Posted on 09/01/2016 9:57:26 AM PDT by Impala64ssa
"It came over my airspace, 25 or 30 feet above my trees, and hovered for a second. I blasted it to smithereens."
A woman in Virginia shot down a drone flying near her property in June of this year. It's at least the third time this has happened in the U.S., with previous incidents in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Originally reported in the local Fauquier Times and subsequently covered by Ars Technica, the shooter was Jennifer Youngman, a neighbor to actor and director Robert Duvall. She had been cleaning her shotguns on the porch when two men stopped on a nearby road and started flying a drone around the general vicinity. Youngman left the drone alone while it flew around nearby fields, but prepared to take it down and ultimately did when it flew over her land.
As she told Ars Technica:
I loaded my shotgun and took the safety off, and this thing came flying over my trees. I don't know if they lost command or if they didn't have good command, but the wind had picked up. It came over my airspace, 25 or 30 feet above my trees, and hovered for a second. I blasted it to smithereens.
Shooting down drones is a bit of a legal gray area in the United States at the moment. Opponents point out that, according to FAA classifications, drones are technical aircraft and interfering with the flight of one is a federal crime. So far no shooters have been prosecuted on the federal level. In fact other drone shooters, like William Merideth, have ultimately been cleared of all charges, though the owner of that drone is still pursuing a civil suit for $1,500 in damages.
To her credit, Youngman told Ars Technica that she went about shooting down the drone with 7.5 birdshot, which is both the most effective way to take a drone out of the sky, but also ensures that the projectiles won't do any harm on the way down. The drone, however, still can. Youngman said the crash left "two punctures in [her] lawn tractor."
The best way to avoid that might be to not shoot down the thing down in the first place.
I hope you're not saying we just have to deal with it. If a pilot of an airplane was flying that low he would be fined or prosecuted. If a person is flying a drone at head level in your backyard and taking pictures are you saying there's nothing you can do about it because it's an FAA registered drone and they own the airspace??
“You can’t invade someone’s privacy by looking at something that’s clearly visible from another property. It wasn’t private to begin with.”
The reasonable expectation of privacy is already protected in law. This can even include persons visible through open windows from outside the property line, but I suspect that you’d need to prove intent. A telescope aimed at a window could convince a jury.
Drones photographing private property that is otherwise not visible from the outside are undoubtedly going to get drawn into the argument of what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy and what is a criminal invasion of that right.
“Drones photographing private property that is otherwise not visible from the outside”
...is also visible on Google Earth.
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