“While there may be many valuable uses for this new technology, the use of unmanned aircraft raises serious concerns about the impact on the constitutional and privacy rights of American citizens,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the committee chairman.
That view was supported by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member, who said using drones to essentially spy on people without their knowledge is “contrary to the notion of what it means to live in a free society.”
“We need to make sure we have sufficient legal safeguards to promote innovation while protect the general public,” Grassley said.
The drones in question differ markedly from the unmanned airplanes used so extensively by the American military for surveillance and combat operations overseas. They are smaller, lightweight, and, like their military cousins, unmanned. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that as many as 30,000 drones will be operating in American airspace by the end of the decade.
One UAS under development reportedly would be the size of a mosquito.
The domestic use of drones provides a dilemma for lawmakers. The device already has proved its worth.
The Department of Homeland Security, through Customs and Border Protection, already operates modified, unarmed drones to patrol rural parts of the nation’s borders. They also are being used to support drug-interdiction efforts by various law-enforcement agencies.
Benjamin Miller, the Unmanned Aircraft Program manager for the Mesa County, Colo., Sheriff’s Office, told the panel that his office maintains two small, battery-operated unmanned aircraft systems – a Draganflyer X6, a backpack-sized helicopter that can fly for 15 minutes, and a Falcon UAV, an airplane that can fly for an hour and fits in the trunk of a car. Both are fitted with cameras.
The drones have flown 185 hours in just over 40 missions over the past four years on two small batteries. They have been used to provide a vital view of a church fire, locate the body of a missing woman, and conduct an aerial survey of the county landfill to determine the increase in waste over the previous year – a task that once cost almost $10,000 which was completed at a cost of $200 by the drone.
“While unmanned aircraft cannot recover a stranded motorist in a swollen river, they can provide an aerial view for a fraction of the cost of manned aviation,” Miller said. “I estimate unmanned aircraft can complete 30 percent of the missions of manned aviation for two percent of the cost. The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office projects direct cost of unmanned flight at just $25 an hour as compared to the cost of manned aviation that can range from $250 to thousands of dollars per hour. It actually costs just one cent to charge a flight battery for either of our systems.”
Michael Toscano, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International, added that drones have been used to assess the flooding of the Red River in the upper Midwest, battle California wildfires and are being used to study everything from hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, tornadoes in the Great Plains, and volcanoes in Hawaii.
“Unlike military UAS, the systems most likely to be used by public safety agencies are small systems, many weighing less than five pounds, with limited flight duration,” Toscano said. “As for weaponization, it is a non-starter. The FAA prohibits deploying weapons on civil aircraft.”
But the low cost and compact nature of drones make them a perfect device for surveillance, raising significant Fourth Amendment questions. Amie Stepanovich, director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, noted that drones can “be equipped with sophisticated surveillance technology that makes it possible to spy on individuals on the ground.”
While her organization recognizes that drones provide “many positive applications,” they can also be used to obtain evidence in a criminal proceeding, intrude on a reasonable expectation of privacy, and gather personal data.
“Rules are necessary to ensure that fundamental standards for fairness, privacy and accountability are preserved,” she said. “The technology in use today is far more sophisticated than most people understand. Cameras used to outfit drones are among the highest definition cameras available. The Argus camera…has a resolution of 1.8 gigapixels and is capable of observing objects as small as six inches in detail from a height of 17,000 feet. On some drones, sensors can track up to 65 different targets across a distance of 65 square miles. Drones may also carry infrared cameras, heat sensors, GPS sensors that detect movement and automated license plate readers.”
The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t considered the limits of drone surveillance under the Fourth Amendment. Twenty years ago the justices determined that law enforcement could conduct manned aerial surveillance from as low as 400 feet without a warrant. There is no federal statute providing safeguards to protect privacy against increased drone use, although Congress has directed the FAA to come up with a plan to integrate UAS into the domestic airspace.
“Accordingly, there are substantial legal and constitutional issues involved in the deployment of aerial drones by law enforcement and state and federal agencies that need to be addressed,” Stepanovich said.
Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, noted that drones “have a lot of people worried about privacy — and for good reason.”
“Drones drive down the cost of aerial surveillance to worrisome levels,” he said. “Unlike fixed cameras, drones need not rely on public infrastructure or private partnerships. And they can be equipped not only with video cameras and microphones, but also the capability to sense heat patterns, chemical signatures or the presence of a concealed firearm. American privacy law, meanwhile, places few limits on aerial surveillance.”
