9 ms·

EFF Demands Answers About Predator Drone Flights in the U.S.

80 points by ari_elle 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago
And none of the 2 candidates will accept discussing this, which means most of the people will be unaware of it.
- venus 14y ago
  "It's not red vs. blue, it's purple vs. you"
  - cynoclast 14y ago
    The choice between Democrat and Republican is not freedom, it is a box to contain you.
_djo_ 14y ago
I still think that by focusing on drones as a unique form of surveillance the focus is being diverted. In concept there's no difference between a police department flying a helicopter with an electro-optical surveillance turret and it flying a UAV equipped with the same. Why is one ok but the other not? It can't be about UAVs flying higher up so they can't be seen or heard, as helicopters are becoming quieter and sensors better so that they can view scenes from much further away without being heard either. Similarly there are vehicle-mounted optronics masts available to police departments that can capture video footage of areas kilometres away. I know of an arrest and successful prosecution that happened recently in South Africa that relied on video of a crime that was captured by one of these vehicles 3.5 km from the scene. The real issue here is persistent video (mostly aerial) surveillance, something which has theoretically been possible with police helicopters until now but has not been done because the logistics make it impossible. That will not necessarily remain true forever. Fact is UAVs will be used by police departments under the same authorisation and rules that make it legal to use helicopters, purely because the cost and flexibility will be irresistible, so trying to ban the domestic use of UAVs is doomed to fail. Instead, there should be public pressure to strongly regulate how, when and where police departments can collect video and what they're allowed to do with it. That will have the benefit of not only restricting what police UAVs can do but also police helicopters and vehicle-mounted optronics masts.
- ari_elle 14y ago
  +1 There should be clear regulations and the public should know what exactly is being done. That is what the EFF basically wants. Other than that i think that using Drones for such purposes also can proof a good testing process. You don't want to loose a drone over Iran, test it here under real circumstances.
- wladimir 14y ago
  I kind of agree. Personally I have no problems with drones being used where police helicopters are now. It's cheaper, safer, and probably more effective too. However, and this is a big issue, drones are thus cheap making it possible to use them much more than police helicopters are now. It's just hardware, you can buy a lot of it. I dread thinking about a future where drones will be swarming everywhere, collecting information aspecifically, to collect and process and find every tiny violation, obliterating any sense of privacy. I agree that's not a technology problem. And regulating technology won't solve it. But it should not be ignored either. Advancing technology does open a lot of debates about what we want life to be really like. A much-heard argument against a 1984-like scenario in the 80's used to be "it's too expensive". It isn't anymore. And drones are only a small part of that.
  - _djo_ 14y ago
    Agreed. As I said I think the problem is one of persistent surveillance. This is only going to get worse as technology develops and it becomes possible for governments and police departments to deploy hundreds or thousands of insect-sized drones through our cities. That's why I think focusing on drones obscures the real issue and makes it more difficult to have the serious and very necessary debate about whether we want to live in societies where the state is able to track you persistently in any public space. We already have the beginnings of something similar in cities like London, where thousands of CCTV cameras are every bit as invasive of our privacy as a police drone flying overhead would be. In other words this battle against the police use of drones like the Predator could be 'won' and it would probably not make any difference to the police's ability to track you with video and audio surveillance.
BUGHUNTER 14y ago
Programmers should just obey! Do not think about the orders you get! Are you a good patriot or are you against us?!? Do not criticize your leaders! OBEY! Build a startup, try to get rich, and never ever talk about anything serious!
- _djo_ 14y ago
  What's that all about? The fact that this story has been voted so far up the front page indicates that HN's readers believe it's a serious issue worth reading about and discussing.
  - wladimir 14y ago
    He's not trying to illustrate what HN readers think, but the mindset of people that try to use technology for purposes of control. Either by having programmers build software for surveillance tech, or by making them build backdoors into other software making surveillance possible. Even though we (collectively, as technologists) make this all possible, we hardly have a say how it will be used, even against ourselves.
    - _djo_ 14y ago
      That's what I thought he was talking about until I got to his second paragraph, which seems HN-specific.
      - cynoclast 14y ago
