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FBI admits to flying drones over US without warrants

188 points by northwest 13y ago

darkxanthos 13y ago
This doesn't bother me. I get that it's being equivalated to living in a police state but I don't view it that way. Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical. When I'm in public I expect that I don't have privacy. EDIT: typo
- northwest 13y ago
  I didn't downvote you, I can't. But I think, you are seriously wrong. And it's because because you lack to see what all this will enable, abuse-wise. I'm pretty sure you will change your mind once you'll effectively feel the consequences. The thing is, if we, as a society want to advance, we need to reflect more on what is happening.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    I agree with you, except where you say "I'm pretty sure you will change your mind once you'll effectively feel the consequences. " No, actually, he won't. 20 years from now, when things are much worse, he won't complain then either. While what they say about boiling frogs is patently false for frogs (they will jump out), it's completely true for humans.
    - northwest 13y ago
      Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
    - adestefan 13y ago
      Why do you instantly assume that 20 years from now things will be "much worse?" Even though I have no idea what "much worse" would even be.
      - fargolime 13y ago
        Why wouldn't a reasonable person assume that, given the historical trend? The gov't has been steadily implementing the strategies laid out in the book 1984, my whole longish life.
      - DannyBee 13y ago
        Please give me one time in the history of the US where privacy that was lost was later regained?
- noonespecial 13y ago
  I'm going to have to disagree. The possibilty that you might be observed in public is a whole different animal than the probabilty or even certainty that you will. Knowing that someone might be watching is different than being sure that someone is. And that is just where this train is headed. Edit: I'm going to go ahead and urge people not to knee-jerk downvote the parent here. Outside of a certain group of the HN crowd, I find this to be the prevailing opinion. A downvote is just a shout of "you're wrong". We need to start educating people of the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance carried to its logical end.
  - darkxanthos 13y ago
    I appreciate the call to not down vote. I see a larger picture of things getting out of hand surely. The issue I have with drones and being watched all the time is that there are so many laws we all probably break one daily and that opens us to be treated as criminals. I'd rather have fewer laws and perhaps further increase the burden of proof necessary to bring charges.
    - fargolime 13y ago
      If you see the larger picture of where things will be, why not be bothered by movement down that slippery slope?
      - darkxanthos 13y ago
        I try to focus on root causes. There's too much noise and wasted energy otherwise.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    Even more so, the constant fear of being watched changes who you are, how you act and the choices you make, even how you think. That is the whole idea behind the concept of the Panopticon. Just putting cameras that might not even work in places or put those dark glass domes like you see in the stores makes one act and feel different. There is an expectation of how police works with a given set of constraints. It seems like a _quantitative_ difference whether a police car can drive by and see your house or a police car is assigned to follow you vs small drone constantly hovering above your house or a tracking device attached to your car. Legally those are the same but they shouldn't be. The distinction is so dramatic like you put it that it is a _qualitative_ difference between the two cases, not just a matter of degree.
- smokeyj 13y ago
  > I get that it's being equivalted to living in a police state but I don't view it that way Largest prison population, largest military, and the end of the Fourth Amendment. I'm curious, would you support making the Gestapo more efficient at what they do?
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    Parent poster expressed an (unpopular) opinion in a civil way. Your response purely in snark and invoking Godwin (two posts in!) is unwarranted.
    - smokeyj 13y ago
      > Your response purely in snark I listed supporting arguments to the contrary.. > and invoking Godwin (two posts in!) is unwarranted I expressed an unpopular opinion in a civil way, and your response is pure snark. I didn't mean to offend you by saying the G word. Maybe I'll talk about another over-reaching police force. Would that be more palatable for you?
      - potatolicious 13y ago
        > "I listed supporting arguments to the contrary.." Yeah, and those were fine. It's like writing a great refutation and ending it with "but sure, go have tea with Hitler". The snarky "you don't support us so clearly you must support [insert evil thing]" undermines a valid point made, and verges on ad hominem. The parallels of the ubiquitous American surveillance state certainly have shades of the Stasi or the Gestapo, but the insinuation that OP must, by virtue of his disagreement with you, support the extreme end of this institution, is unjustified. He stated his opinion with civility, the accusatory, with-us-or-with-pure-evil angle is unwarranted and cheapens the discourse.
        smokeyj 13y ago
        > but the insinuation that OP must, by virtue of his disagreement with you, support the extreme end of this institution, is unjustified OP States: Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical. I'm not insinuating anything. I'm simply questioning OP about his self-proclaimed principles in an obviously Socratic method. The only thing I'm accusing OP of is being ignorant of principled reasoning.
- w4 13y ago
  I'd be inclined to agree if this were limited to public spaces only. But here's the issue: aerial surveillance isn't limited to public areas only. If I'm surveilling a public park aerially I'm also necessarily surveilling the houses next to it. If I have to get a warrant to perform that survellance then good enough. The warrant will limit the surveillance. No warrant? Now it drifts into that surveillance state place. A police officer on patrol can't police private property without trespassing; the houses bordering the park likely have privacy fences, foliage coverage, etc. to prevent their owners from being watched (by a anyone, not just police) on their pool deck or wherever. Drones (and planes) see right over those, and without warrants they're quite likely to result in privacy violations.
