Image: Francesco Bongiorni
Before the decade is out, there may be thousands more eyes in the sky. Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, are already a staple of modern warfare. Now they are set to take on a much larger role in the U.S.
Congress has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to set rules by 2015 for how drones may be used in domestic airspace. These rules could open up the skies to unmanned vehicles of all types—from large surveillance drones used by the military to insect-size prototypes being developed in university laboratories. The technology promises to be immensely useful. Public safety agencies can use drones to survey wildfires, conduct search-and-rescue operations, or pursue heavily armed suspects. Farmers will use them to survey their fields; energy companies will fly drones over critical machinery.
Still, drones also pose an immense threat to privacy. The proliferation of small, inexpensive aerial vehicles with video downlinks will dramatically alter the cost-benefit ratio of surveillance. No longer will law-enforcement agencies need to consider the expense and risk of operating a helicopter when gathering evidence. Consequently, law-enforcement agencies will have ample opportunity and motivation to deploy drones on open-ended sorties. It is not hard to imagine blanket campaigns that survey entire cities for backyard marijuana plants or even building code violations. Privacy advocates rightly worry that drones, equipped with high-resolution video cameras, infrared detectors and even facial-recognition software, will let snoops into realms that have long been considered private.
The privacy threat does not just come from law enforcement, either. Paparazzi and private detectives will find drones just as easy to use as the cops. Your neighbor is not allowed go into your yard without your permission—will he be able to keep a drone hovering just above it?
Case law paints a hazy picture of how drones could be employed for surveillance. A 1989 Supreme Court decision ruled that police may use helicopters to peer into semiprivate areas—say, the backyard of a home—without first obtaining a warrant. Such speculative reconnaissance, however, has been naturally limited by the costs of helicopter operations. Will the same law apply to unmanned drones, which are not similarly constrained?
A more recent case poses troubling questions about access to the most sacrosanct spaces. In 2001 the Supreme Court ruled that police could not use thermal-imaging technology to gather evidence about the goings-on hidden inside a residence without first obtaining a warrant. The court reasoned that governmental use of “a device that is not in general public use”—a thermal imager—constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and therefore requires a judge's approval. Yet if unmanned aerial vehicles become as prevalent as manufacturers hope, one could argue that drones are exempt from that precedent.
Already the faa has permitted a handful of law-enforcement agencies to operate drones on a short-term basis. The limited regulations accompanying those permits (which, thankfully, preclude attaching any weapons to the drones) are insufficient to protect the privacy of citizens. Perhaps this should not be surprising. The faa is not in the business of privacy protection. Its primary concern is with the safety of domestic airspace.
No federal agency, in fact, can be held accountable if drones are not used responsibly and in a way that respects the Fourth Amendment. As such, Congress should proactively enact laws that confine domestic drones to reasonable, useful purposes. Several sensible ideas were proposed during the last session of Congress, including a bill that would have outlawed drone spying without a warrant and instituted important transparency and accountability measures for their use. But that bill failed to make it out of a subcommittee. The present Congress must be more active than its predecessor in heading off this clear and impending threat to personal privacy.
This article was originally published with the title The Spies above Your Backyard.
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9 Comments
Add CommentDavid Brin has pretty much covered this topic top to bottom over the past 15 years, and I, for one, agree with him.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe ubiquity of technological prying eyes is a foregone conclusion. The genie is long since out of the bottle, and we're not going to be able to just legislate it back in. Flying, or not, methods of information gathering are everywhere, from the traffic camera you drive by every day, to the thousands of cell phone cameras you walk by, to the small pieces of software that monitor your browsing habits for target ted advertising.
Information is out there, plain and simple. There are just too many prying eyes, everywhere, to avoid this fact. What's more, governments have been watching us since long before drones, and their power to do so will continue to grow one way or the other. This issue is simply a lot bigger than unmanned aircraft. That fact creates a danger in potential overreaction to inevitable technology: we will never stop the powerful from watching, plain and simple. The only thing we might end up doing is curtailing the power of the rest of us to watch back.
The issue here isn't how to preserve 50 year old notions of privacy, because they were dead 20 years ago. Hell, they were dead even when we still had illusions of them. The question we SHOULD be asking ourselves is how to make sure it goes both ways. Our goal should be reciprocal accountability, not a return to secrecy that was largely exclusive to the privileged in the first place, so that things like this stop happening away from that accountability: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gim_pqUAKcc
Thank god there was ample surveillance there that day. And those with power already realize this, which is why their goal for the last decade has never been to outlaw greater technology to watch, but rather to create a disparity in that capability. It's the police lobbying states to make it illegal to record them. It's Dick Cheney having his house blurred ouy in the satellite imagery used in Google maps. THAT is what we should be concerned about, not that the inevitable power to watch will grow, because it will no matter what, it rather that it gets concentrated in the hands of a few, while the rest of us get left behind.
Such is my opinion, anyways.
We are already fully observed. Google Earth has it pretty much covered. Satellites take hi-resolution photos constantly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf a drone is watching you, you'll never know. Wear a large hat and don't look up and you will be fine.
I see a new market for anti spy drone attack drones capable of destroying unwanted snoops.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne simple solution: legalize private destruction of any robotic surveillance device, whether owned by private citizens or government. Already one hunting group has shot down a drone flown by an anti-hunting group. Amd don't limit it to flying drones. Include surveillance cameras, GPS trackers, all of them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know a lot about how surveillance is conducted, I am an MK ULTRA "victim" who is under 24 hour surveillance and being gang stalked. The ways of conducting surveillance of a target is so far-reaching and pervasive that in my opinion, drones are not as much for surveillance as they are for murdering or intimidating targets.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that the biggest potential danger from drones comes from the small insect size drones that are currently being developed. Someone could fly one of those directly inside your house unnoticed, and they could even be used to prick someone and infect them with some sort of poison/virus/bacteria...etc. The smaller they get, the scarier they become to me. I still think they are cool though. I bought one of the personal quad-copter style ones that can be flown with an iphone and I plan on using it to film surfing videos if I can avoid crashing it into the ocean :-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190732276985&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT
why on earth would any rational person even think that our congress would do anything to protect the 4th amendment or any other amendment to the constitution. The 4th and 5th have been totally eviscerated by legislation like the (UN)patriot act, and provisions in the latest NDAA , the DHS is totally out of control, and the president claims he no longer has to follow the rule of law in providing due process (which is a human right for all, not just for US citizens) before assassination. Much of the 1st has been twisted beyond belief--fee speech zones???, and governmental meddling in the freedom of religious expression, the 2nd is once again under serious attack, and the others--especially the 10th are pretty much ignored.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat we need is not some fluff legislation to protect our privacy from drones, but a nation wide insistence that the federal government start paying attention to the rule of law (the constitution, get the federal government back to it's proper size and limits, and for every one who takes the OATH to actually honor that oath rather than just paying lip service to it.
You sound worried. Step back a moment and recall it's only if your doing something that would harm the country.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour not up to something are you? The drones will be watching.
What privacy???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetween cell phones, robot surveillance cameras, and all the rest there was precious little public privacy before drones even entered the picture. And with all that is shared online, knowingly and unknowingly, most of us don't even have privacy in our personal lives, through our own actions and choices.
So what?? You think that some government agency of some sort is going to find you so interesting that they are going to start paying attention? Not likely unless you are engaged in something so illegal or dangerous that the rest of us would welcome the fact that you are being watched, for our own protection.
Besides, all of us who consider ourselves to be "believers" in the Judeo-Christian- Islamic traditions assume that we are being watched by the ultimate, final judge all the time anyway and we don't complain about that.
So, what's the big deal?