        It isn't HN-specific. It is about how we all individually see the problem, but do nothing about. It is a choice. Be a cog in the machine that makes your life livable, but makes everyone's just a little bit worse by doing so instead of trying to change the system. A single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood. If we all, just the technologists all got together and said, hey, quit it with that war shit and refused to make new or maintain old war making machines, war would end almost immediately. But the system has made the consequences of an individual or a minority doing that disastrously bad for them if they do it alone. It is a cage of fear. Legitimate fear. Fear of what would happen if we end up standing alone in our rebellion. But we don't. We read HN and talk about making money. And that economic output, that money will be used against us to make things worse for everybody but the plutocracy that controls the political duopoly.
ck2 14y ago
They already said they are just going to put commercial airtraffic beacons on the drones. Of course then certain law enforcement types who feel they are above any law (ie. most of them) will disconnect or disable them. After they accidentally kill people it will be written off as the cost of enforcing the law, ala the nightmare of the TSA which everyone seems to put up with for some unknown reason. Remember this phrase in a few years "drones, oh well what can you do, fact of life, they make me feel safer". BTW, federal courts have already said it's legal for cops to put cameras on your property without a warrant, so a drone is just an extension of that. Hopefully the video on the drones won't go accidentally missing after they raid the wrong home and kill your dog while they arrest you for resisting arrest.
- fartjetpack 14y ago
  This type of fear mongering is crazy.
- _djo_ 14y ago
  The FAA will never allow police departments to fly these things without air traffic transponders like ADS-B. Saying that the police will disconnect or disable them is a red herring. Again, how is a drone functionally different for law enforcement purposes to a helicopter with a surveillance turret? All the points you've made apply just as much to the latter platform as to the former.
  - ck2 14y ago
    The resource cost and limited availability for a helicopter ensures proper use. Drones will have no such natural restrictions - there will be dozens per city. Ever notice what happens when you give cops a tool - say for example a taser or pepper spray? It immediately gets put on the front line, used constantly to escalate things. To assume drones won't be abused is just willful ignorance.
    - _djo_ 14y ago
      The resource cost and limited availability constraints for helicopters that apply now will not necessarily apply in future, which means that the surveillance they provide will become far more persistent. I am not assuming drones won't be abused, in fact I assume they will be. See my other comments on this post for my views on the undesirability of persistent police surveillance. But as I pointed out with my reference to vehicle-mounted optronic masts, that surveillance will happen with or without drones, so the focus should be on the surveillance and not on the drones. As an aside, you failed to back up the claim that the 'commercial air traffic beacons' would be disabled.
cafard 14y ago
Doesn't "Predator" suggest "armed"? Not that surveillance shouldn't be kept within very strict limits.
- _djo_ 14y ago
  No. The Predator as first designed was an unarmed reconnaissance UAV and it did not carry weapons when it entered service in 1995. It was modified to carry and fire Hellfire missiles in 2001 and first flew with them operationally over Afghanistan late that year. The 'Predator' moniker likely referred to the UAV's role in hunting down targets through surveillance, especially as there was no intention to develop an armed version when it first entered service. That need only arose after the US's experience in the Balkans in the late '90s.
dguido 14y ago
Why are predator drone flights on the agenda for the EFF? I thought they were about "your right's online"? Did they stop working on those issues? Problem solved, let's move on to drone flights? If I cared about these issues, I would donate my money to someone else. If I care about my right's online, now I'm not sure who is supporting them because it doesn't seem to be the EFF...
- JakeSc 14y ago
  I think you're being downvoted because people disagree with you. The EFF, being the Electronic Frontier Foundation, aims "increase popular understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by developments in computing and telecommunications." [1] The issue of drone flights and privacy absolutely relates to the mission of the EFF. [1] See the EFF mission statement at: http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/?f=eff_creation.html http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/?f=eff_creation.html
  - GHFigs 14y ago
    It's much easier to understand the EFF if you recognize them as a libertarian organization at heart.
cynoclast 14y ago
I know this is childish, but all I can think about it is, how if we slide much further into tyranny how fun it is going to be to shoot down everybody's unmanned drones in defense of freedom.
thwest 14y ago
Anyone tried to find themselves in the publicly available UAV surveillance data? https://www.sdms.afrl.af.mil/index.php?collection=csuav https://www.sdms.afrl.af.mil/index.php?collection=csuav
goatforce5 14y ago
Floating speed/red light cameras in the sky!
abecedarius 14y ago
I keep reading of lawsuits over FOIA requests; has it become a norm to ignore the requests until someone shows they really mean it? Has anyone faced significant consequences for stalling?