- orblivion 13y ago
  I think it comes down to something that people don't like to say outright: Many of us want the ability to evade the government. We are afraid of the government being too good at their job.
  - darkxanthos 13y ago
    Exactly. That's the point I'm making in my other reply. The problem isn't that the government is watching... it's that it claims to have jurisdiction over too many issues that it shouldn't be involved in.
    - orblivion 13y ago
      Right, but my point is that there's no magic that makes the government act within its jurisdiction. We should try to force it to limit itself to that (and then some, but that's another discussion), but we shouldn't assume we'll succeed. Generally, I do agree with you. No expectation of privacy. Generally, this doesn't particularly bother me. Which means I would guess (from a very lay point of view) that there's no justification to require warrants for flying drones. Anybody should be able to fly a drone. However we should arguably be fighting against this anyway, to keep the government from being too good at its job, since we can't trust it to do the right thing with whatever power it's asserted.
      - darkxanthos 13y ago
        That's a very valid point.
  - northwest 13y ago
    Government is power. And power simply must be limited. If not, there will be even more abuse, meaning: democracy will be curbed or even eliminated. And that means, general injustice will increase sharply. And this leads to a lock-in situation where injustice cannot be reversed b/c it protects itself. It's already the case to a certain degree in Washington, today, when you look to what extreme extent money is replacing democracy ("money" of course being a handful of ultra-rich people).
- fargolime 13y ago
  Will you feel the same when you can see (and hear) several drones in the sky at any given moment, 24/7?
iandanforth 13y ago
Two questions: 1. If I'm in my backyard and I have a high fence (private). And an FBI target walks by my property (public), how can they claim to not be surveilling me as well? 2. Is it unconstitutional surveillance to use Google Earth to see if I was home on the specific day their imagery was collected?
- DannyBee 13y ago
  high fence does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy Even within the curtilage and notwithstanding that the owner has gone to the extreme of erecting a 10-foot high fence in order to screen the area from ground-level view, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy from naked-eye inspection from fixed-wing aircraft flying in navigable airspace. California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 See also Oliver v. United States, where even "locked gate + no trespassing signs" does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy.
  - northwest 13y ago
    Another right bites the dust.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      This was 17 years ago, so it's not like it's a really recent occurrence. For example, nobody who was on the supreme court then is on the supreme court now. Nobody has cared so far ....
      - kahirsch 13y ago
        You mean 27 years ago. (1986) Five of the justices have been on the court more than 17 years
        DannyBee 13y ago
        Whoops :)
woofyman 13y ago
I'm somewhere between meh and concerned about this. One one hand, this is nothing new. Police have used airplanes to catch speeders for a long long time. But the breathless, OMG we're in a police state pushes me, for some reason, to take the contrarian stand.
- genwin 13y ago
  I used to live in a city with cops everywhere, where you'd get pulled over for doing 38 mph in a 35 zone. This city is surely intent on using drones to auto-fine all such criminals, making the place even safer by narrowing it to 35.01 mph.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  i think people (and government pushing for drone usage) missing one important aspect - where police/FBI will launch 100 drones, the citizens will launch tens of thousands drones (and if it is outlawed like it is in some states already - it will be Anon's drones) and will observe and record each government/police action. People are worried about government's gigapixel Argus while hundred citizens' drones with 10M cameras can do the same job. While citizens can claim protection of 4th, the government/police while performing their duties - can't as their actions are allowed to be observed by citizens. It will be a police state for police. Right now a citizen recording police is easily intimidated, like by arresting him and shooting his dog for example. Good luck doing it in case of anonymous drone :)
  - genwin 13y ago
    It will surely be illegal for the citizens to have their own drones. It will be gov't-only airspace at that altitude. (The people won't object in sufficient numbers either, giving gov't the mandate.) I doubt an Anon could launch or land a drone very many times without getting caught.
jurassic 13y ago
Did any of you actually read the article? Despite the sensationalist title, they're only admitting to 10 incidents since 2006 including one where a young boy's life was possibly on the line. I'm as anti-spying as anybody, but ~1 incident per year seems like a reasonable rate to me if a serious threat is motivating it. This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky.
- northwest 13y ago
  > This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky. Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets? I certainly do. And I see a pattern here: a) it's an evolution, and b) they are doing all this behind our backs (without the promised transparency) If we had a website where every such incident would be published and precisely detailed and justified, the situation would already be slightly different, b/c then, we would have an eye on it, every single day.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    I don't. Can you provide a link? That seems like profoundly dumb public policy to me: no domestic use for unmanned aircraft?
  - lotso 13y ago
    > Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets? No, I don't.
