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FBI Surveilling U.S. With Drones
- Uhhrrr 13y agoThis is a little creepy and Skynet-ish, but compared to the massive CF that is NSA's unconstitutional, invasive, pile of private information, it's just a distraction. It's no different than when the police fly over your house in a helicopter and look down. EDIT: I should have said "no different, legally, than when". This does allow surveillance on a greater scale, and maybe that will change people's feelings about it. But the information asymmetry isn't as great as it is with NSA. Ordinary citizens are allowed to fly drones, so why not the FBI?
- CapitalistCartr 13y agoIt is massively different. All of the ways in which technology changes law enforcement have the same problem. The primary protector of our liberties has been economics: the government couldn't afford to follow many of us. If we weren't mostly law-abiding citizens, LE would be easily overwhelmed. But technology changes all that. Putting a helicopter in the air with a police pilot is a huge expense. Putting a thousand drones in the air is cheaper. And the benefit doesn't stop there. Computers can correlate data, follow individuals, listen in, eliminating the need for an army of support people. A few agents at their desks can lay out the overall plan, and software can implement "Big Brother". But wait, there's more. As tech makes us wealthier, it also makes our government wealthier, while lowering the cost of drones, bandwidth, servers, software, etc. So in a decade, we could have perhaps ten thousand drones instead of one thousand. How long drones pick up cell phone transmissions for better tracking? After all, its publicly broadcast data.
- discostrings 13y ago> It's no different than when the police fly over your house in a helicopter and look down. It's at least an order of magnitude cheaper and easier to do. Thus, it will be much more prevalent. It's like looking at how many people have printers at home when there are $50 inkjets out there compared to a world where the least expensive printer was $3500. And in which the consumables for the $50 inkjet were also less than 1/10 the price. EDIT: I'm referring to the near future, not the present. Currently, drones are still quite expensive. It's like a time when inkjet printers were just developed, and only 100 were produced. Once production ramps up and the technology is refined, the price plummets.
- jm4 13y agoI saw you make this argument elsewhere in the thread. Do you have a source? I would expect the opposite to be true- at least until drones become more prevalent. There is a lot more that goes into these systems than a model-sized self flying aircraft. On a somewhat related note, there was a recent AMA on reddit from a drone pilot: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ghkm7/iama_drone_sensor_operator_i_have_flown_hundreds/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ghkm7/iama_drone_sens...
- discostrings 13y agoI guess I got a little ahead of myself. In my comment, I was referring more to the near future than to the present. I think you're correct--until this becomes common and has undergone a few rounds of revisions, the numbers I gave are not in line with the current situation. I still maintain the numbers as a likely reality in the near future. Once drones become common, they will be much cheaper than helicopters. If there are facts I'm missing in that assessment, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for sharing the AMA--checking it out now!
- alan_cx 13y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLiZxjQrVg&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLiZxjQrVg&feature=player_em... No, that kid isnt me!!! But note the age. Detail here: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1335765 http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1335765 More here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DHoLYf5pMA&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DHoLYf5pMA&feature=related A sample of easily available code here: https://code.google.com/p/simple-flight-controller/ https://code.google.com/p/simple-flight-controller/ Larger versions available. For some in to RC models, these things are trivial to build. Adding cameras is old hat nowadays. Only problem I see is long range control. But that might just be my lack of knowledge
- adventured 13y agoExcept for at least one major thing: ARGUS http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-free-speech-national-security/drone-nightmare-scenario-now-has-physical http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-free-speech-... You can't reasonably do that with manned helicopters, it'd be wildly impractical. UAVs however are ideal for it. Particularly smaller, lighter, UAV helicopters that can hover in a zone for extreme periods of time recording everything in very high resolution. And over the next decade or two the technology will advance radically, enabling 24/7, simultaneous (the UAVs working in a grid tandem) surveillance at high resolution over all areas of every metro. It's not a question of if this will happen, but how soon.
- motters 13y agoCompared to surveillance of the internet and phone calls drones don't pose much of a threat to privacy. It's technically difficult to recognise people from aerial photos, although when combined with mobile phone geolocations and unlimited access to personal metadata that would be possible. There are also entirely legitimate kinds of drone surveillance, such as land surveys, detecting diseases amongst crops, monitoring livestock or shipping or general environmental monitoring (temperature, atmospheric gasses, etc).
- ldh 13y agoMaybe it's technically difficult now, but what happens when that technology inevitably improves? Once this becomes acceptable, what next? The "abuse of power" knob only ever seems to get turned in one direction.
- epoxyhockey 13y agoJust some anecdotal evidence, but drones surveilling citizens seems to resonate more with the 65+ aged members of society than does the recording of all internet & phone traffic. Moments later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) said drones were a huge privacy threat to Americans. Yet, regarding NSA activities, Feinstein said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-d...)