80 points by ari_elle 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago

And none of the 2 candidates will accept discussing this, which means most of the people will be unaware of it.

venus 14y ago
"It's not red vs. blue, it's purple vs. you"
- cynoclast 14y ago
  The choice between Democrat and Republican is not freedom, it is a box to contain you.

_djo_ 14y ago

I still think that by focusing on drones as a unique form of surveillance the focus is being diverted. In concept there's no difference between a police department flying a helicopter with an electro-optical surveillance turret and it flying a UAV equipped with the same. Why is one ok but the other not? It can't be about UAVs flying higher up so they can't be seen or heard, as helicopters are becoming quieter and sensors better so that they can view scenes from much further away without being heard either. Similarly there are vehicle-mounted optronics masts available to police departments that can capture video footage of areas kilometres away. I know of an arrest and successful prosecution that happened recently in South Africa that relied on video of a crime that was captured by one of these vehicles 3.5 km from the scene. The real issue here is persistent video (mostly aerial) surveillance, something which has theoretically been possible with police helicopters until now but has not been done because the logistics make it impossible. That will not necessarily remain true forever. Fact is UAVs will be used by police departments under the same authorisation and rules that make it legal to use helicopters, purely because the cost and flexibility will be irresistible, so trying to ban the domestic use of UAVs is doomed to fail. Instead, there should be public pressure to strongly regulate how, when and where police departments can collect video and what they're allowed to do with it. That will have the benefit of not only restricting what police UAVs can do but also police helicopters and vehicle-mounted optronics masts.

ari_elle 14y ago
+1 There should be clear regulations and the public should know what exactly is being done. That is what the EFF basically wants. Other than that i think that using Drones for such purposes also can proof a good testing process. You don't want to loose a drone over Iran, test it here under real circumstances.
wladimir 14y ago
I kind of agree. Personally I have no problems with drones being used where police helicopters are now. It's cheaper, safer, and probably more effective too. However, and this is a big issue, drones are thus cheap making it possible to use them much more than police helicopters are now. It's just hardware, you can buy a lot of it. I dread thinking about a future where drones will be swarming everywhere, collecting information aspecifically, to collect and process and find every tiny violation, obliterating any sense of privacy. I agree that's not a technology problem. And regulating technology won't solve it. But it should not be ignored either. Advancing technology does open a lot of debates about what we want life to be really like. A much-heard argument against a 1984-like scenario in the 80's used to be "it's too expensive". It isn't anymore. And drones are only a small part of that.
- _djo_ 14y ago
  Agreed. As I said I think the problem is one of persistent surveillance. This is only going to get worse as technology develops and it becomes possible for governments and police departments to deploy hundreds or thousands of insect-sized drones through our cities. That's why I think focusing on drones obscures the real issue and makes it more difficult to have the serious and very necessary debate about whether we want to live in societies where the state is able to track you persistently in any public space. We already have the beginnings of something similar in cities like London, where thousands of CCTV cameras are every bit as invasive of our privacy as a police drone flying overhead would be. In other words this battle against the police use of drones like the Predator could be 'won' and it would probably not make any difference to the police's ability to track you with video and audio surveillance.

BUGHUNTER 14y ago

Programmers should just obey! Do not think about the orders you get! Are you a good patriot or are you against us?!? Do not criticize your leaders! OBEY! Build a startup, try to get rich, and never ever talk about anything serious!

_djo_ 14y ago
What's that all about? The fact that this story has been voted so far up the front page indicates that HN's readers believe it's a serious issue worth reading about and discussing.
- wladimir 14y ago
  He's not trying to illustrate what HN readers think, but the mindset of people that try to use technology for purposes of control. Either by having programmers build software for surveillance tech, or by making them build backdoors into other software making surveillance possible. Even though we (collectively, as technologists) make this all possible, we hardly have a say how it will be used, even against ourselves.
  - _djo_ 14y ago
    That's what I thought he was talking about until I got to his second paragraph, which seems HN-specific.
    - cynoclast 14y ago
      It isn't HN-specific. It is about how we all individually see the problem, but do nothing about. It is a choice. Be a cog in the machine that makes your life livable, but makes everyone's just a little bit worse by doing so instead of trying to change the system. A single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood. If we all, just the technologists all got together and said, hey, quit it with that war shit and refused to make new or maintain old war making machines, war would end almost immediately. But the system has made the consequences of an individual or a minority doing that disastrously bad for them if they do it alone. It is a cage of fear. Legitimate fear. Fear of what would happen if we end up standing alone in our rebellion. But we don't. We read HN and talk about making money. And that economic output, that money will be used against us to make things worse for everybody but the plutocracy that controls the political duopoly.