  - fargolime 13y ago
    > Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets? It was drone strikes. I'm confident that's coming against the domestic population, with concomitant "oops, we didn't mean to hit the playground" events.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      Right, because the government drops bombs from manned aircraft in the domestic theater all the time.
_delirium 13y ago
Is the unmanned aspect the main difference here? Police have long used both planes and helicopters, and warrants aren't typically required in those cases.
- fargolime 13y ago
  I'm wondering about that too. Because of the ubiquitous planes and helicopters, and satellites too, I've assumed no warrants would be needed for a drone surveillance net. (My plan is to move to a smaller town, if only for less noise.)
- rainsford 13y ago
  Yeah, I guess I'm not quite getting why I (or anyone else) should be upset about this. Using unmanned drones a handful of times in cases where I would imagine a helicopter would have previously been used sounds pretty reasonable to me.
  - fargolime 13y ago
    Reasonable to me too. But I'm confident the plan is to have hundreds of drones in the sky 24/7 over major cities, covering every square meter every x minutes.
    - mjn 13y ago
      That's an issue that's arising in many forms recently, and I'm not sure the law has sorted out what to do about it. The gut feeling, which I share, is that there's a qualitative difference between a few targeted observations and pervasive surveillance. But the law has traditionally not included a numerical aspect in 4th-amendment analyses. Either the police need a warrant to fly a helicopter over a city and photograph it, or they don't, regardless of whether they're flying one or a hundred. Saying that something would require a warrant if done very frequently but not if done occasionally would require a either a novel approach to the 4th amendment, or a new law passed by Congress specifying a new policy. Two bits of 4th amendment law do point towards development of a new doctrine, but I'm not sure very strongly: 1. In United States v. Knotts (1983), the defendant argued that allowing the government to electronically track a vehicle without a warrant raised the spectre of the government being able to pervasively track all movements. The court dismissed that concern by writing: [Defendant] expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the Government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the reality hardly suggests abuse; if such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable. It's a bit of a confusing comment, though, because it doesn't explain the basis for treating "dragnet-type" uses of GPS tracking differently from scattered uses, from a 4th-amendment perspective. My guess is that Rehnquist just wanted to dismiss the defendant's dystopian hypothetical by saying it's not happening now and if it happens later, well we'll deal with it later. 2. One lower court has introduced a "mosaic theory" of the fourth amendment by which things that individually don't count as "searches" for 4th-amendment purposes could constitute a search when aggregated. Here's an article on that: http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1718&context=faculty_publications http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
lotso 13y ago
"Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley
- belorn 13y ago
  It should be noted that any citizen is allowed to do so, including with quadcopters. Each time the police us arguing to forbid citizen to use quadcopters to record a demonstration, they are working against their own possibility to use drones. So far, they can't eat and have the cake at the same time,
  - oleganza 13y ago
    Police eats and keeps cakes all the time because they are allowed to use guns and violence much wider than any regular person. Almost every time when a cop is "unnecessarily" brutal, he gets away with it while non-cop for the same action would serve a jail time. Just check the news. After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be legally violent, while others must obey.
    - mindslight 13y ago
      > After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be legally violent, while others must obey. To be fair, the original idea is that some people are legally violent on behalf of the rest. Any implementation is thus plagued with principal agent and quorum problems. As the system precesses, it becomes an autonomous entity working to keep up an illusion of subservience lest we stop feeding it.
    - belorn 13y ago
      While I would normally agree with you, the cited supreme case above stated that: However, the Court stopped short of allowing all aerial inspections of private property, noting that it was "of obvious importance" that a private citizen could have legally flown in the same airspace. Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more. As such, the Police can't eat and keep cake in this case, except if congress changes the law. The supreme court case is quite clear.
northwest 13y ago
Here's 1 map by the EFF (click the red link at the end of the article for the map by Google): https://www.eff.org/foia/faa-drone-authorizations https://www.eff.org/foia/faa-drone-authorizations
rayiner 13y ago
In other news, my wife showers without a drivers license. A warrant is not required for anything you can see from public airspace.
donpark 13y ago
What's disturbing is that we're replacing clear lines with trust.
tootie 13y ago
The NYPD fly helicopters over the city pretty much all day every day. And they are probably armed with something or other. The FBI drones are not. Drone surveillance can never be illegal by definition since they can only observe things in public view. I wish people would stop worrying about specific tactics, be it drones or decrypting SSL traffic, and worry about due process.
serge2k 13y ago
Do they need a warrant to sit in a car and watch a building?
stormbrew 13y ago
It's kind of amazing that people who fear the US government becoming oppressive are willing to listen to the propaganda arm of what's developing into a truly oppressive strong-arm government. Not to say it's not a valid concern, but RT's rise as a source people listen to is equal parts fascinating and disturbing. The USSR, or the USA during the cold war for that matter, would have killed to have this kind of influence on people in their opposing spheres.