- ChuckMcM 13y agoPlaying to the Californian voters who are currently pestering local law enforcement trying to acquire and deploy drones no doubt.
- charonn0 13y agoI don't understand your statement... is she playing to CA citizens who want the drones or who are against the drones?
- ihsw 13y agoThe statement is indeed ambiguous, however CA citizens are pestering local law enforcement regardless of their intent (be it for or against). The amount of people fearing 'illegals' is certainly not small, however the amount of people fearing overzealous police departments is also not small.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoNot much of a surprise, although calling your low level agents "drones" is bad management :-) More seriously though, the FBI and police have, since the 60's, had helicopters which they use for surveillance and initial investigation. When my father-in-law stayed at our apartment in LA he said he felt like he was back in Viet Nam (there had apparently been a convenience store hold up that evening with the suspects fleeing on foot). So having aerial things flying around and looking during an investigation is going to be pretty much a non-issue to most Americans I suspect. The DHS gigapixel camera in the sky ARGUS [1] was a bit creepier for me. [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/06/argus_is_could_the_pentagon_s_1_8_gigapixel_drone_camera_be_used_for_domestic.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/06/argus_is_...
- discostrings 13y agoThe real issue is scale--it costs a lot of money to put a helicopter in the air, and that's a good thing because it ensures restraint in use. Maybe Americans won't notice that aspect and assent to this sort of thing because it's "just like what's already going on". But if so, they'll be missing that due to the economics, it'll be a totally different ball game.
- jm4 13y agoI would imagine the helicopter costs less than the drone.
- temp453463343 13y agoThat's not a great rational to not use drones. You're throwing away tons of money maintaining helicopters that you don't need most of the time because it's too hard to regulate the use of drones? That's like forcing police officers to only use 18th century muskets so they don't shoot too much
- scarecrowbob 13y agoWell, in the US tasers proliferated, and so has taser use.... the weapon's "cost of use" is much smaller than a firearm so it gets used much more casually as a compliance tool rather than as a last ditch tool to keep officers safe.
- mtgx 13y agoI have a feeling over the next 2-3 decades, there will be a ton of revolutions in most countries, because governments will keep wanting to create total surveillance states, and eventually many people will get fed up with it, but it will be too hard to fight from the beginning, and it will just turn into revolutions later on.
- forgotAgain 13y agoThis smells like an attempt to get the story out before it became public via a leak. From here on out politicians can treat it as old news.
- fudged71 13y agoI've heard that some police forces in Canada have been using small helicopters for emergencies and SWAT-type situations. I don't think that counts as surveillance, though.
- asynchronous13 13y agoI work in the field of unmanned aircraft. I'm always amazed by the enormous disconnect between public perception and what I see going on inside the industry. I've talked directly to members of several police departments about why they want unmanned aircraft. In Brevard county FL, for example, they want infrared cameras to help find patients with Alzheimer's disease that have wandered away from home. Several police departments want a cheap way to take aerial photographs of accident scenes so they can move wreckage and debris off the roads faster and keep traffic flowing. In general, it's for surprisingly mundane tasks. I happen to live in Colorado, and I'd love to use our products to help with forest fires, but the FAA won't let us. Of course, any tool can be abused. It seems like that's the primary fear that people have with this new technology.
- ferdo 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil "Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal."
- scott_s 13y agoThat quote has to do with the authorities presenting bad things as good things. In order to apply it, you must first establish that what is being presented is bad. If you agree that what is being presented is good, then this quote does not apply. Instead, then, we have to have a discussion about what policies need to be in place to prevent the things that we agree are, in fact, bad.
- ferdo 13y agoThe quote has to do with the fact that most people engaging in evil don't even think about it. When a State says, "These are the bad guys. Go get them.", there's a sizable percentage of the population that can rationalize away the evil committed by "The Mission" because for whatever reason, they either lack the ability to reflect on what they're doing or they choose not to reflect on what they're doing. "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." -Hannah Arendt
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ianstallings 13y agoMy main concern is integration with existing manned aircraft and the dangers associated with that. Just the other day the news broke about a close call in Afghanistan between a passenger jet and a German Luna UAV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NOar22TX2k http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NOar... The privacy issues have been the same issues brought up about manned aircraft surveillance. IMHO it's just a larger hill to mount a camera on. They could just as easily sit outside and watch you, or in a helicopter, or via remote sensors, or using one of the millions of cameras that watch us everyday. It's a much broader issue than just "should they use drones".
- llamataboot 13y agoOf course, presumably it can work the other way as well. I look forward to small private copwatch organizations that can keep a camera on police interactions with the public through small UAVs. The threat of ubiquitous surveillance through camera phones and drones has the potential to radically change policing tactics in the US and curb brutality.
- clubhi 13y agoIs anyone bothered that the government misuses a term meta data? They are collecting data about us. They aren't collecting information about our schema.