On the front page of the Los Angeles Times this weekend was a story about local police calling in military drones -- in this case, the Predator B -- to help apprehend civilians. Mark my words, this is just the beginning. Drones are simply too effective, too cost efficient, for police, firefighters, and even the private sector to ignore. Imagine what drones would do for the lucrative paparazzi industry, for instance, especially coupled with commercially available facial recognition technology.
So why isn't the sky already filled with drones? The Federal Aviation Administration has for years restricted the use of unmanned aerial systems absent a waiver. A few folks in the public sector have sought them. (The state of Oklahoma sought a blanket waiver of the drone ban for eighty miles of airspace.) Going forward, however, waiver may not be necessary: The FAA faces increasing pressure to relax its restrictions and is considering rulemaking to reexamine drone use in domestic airspace.
Although the FAA's rules stand in the way of many uses of drones, United States privacy law does not. There is very little in our Constitution, statutes, or case law that would prohibit the use of drones for surveillance within our borders. Citizens do not generally enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, nor even in the portions of their property visible from a public vantage.
If anything, observations by drones may occasion less scrutiny than manned aerial vehicles. Several prominent cases, and a significant body of scholarship, reflect the view that no privacy violation has occurred unless and until a human observes a person, object, or attribute. Just as a dog might sniff packages and alert an officer only in the presence of contraband, so might a drone scan for various chemicals or heat signatures and alert an officer only upon spotting the telltale signs of drug production.
It may be tempting to conclude on this basis that drones will further erode our individual and collective privacy. Yet the opposite may happen. Drones may help restore our picture of a privacy violation. They could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the 21st century.
Technology has been changing at a rapid pace; privacy law has not. We are still using a statute from 1986 to govern the circumstances under which law enforcement can intercept or access electronic communications. Computers, the Internet, RFID, GPS, biometrics, facial recognition -- none of these developments has created the same sea change in privacy thinking.
One contributing factor here may be the impossibility of visualizing privacy violations in the modern age. What does a privacy violation even look like? Maybe somewhere, in some distant server farm, the government correlates two pieces of disparate information. Maybe one online advertiser you have never heard of merges with another to share email lists. At most one can picture the occasional harmful outcome; its mechanism remains obscure. This lack of a mental model for contemporary privacy harm makes it hard to inspire judges or spur legislative action.
The introduction of government and private drones into our cities will feel very different to the public and perhaps to the courts. What data there is suggests that Americans are nervous around robots. They may associate drones in particular with violence and the theater of war. The proliferation of drones in our skies could lead to a privacy moment, all of our amorphous fears about new technology watching us suddenly corporeal and immediate.
It is for this reason that I believe drones could end up being good for privacy law. The backlash against their use could unravel long-standing doctrinal presumptions against privacy in public, supporting a mosaic theory of privacy such as that on appeal to the Supreme Court from the D.C. Circuit in United States v. Jones. Moreover, it could cut against the argument that people have no privacy interest in contraband or that there has been no privacy violation as long as a person does not see anything s/he should not. These would become itchy-shirt arguments, no longer feeling quite right.
To read more about drones, check out The Drone as Privacy Catalyst by M. Ryan Calo, on the Stanford Law Review Online.
Follow Ryan Calo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rcalo
How is this supposed to help our "Privacy"?
These Dirty Programs have wasted Billions, and should have never exsisted inside "The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave."
Our Nation was built on Principles, and Values far better than this Disgusting Out of Control Spying, and Invasion of our Rights!
To: Liberty.
Yeah but, haven't you heard, we ARE at war, we are all terrorist suspects now. And, some of them don't pay parking tickets. This is a war that will never end, by design.
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home." -James Madison
It would be more straightforward to deal with drones by replacing existing FAA regulations with stand alone legislation placing strict limits on the use of drones.
Too bad the political machinery has been co-opted and is no longer responsive to the mass constituency it supposedly represents.
Law enforcement doesn't have a great record when using dogs trained to find contraband:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__journal_of_law_and_liberty/documents/documents/ecm_pro_060918.pdf
We appear to have gotten a government that is obsessed about protection without addressing why they might need protection from someone and resolving the problem.
We have the 9-11 issue of terrorism without addressing why persons are willing to kill themselves as suicide bombers to make a point about American foreign policy. For bin Laden, it was that we infidels have military bases in Saudi Arabia, a nation sacred to Islam. Our presence there is as much an affront to their faith as Voodoo would be to Catholics if it occupied the Vatican.
America built schools in other nations, promoted literacy rates higher than our own and made a name as those that would give of themselves to make everyone else our equal. That is how you prevent terrorism
Back to privacy and the right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizure of your property.
If you let drones patrol the skies over your life, you can be certain something questionable will be found in your conduct, it is what the operators are expected to do in their day to justify their paycheck.
You don't have to accept this.
As one of our Founding Fathers said;
Those that would give up their freedom in exchange for their security deserve neither.
1984 has come with a vengeance. and we didn't notice.
If your are out in public, you are observed and identified. get used to it.
If you are at an intersection with a thermal globe above you get used to it.
If you walk in a Store such as Walmart with thermal globes every twenty feet above you get used to it.
Our Founding Fathers Threw a Revolution over to high a tax on Tea.
"We the Sheep" are allowing our hard earned tax dollars to be squandered to Trash our very Constitution, and Rights to Privacy.
Get used to it!
the Boston Tea Party was NOT against government and taxation. It was against big business and money as free speech buying government influence.
"The directors of the company attempted to avert bankruptcy by appealing to Parliament for financial help. This led to the passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which gave the Company greater autonomy in running its trade in America, and allowed it an exemption from the tea tax which its colonial competitors were required to pay. ...The arrival of tax-exempt Company tea, undercutting the local merchants, triggered the Boston Tea Party in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, one of the major events leading up to the American Revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
Already news agencies have helicopters. It's only natural they'll want drones. Throw a high def camera into the mix and even some paparazzi will want them.
The Sky's are already filled with Spy Drones Disguised as Phony Airliners, and smaller private aircrafts, all of which have the Highest Thermal Imaging Camera's, and Laser Listening , and are watching "We the People" inside what we "Sheep" believe to be the "Privacy" of our very American Homes.
I have years of video of these Disgusting Drones, and yes they work in conjunction with the dirty Helicopters.
In a country where the lines between governments and corporations are already pretty much non-existent, why let the camel further into the tent?