188 points by northwest 13y ago

This doesn't bother me. I get that it's being equivalated to living in a police state but I don't view it that way. Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical. When I'm in public I expect that I don't have privacy. EDIT: typo

northwest 13y ago
I didn't downvote you, I can't. But I think, you are seriously wrong. And it's because because you lack to see what all this will enable, abuse-wise. I'm pretty sure you will change your mind once you'll effectively feel the consequences. The thing is, if we, as a society want to advance, we need to reflect more on what is happening.
- DannyBee 13y ago
  I agree with you, except where you say "I'm pretty sure you will change your mind once you'll effectively feel the consequences. " No, actually, he won't. 20 years from now, when things are much worse, he won't complain then either. While what they say about boiling frogs is patently false for frogs (they will jump out), it's completely true for humans.
  - northwest 13y ago
    Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
  - adestefan 13y ago
    Why do you instantly assume that 20 years from now things will be "much worse?" Even though I have no idea what "much worse" would even be.
    - fargolime 13y ago
      Why wouldn't a reasonable person assume that, given the historical trend? The gov't has been steadily implementing the strategies laid out in the book 1984, my whole longish life.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      Please give me one time in the history of the US where privacy that was lost was later regained?
noonespecial 13y ago
I'm going to have to disagree. The possibilty that you might be observed in public is a whole different animal than the probabilty or even certainty that you will. Knowing that someone might be watching is different than being sure that someone is. And that is just where this train is headed. Edit: I'm going to go ahead and urge people not to knee-jerk downvote the parent here. Outside of a certain group of the HN crowd, I find this to be the prevailing opinion. A downvote is just a shout of "you're wrong". We need to start educating people of the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance carried to its logical end.
- darkxanthos 13y ago
  I appreciate the call to not down vote. I see a larger picture of things getting out of hand surely. The issue I have with drones and being watched all the time is that there are so many laws we all probably break one daily and that opens us to be treated as criminals. I'd rather have fewer laws and perhaps further increase the burden of proof necessary to bring charges.
  - fargolime 13y ago
    If you see the larger picture of where things will be, why not be bothered by movement down that slippery slope?
    - darkxanthos 13y ago
      I try to focus on root causes. There's too much noise and wasted energy otherwise.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Even more so, the constant fear of being watched changes who you are, how you act and the choices you make, even how you think. That is the whole idea behind the concept of the Panopticon. Just putting cameras that might not even work in places or put those dark glass domes like you see in the stores makes one act and feel different. There is an expectation of how police works with a given set of constraints. It seems like a _quantitative_ difference whether a police car can drive by and see your house or a police car is assigned to follow you vs small drone constantly hovering above your house or a tracking device attached to your car. Legally those are the same but they shouldn't be. The distinction is so dramatic like you put it that it is a _qualitative_ difference between the two cases, not just a matter of degree.
smokeyj 13y ago
> I get that it's being equivalted to living in a police state but I don't view it that way Largest prison population, largest military, and the end of the Fourth Amendment. I'm curious, would you support making the Gestapo more efficient at what they do?
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Parent poster expressed an (unpopular) opinion in a civil way. Your response purely in snark and invoking Godwin (two posts in!) is unwarranted.
