Unmanned aerial vehicles ("UAVs"), often called "drones," are coming to American skies.
In February, President Obama signed a law that requires the Federal Aviation Administration to pave the way for public agencies and, eventually, private companies, to fly drones within the United States.
The proliferation of domestic drones has been preceded by a proliferation of news stories about the technology -- and of some misconceptions regarding what drones are, and how they might be used. A law professor and a professor of electrical engineering, we've identified ten commonly held myths related to the technology and legal framework involved in drones and their use.
Myth #1: A model airplane is a drone.
A drone is an unmanned aircraft that can fly autonomously--that is, without a human in control. By contrast, model airplanes are largely flown within visual line of sight and in the presence of an operator who watches and maintains control of the airplane during flight. That alone is enough to place model airplanes cleanly outside the boundaries of the definition of a "drone."
Myth #2: Drones are no different than street surveillance cameras.
The ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and other organizations have raised concerns over the privacy issues associated with the use of drones. One of the first questions privacy advocates get about UAVs is how they differ from the street cameras many cities already employ. But drones are very different from fixed cameras because, most fundamentally, they fly. Not only can drones monitor public spaces, they can see any area visible from the air. Drones can also be used to follow a suspect from place to place without having to merge multiple video feeds from different fixed cameras. Finally, attitudes toward drones appear to differ than attitudes toward more familiar cameras, creating an opportunity to reexamine privacy law.
Myth #3: Drones can only stay in the air for a short amount of time.
Another common belief about non-military UAVs is that they have a short flight time and range. Many battery-powered UAVs are indeed limited to flight times of well under an hour. However, there is enormous variety in the shapes, sizes, and capabilities of UAVs. Some U.S. military UAVs can stay aloft for many hours at a time and have a range of thousands of miles. Boeing is currently developing the Solar Eagle, a solar-powered UAV that will be able to stay aloft at very high altitudes for five continuous years.
Myth #4: Only the police can use drones.
Much of the attention regarding domestic drones has been concerned with their likely use by law enforcement agencies. But there are many other potential applications as well, including agriculture, surveying, news reporting, and firefighting. And Congress has charged the FAA with developing a plan to integrate many more private drones in the nation's airways by September of 2015. The impact of drones in the United States will be profound -- and will go well beyond law enforcement applications.
Myth #5: Police need a warrant to observe you with a drone flying below 400 feet.
There is a 1989 Supreme Court case, Florida v. Riley, where police flew a helicopter at 400 feet in order to look at a backyard and greenhouse for evidence of marijuana cultivation. The Court found no constitutional privacy violation. Four of nine justices remarked that a helicopter is allowed to fly at 400 feet, adding "We would have a different case if flying at that altitude had been contrary to law or regulation." One justice agreed with the holding but wrote separately, reasoning in part that "there is considerable public use of airspace at altitudes of 400 feet and above." Presumably based on this language, it has been suggested that a warrant is needed to operate a drone for surveillance purposes below 400 feet. But nothing in either the four-justice plurality or one-justice concurrence in Riley -- or any other Supreme Court case -- supports this bright line view.
Myth #6: Police flying a drone to the scene of a crime can only use footage acquired at the crime scene itself.
Another misconception is that police who are flying a drone to a specific location such as a crime scene or emergency cannot use the footage the drones gather on the way to that location. Generally speaking, if an officer has a right to be somewhere -- whether a sidewalk, stairwell, or helicopter -- she can gather whatever evidence she can see, smell, hear, or record. The same is likely true of drones. Of course, it may be a matter of best practice only to record the activities of citizens when necessary. But it is not a constitutional limitation; "incidental" drone surveillance may well be in the cards.
Myth #7: The Supreme Court's January 2012 decision in Jones (the warrantless GPS tracking case) means that police need a warrant to follow your car using a drone.
In the recent case of United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that officers generally need a warrant to follow a vehicle with a GPS device continuously for an extended period of time. A majority of justices (five of nine) expressed a general concern with sustained surveillance by electronic means. Technically, however, the Jones case was decided on a narrower basis: five justices thought that the act of affixing the GPS device to the car was itself a kind of trespass to personal property, thus triggering a Fourth Amendment violation. Drones do not need to be affixed to anything, so the Jones ruling won't necessarily limit how they might be used for surveillance.
Myth #8: Most "drones" used by the U.S. military overseas are armed.
Many of the impressions regarding drones come from media coverage of military UAVs. In particular, UAVs are often described in the press as firing missiles at insurgents or terrorists. It turns out, however, that the overwhelming majority of U.S. military unmanned aircraft are unarmed, and are used to acquire imagery. In many cases, this imagery provides vital information that can help save the lives of American troops on the ground.
Myth #9: It doesn't take any flying skill to operate a U.S. military "drone."