ck2 14y ago

They already said they are just going to put commercial airtraffic beacons on the drones. Of course then certain law enforcement types who feel they are above any law (ie. most of them) will disconnect or disable them. After they accidentally kill people it will be written off as the cost of enforcing the law, ala the nightmare of the TSA which everyone seems to put up with for some unknown reason. Remember this phrase in a few years "drones, oh well what can you do, fact of life, they make me feel safer". BTW, federal courts have already said it's legal for cops to put cameras on your property without a warrant, so a drone is just an extension of that. Hopefully the video on the drones won't go accidentally missing after they raid the wrong home and kill your dog while they arrest you for resisting arrest.

fartjetpack 14y ago
This type of fear mongering is crazy.
_djo_ 14y ago
The FAA will never allow police departments to fly these things without air traffic transponders like ADS-B. Saying that the police will disconnect or disable them is a red herring. Again, how is a drone functionally different for law enforcement purposes to a helicopter with a surveillance turret? All the points you've made apply just as much to the latter platform as to the former.
- ck2 14y ago
  The resource cost and limited availability for a helicopter ensures proper use. Drones will have no such natural restrictions - there will be dozens per city. Ever notice what happens when you give cops a tool - say for example a taser or pepper spray? It immediately gets put on the front line, used constantly to escalate things. To assume drones won't be abused is just willful ignorance.
  - _djo_ 14y ago
    The resource cost and limited availability constraints for helicopters that apply now will not necessarily apply in future, which means that the surveillance they provide will become far more persistent. I am not assuming drones won't be abused, in fact I assume they will be. See my other comments on this post for my views on the undesirability of persistent police surveillance. But as I pointed out with my reference to vehicle-mounted optronic masts, that surveillance will happen with or without drones, so the focus should be on the surveillance and not on the drones. As an aside, you failed to back up the claim that the 'commercial air traffic beacons' would be disabled.

cafard 14y ago

Doesn't "Predator" suggest "armed"? Not that surveillance shouldn't be kept within very strict limits.

_djo_ 14y ago
No. The Predator as first designed was an unarmed reconnaissance UAV and it did not carry weapons when it entered service in 1995. It was modified to carry and fire Hellfire missiles in 2001 and first flew with them operationally over Afghanistan late that year. The 'Predator' moniker likely referred to the UAV's role in hunting down targets through surveillance, especially as there was no intention to develop an armed version when it first entered service. That need only arose after the US's experience in the Balkans in the late '90s.

dguido 14y ago

Why are predator drone flights on the agenda for the EFF? I thought they were about "your right's online"? Did they stop working on those issues? Problem solved, let's move on to drone flights? If I cared about these issues, I would donate my money to someone else. If I care about my right's online, now I'm not sure who is supporting them because it doesn't seem to be the EFF...

JakeSc 14y ago
I think you're being downvoted because people disagree with you. The EFF, being the Electronic Frontier Foundation, aims "increase popular understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by developments in computing and telecommunications." [1] The issue of drone flights and privacy absolutely relates to the mission of the EFF. [1] See the EFF mission statement at: http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/?f=eff_creation.html http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/?f=eff_creation.html
- GHFigs 14y ago
  It's much easier to understand the EFF if you recognize them as a libertarian organization at heart.

cynoclast 14y ago

I know this is childish, but all I can think about it is, how if we slide much further into tyranny how fun it is going to be to shoot down everybody's unmanned drones in defense of freedom.

thwest 14y ago

Anyone tried to find themselves in the publicly available UAV surveillance data? https://www.sdms.afrl.af.mil/index.php?collection=csuav https://www.sdms.afrl.af.mil/index.php?collection=csuav

goatforce5 14y ago

Floating speed/red light cameras in the sky!

abecedarius 14y ago

I keep reading of lawsuits over FOIA requests; has it become a norm to ignore the requests until someone shows they really mean it? Has anyone faced significant consequences for stalling?