  - smokeyj 13y ago
    > Your response purely in snark I listed supporting arguments to the contrary.. > and invoking Godwin (two posts in!) is unwarranted I expressed an unpopular opinion in a civil way, and your response is pure snark. I didn't mean to offend you by saying the G word. Maybe I'll talk about another over-reaching police force. Would that be more palatable for you?
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      > "I listed supporting arguments to the contrary.." Yeah, and those were fine. It's like writing a great refutation and ending it with "but sure, go have tea with Hitler". The snarky "you don't support us so clearly you must support [insert evil thing]" undermines a valid point made, and verges on ad hominem. The parallels of the ubiquitous American surveillance state certainly have shades of the Stasi or the Gestapo, but the insinuation that OP must, by virtue of his disagreement with you, support the extreme end of this institution, is unjustified. He stated his opinion with civility, the accusatory, with-us-or-with-pure-evil angle is unwarranted and cheapens the discourse.
      - smokeyj 13y ago
        > but the insinuation that OP must, by virtue of his disagreement with you, support the extreme end of this institution, is unjustified OP States: Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical. I'm not insinuating anything. I'm simply questioning OP about his self-proclaimed principles in an obviously Socratic method. The only thing I'm accusing OP of is being ignorant of principled reasoning.
w4 13y ago
I'd be inclined to agree if this were limited to public spaces only. But here's the issue: aerial surveillance isn't limited to public areas only. If I'm surveilling a public park aerially I'm also necessarily surveilling the houses next to it. If I have to get a warrant to perform that survellance then good enough. The warrant will limit the surveillance. No warrant? Now it drifts into that surveillance state place. A police officer on patrol can't police private property without trespassing; the houses bordering the park likely have privacy fences, foliage coverage, etc. to prevent their owners from being watched (by a anyone, not just police) on their pool deck or wherever. Drones (and planes) see right over those, and without warrants they're quite likely to result in privacy violations.
orblivion 13y ago
I think it comes down to something that people don't like to say outright: Many of us want the ability to evade the government. We are afraid of the government being too good at their job.
- darkxanthos 13y ago
  Exactly. That's the point I'm making in my other reply. The problem isn't that the government is watching... it's that it claims to have jurisdiction over too many issues that it shouldn't be involved in.
  - orblivion 13y ago
    Right, but my point is that there's no magic that makes the government act within its jurisdiction. We should try to force it to limit itself to that (and then some, but that's another discussion), but we shouldn't assume we'll succeed. Generally, I do agree with you. No expectation of privacy. Generally, this doesn't particularly bother me. Which means I would guess (from a very lay point of view) that there's no justification to require warrants for flying drones. Anybody should be able to fly a drone. However we should arguably be fighting against this anyway, to keep the government from being too good at its job, since we can't trust it to do the right thing with whatever power it's asserted.
    - darkxanthos 13y ago
      That's a very valid point.
- northwest 13y ago
  Government is power. And power simply must be limited. If not, there will be even more abuse, meaning: democracy will be curbed or even eliminated. And that means, general injustice will increase sharply. And this leads to a lock-in situation where injustice cannot be reversed b/c it protects itself. It's already the case to a certain degree in Washington, today, when you look to what extreme extent money is replacing democracy ("money" of course being a handful of ultra-rich people).
fargolime 13y ago
Will you feel the same when you can see (and hear) several drones in the sky at any given moment, 24/7?