Sometimes you hear the disparaging claim that UAVs, unlike fighter jets, are easy to fly. U.S. military unmanned aircraft such as the Predator are capable of autonomous flight but are piloted by extremely skilled aviators. Thanks to a combination of technology advances, these pilots no longer need to be physically sitting in the airplane. But that doesn't make them any less skilled in most respects than traditional in-the-cockpit pilots. Indeed, many U.S. military unmanned aircraft pilots prefer not to use the term "drone," as it fails to recognize the high levels of skill and extensive training behind real-world flight operations. Instead, they often use terms such as UAV or RPA ("remotely piloted aircraft").
Myth #10: The downsides of drones in U.S. airspace outweigh the benefits.
Like almost any technology, drones can be misused. It's important to put in place appropriate frameworks to ensure that they are operated responsibly. In doing so, however, we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger picture: The domestic use of drones will provide a long list of benefits. They can provide vital, lifesaving imagery in many different scenarios. The drone community, which includes companies, universities, and hobbyists, is merging robotics, sensors, and airframe design in an amazing variety of innovative ways. These innovations, and jobs they create, both now and in the future, can help American competitiveness not only within the drone industry, but also more broadly.
Ryan Calo is currently Director of Privacy and Robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. As of September, he will be a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. John Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
Follow John Villasenor on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johndvillasenor
Follow Ryan Calo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rcalo
Steve Clemons: USAF Drones Trail Civilian Auto Traffic in New Mexico
The most frightening part of this...past the obvious misuse for survailence of the American public, are the statistics on crash rates.
These are DANGEROUS pieces of machinery. And out here in the country, where we have little to protect us from fires, this is a terrifying reality.
Currently we are living with the heavy smoke from a New Mexico fire, hundreds of miles away, of epic proportions (190,000 acres!) ....a fire which could easily have been started here by the crashing of one of these machines. Is this what we want?
This is the most important one, in my opinion. If you jump on your favorite web search engine, you can already see examples of people using helicopter drones to get video coverage of events where the police have blocked them from going. Since the state is obviously going to use drones towards unethical or illegal ends, activists should take advantage of the tech too in order to monitor the police and other government entities. After all, the police have shown no aversion to arresting people with cameras, injuring them, and deleting/destroying their footage. It'll be a lot harder to catch and do the same with a drone.
People talking about shooting one down, that alone shows how out of touch with reality these folks are.
You arent going to hit something at 20,000 feet with a rifle genius!
If you want to fight for your right to privacy, you need to stop worrying about a single platform (the UAV) and fight airborne surveillance as a whole.
Does it matter if youre being spied on from a UAV or a Helicopter? really? How are the two different when the end result is factored in.
Drones are smaller and quieter and, thus, more invasive and insidious. They can get much closer without someone noticing. That's the biggest concern I imagine.
Each one of these has a person sitting behind the controls just like in a real airplane.
Law enforcement is allowed and always has been allowed to fly surveillance missions in helicopters etc.
Nothing has changed except now the taxpayers dont pay as much for the fuel as UAV's get 100 times better fuel savings.
as far as big brother watching, dont be so gullible. He has always been watching.
And how about int'l, lethal use?
These UAV's offer absolutely no erosion of rights that havent already been eroded by manned aircraft.
No matter what situation you point to where a UAV is supposedly violating your rights as an American, you can just replace the word UAV with Manned Helicopter or Airplane.
And then, a debate about existing surveillance might be in order too.
Both systems are doing the exact same thing.
You have nothing to fear from a UAV that you dont already have to fear from a Manned aircraft.
Same surveillance, just a different platform.
And this platform will spy on you for 100 times less the cost of a helicopter.
That's a silly question. There's people in a helicopter would could die from such activity. There are no people in a drone.
I find it highly unlikely that this will have any effect. Iran showed the proper way of combating drones. They jammed the control frequency and spoofed the GPS. At least in the military drones, when the control frequency is jammed or lost, it has a failsafe built in to use GPS to guide it back to base. I can't imagine that wouldn't be there for police units either, as it's a good means of protecting the investment. Thus, theoretically, if the GPS failsafe is there, one could prevent aerial drone surveillance by building a barrier array that broadcast a powerful enough signal on the same frequency used by the drones. It would jam the signal and thus send the drone home.
Once this happens, it's going to be interesting seeing the tests and publications that come out from security enthusiasts looking into drone vulnerabilities.
I have not noticed any discernible methodology used to " identify" these allegedly "commonly held myths"
beside the Strawman Methodology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErEBkj_3PY
We need limits on what information is gathered, where it's gathered, under what circumstances it's gathered, what it's used for, to whom it's available, and how long it's kept -- not on irrelevant details of how it's gathered.
..unless you're a robber baron.
I doubt we will see drones over Norway or Canada anytime soon..