The American public, Calo said, enjoys “next to no expectation of privacy in public” and the Supreme Court has made it clear that law enforcement doesn’t need a warrant “to peer into your backyard.”
“I see no reason why these precedents would not extend readily to drones,” he said.
In very small letters.
While I’m not surprised technology is getting us to the point of this being possible, the first image is a fake. It was created on Deviant Art as part of a contest about five years ago. It has been all over the internet with various captions for different stories.
Some swamp gas sniffers think a UFO must be between 2 miles wide and 8 feet wide....When I guess it would be possible for alien spacecraft to be the size of a grain of sand, capable of holding thousands of aliens which could be setting up bases under the patio table.
They are not all as small as skeets. I’m going after the ones the size of a backpack.
By the way you can go online and get the instructions to build a small EMP gun that will disable these drones. I would say that might be the answer to the skeet sized ones.
Hmmm. This could be a useful tool for us. Let’s see, what do we want to know or get a photo of?
They already do. The AR Drone can be controlled by an Android smartphone or programmed with a path using GPS and has a HD video and still camera. It is pretty cool and the best part is they run about $300.
I've been tempted to get one myself.
Curious how these are controlled - I assume by radio.
Wonder if a simple spark generator could spew out enough wide band rf interference to render them control-less.
You might want to research Bit-Coin. The attempt has started and the FBI is spooked.
Think I’ll cover my entire metal roof with magnetic paint in anticipation of drone fly-bys.
Then I’ll just have to go up there once a month to scrape them off.
Ok, so you detonate the emp device and deactivate the ones in your backyard at 9:00am. What about the ones that fly in at 10:00am? And 11:00am? Do you just periodically activate the emp device? What about your own electronics. And your neighbors. What would the power company say about your doing this?
What stops the drone makers from hardening the little buggers against EMP? Then what?
How do you stop the undetected ones in public places? Like the store, the gas station, while you’re picking up dog food at the co-op?
The backpack ones won’t look like drones either. They will (and most likely already do, in fact) look like birds of some sort. Are blackbirds and crows going to be endangered species?
What happens when the crazy sex offender over the hill gets these? Or the gang bangers scoping for good houses to hit? Intel from these won’t be limited to the official government orgs. The gang bangers could use the smaller ones to deliver explosives or just knockout gas.
For an exercise, go read smokinggun sometimes. Then imagine all these people had drones. And that’s just the plain old crazies. Wait till the Zetas get them. And the crips and bloods. And MS-13.
And there are plenty of elites who would LOVE (Bill Gates, i’m talking about you!) to eliminate about half of the humans currently alive. Easily done with this tech. Anonymously too.
This tech will change human relations in a way that’s never happened. This is even bigger than using black powder to hurl objects over the next hill. That was hardly anonymous.
You won’t have any idea who or what is happening on your own property. Or even in your own home.
Not sure about those STINK BUGS. Does anyone ever remember such a huge infestation of these critters in the past? It’s not as if they’re 14-yr locusts.
Oh, and about those locusts;)
A lot of truth there.
You know there are the extreme wealthy in lofty places, who'd love to eliminate most of the worlds population.
They no doubt they see most people in modern day planet earth as a burden, who use way too many resources, are difficult to control and are a direct threat to those living in those lofty places.
They would love to see the carbon footprint dramatically reduced. And since they've looted most things like Social Security etc, it would be much easier to deal with when just a few unwashed peons take to the streets.
“Also appearing in science fiction is digital money which cannot be traced, cannot be taxed.”
It is not science fiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
For all the gun control rhetoric going around these days, these make guns completely obsolete. In pretty much all ways. No more anonymously picking off old steve up the road (with a gun) because you just plain don’t like him. That would involve going somewhere near old steve and plugging him yourself. You could just program his facial recognition information into a ‘hit man’ drone and wait.
He will have few defenses against this attack.
Likewise, if the elites want to take you out with this tech, your own guns will be useless. Do you plan to shoot every bird or mosquito cloud on your property?
Who needs billions of dollars worth of weaponry if you can have these?
Conversely, I am sure that there will be a low-tech means devised to defeat these flying robots.
Listen to your mother.
Don’t kill the lizards.
Lizards are your friends.
Perfect assassin.
I wonder what the birds are going to think of these little drones ? I can just see birds and bats knocking these things out of the sky. Time to get a falcon-lol.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.