iandanforth 13y ago

Two questions: 1. If I'm in my backyard and I have a high fence (private). And an FBI target walks by my property (public), how can they claim to not be surveilling me as well? 2. Is it unconstitutional surveillance to use Google Earth to see if I was home on the specific day their imagery was collected?

DannyBee 13y ago
high fence does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy Even within the curtilage and notwithstanding that the owner has gone to the extreme of erecting a 10-foot high fence in order to screen the area from ground-level view, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy from naked-eye inspection from fixed-wing aircraft flying in navigable airspace. California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 See also Oliver v. United States, where even "locked gate + no trespassing signs" does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy.
- northwest 13y ago
  Another right bites the dust.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    This was 17 years ago, so it's not like it's a really recent occurrence. For example, nobody who was on the supreme court then is on the supreme court now. Nobody has cared so far ....
    - kahirsch 13y ago
      You mean 27 years ago. (1986) Five of the justices have been on the court more than 17 years
      - DannyBee 13y ago
        Whoops :)

woofyman 13y ago

I'm somewhere between meh and concerned about this. One one hand, this is nothing new. Police have used airplanes to catch speeders for a long long time. But the breathless, OMG we're in a police state pushes me, for some reason, to take the contrarian stand.

genwin 13y ago
I used to live in a city with cops everywhere, where you'd get pulled over for doing 38 mph in a 35 zone. This city is surely intent on using drones to auto-fine all such criminals, making the place even safer by narrowing it to 35.01 mph.
VladRussian2 13y ago
i think people (and government pushing for drone usage) missing one important aspect - where police/FBI will launch 100 drones, the citizens will launch tens of thousands drones (and if it is outlawed like it is in some states already - it will be Anon's drones) and will observe and record each government/police action. People are worried about government's gigapixel Argus while hundred citizens' drones with 10M cameras can do the same job. While citizens can claim protection of 4th, the government/police while performing their duties - can't as their actions are allowed to be observed by citizens. It will be a police state for police. Right now a citizen recording police is easily intimidated, like by arresting him and shooting his dog for example. Good luck doing it in case of anonymous drone :)
- genwin 13y ago
  It will surely be illegal for the citizens to have their own drones. It will be gov't-only airspace at that altitude. (The people won't object in sufficient numbers either, giving gov't the mandate.) I doubt an Anon could launch or land a drone very many times without getting caught.

jurassic 13y ago

Did any of you actually read the article? Despite the sensationalist title, they're only admitting to 10 incidents since 2006 including one where a young boy's life was possibly on the line. I'm as anti-spying as anybody, but ~1 incident per year seems like a reasonable rate to me if a serious threat is motivating it. This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky.

northwest 13y ago
> This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky. Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets? I certainly do. And I see a pattern here: a) it's an evolution, and b) they are doing all this behind our backs (without the promised transparency) If we had a website where every such incident would be published and precisely detailed and justified, the situation would already be slightly different, b/c then, we would have an eye on it, every single day.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I don't. Can you provide a link? That seems like profoundly dumb public policy to me: no domestic use for unmanned aircraft?
- lotso 13y ago
  > Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets? No, I don't.
- fargolime 13y ago
  > Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets? It was drone strikes. I'm confident that's coming against the domestic population, with concomitant "oops, we didn't mean to hit the playground" events.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Right, because the government drops bombs from manned aircraft in the domestic theater all the time.

_delirium 13y ago

Is the unmanned aspect the main difference here? Police have long used both planes and helicopters, and warrants aren't typically required in those cases.

fargolime 13y ago
I'm wondering about that too. Because of the ubiquitous planes and helicopters, and satellites too, I've assumed no warrants would be needed for a drone surveillance net. (My plan is to move to a smaller town, if only for less noise.)
rainsford 13y ago
Yeah, I guess I'm not quite getting why I (or anyone else) should be upset about this. Using unmanned drones a handful of times in cases where I would imagine a helicopter would have previously been used sounds pretty reasonable to me.
- fargolime 13y ago
  Reasonable to me too. But I'm confident the plan is to have hundreds of drones in the sky 24/7 over major cities, covering every square meter every x minutes.
  - mjn 13y ago
    That's an issue that's arising in many forms recently, and I'm not sure the law has sorted out what to do about it. The gut feeling, which I share, is that there's a qualitative difference between a few targeted observations and pervasive surveillance. But the law has traditionally not included a numerical aspect in 4th-amendment analyses. Either the police need a warrant to fly a helicopter over a city and photograph it, or they don't, regardless of whether they're flying one or a hundred. Saying that something would require a warrant if done very frequently but not if done occasionally would require a either a novel approach to the 4th amendment, or a new law passed by Congress specifying a new policy. Two bits of 4th amendment law do point towards development of a new doctrine, but I'm not sure very strongly: 1. In United States v. Knotts (1983), the defendant argued that allowing the government to electronically track a vehicle without a warrant raised the spectre of the government being able to pervasively track all movements. The court dismissed that concern by writing: [Defendant] expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the Government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the reality hardly suggests abuse; if such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable. It's a bit of a confusing comment, though, because it doesn't explain the basis for treating "dragnet-type" uses of GPS tracking differently from scattered uses, from a 4th-amendment perspective. My guess is that Rehnquist just wanted to dismiss the defendant's dystopian hypothetical by saying it's not happening now and if it happens later, well we'll deal with it later. 2. One lower court has introduced a "mosaic theory" of the fourth amendment by which things that individually don't count as "searches" for 4th-amendment purposes could constitute a search when aggregated. Here's an article on that: http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1718&context=faculty_publications http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

lotso 13y ago

"Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley

belorn 13y ago
It should be noted that any citizen is allowed to do so, including with quadcopters. Each time the police us arguing to forbid citizen to use quadcopters to record a demonstration, they are working against their own possibility to use drones. So far, they can't eat and have the cake at the same time,
- oleganza 13y ago
  Police eats and keeps cakes all the time because they are allowed to use guns and violence much wider than any regular person. Almost every time when a cop is "unnecessarily" brutal, he gets away with it while non-cop for the same action would serve a jail time. Just check the news. After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be legally violent, while others must obey.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    > After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be legally violent, while others must obey. To be fair, the original idea is that some people are legally violent on behalf of the rest. Any implementation is thus plagued with principal agent and quorum problems. As the system precesses, it becomes an autonomous entity working to keep up an illusion of subservience lest we stop feeding it.
  - belorn 13y ago
    While I would normally agree with you, the cited supreme case above stated that: However, the Court stopped short of allowing all aerial inspections of private property, noting that it was "of obvious importance" that a private citizen could have legally flown in the same airspace. Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more. As such, the Police can't eat and keep cake in this case, except if congress changes the law. The supreme court case is quite clear.

northwest 13y ago

Here's 1 map by the EFF (click the red link at the end of the article for the map by Google): https://www.eff.org/foia/faa-drone-authorizations https://www.eff.org/foia/faa-drone-authorizations

rayiner 13y ago

In other news, my wife showers without a drivers license. A warrant is not required for anything you can see from public airspace.

donpark 13y ago

What's disturbing is that we're replacing clear lines with trust.

tootie 13y ago

The NYPD fly helicopters over the city pretty much all day every day. And they are probably armed with something or other. The FBI drones are not. Drone surveillance can never be illegal by definition since they can only observe things in public view. I wish people would stop worrying about specific tactics, be it drones or decrypting SSL traffic, and worry about due process.

serge2k 13y ago

Do they need a warrant to sit in a car and watch a building?

stormbrew 13y ago

It's kind of amazing that people who fear the US government becoming oppressive are willing to listen to the propaganda arm of what's developing into a truly oppressive strong-arm government. Not to say it's not a valid concern, but RT's rise as a source people listen to is equal parts fascinating and disturbing. The USSR, or the USA during the cold war for that matter, would have killed to have this kind of influence on people in their opposing spheres.