I'm pretty sensitive to these things. That said, if you look at the partial list provided (granted this was potentially cherry picked), we're looking primarily at disaster awareness stuff. Flooding, wild fires, and search & rescue. Not spying.
Military resources, such as The National Guard, get called up for disaster relief all of the time. I think I'd rather drones helping people in these scenarios than what they're primarily used for.
I agree. Military tech is the best tech, if it can spot a terrorist in a bush than it can, and should be used to find victims of natural disasters.
Also, I don't think UAVs are the best option for mass surveillance. I mean, there's cameras on every corner, phones in every pocket, etc. There's enough cameras to spy on people, you don't need to stick a very expensive drone that will last only a couple hours/days and not be able to peek in houses as well as someone's webcam.
I'm not sure how I feel about this bit though.
> an unnamed mayor asked the Marine Corps to use a drone to find potholes in the mayor's city
I mean. Is it helpful? Yes. Is it a really good way to find potentially dangerous potholes? Probably. It just seems... excessive.
> > an unnamed mayor asked the Marine Corps to use a drone to find potholes in the mayor's city
Maybe he's trying to figure out if he can use a DHS grant to buy "OMG TERRORISM" drones, that just happens to look for potholes whenever it has a few minutes off between terror attacks?
EDIT: On second thought, is finding the holes really the bottleneck in The War on Potholes? And if so, isn't this better fixed with an answering machine, and/or a $5000 Rails app?
Is it really hard to get people to complain about potholes, if complaining is actually going to get them filled in? And if you're not going to fill them in, then why care where they are?
It's easy to get people to complain. The drone is probably able to produce far better data assuming the main problem is pothole triage (ie you're only going to fix ~30%, of which around half will be patched quickly and the other half properly re-tarmacked. Which ones and in which order?)
It's not just drones. Law Enforcement often flies surveillance flights, circling over locations of interest. These planes often have thermal/visual imaging video cameras and, according to some stories, may also be carrying other tracking or signal interception hardware (think Stingray). HN user jjwiseman [0] scooped most of the press about this.
You can locate such "interesting" flights right now, using your browser. Just open up ADSB Exchange Virtual Radar [1], which doesn't filter out flights with certain squawk codes like other online virtual radar sites do. If you do, select "Menu" from the map (with the gear icon), then "Options". Select the "Filter" tab, select to "Enable filters", select "Interesting" from the dropdown listbox, and select "Add Filter". Now you can zoom out over the country, and see all the "interesting" flights using the table on the left. Note any flights with the "LE" or "FBI" or "DHS" user tag.
Right now, as I write this, an FBI-owned aircraft is circling over the Norwood/Bronx area of NYC [2], tail number N912EX, registered to OBR Leasing (one of the "shells" that the US Gov't uses for registering its law enforcement aircraft), as mentioned in an AP story last summer [3]
Edit2: Any aircraft squawking transponder beacon codes between 4401-4433 are engaged in law enforcement operations. More on the various squawk codes reserved by US Gov't operations can be found here (pdf link): http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/FINAL_Order_7...
So, presumably, there are uber-secret flights that the military and cia, etc operate which are so clandestine that they appear civilian. However, their flight plans are probably quite similar to the known law enforcement/military stuff. Eg: circling over certain places or circling/tracking a moving car. So in theory you could train a network on known civilian vs known law enforcement and then have it identify the as yet unidentified law enforcement flight plans?
I don't think you'd even need anything fancy. Here's the list of things that are true of most of the surveillance aircraft I've found:
Flies in circles
Flies over one region for hours
Flies at around 5000 feet altitude
Squawks 4414 or 4415
Uses a callsign that starts with JENA or JENNA
Registered owner in Bristow VA, Greenville DE, Wilmington DE, or Manassas VA
I have some simple code that highlights planes that are flying in circles so that I can take a closer look at them.
> You can locate such "interesting" flights right now, using your browser. Just open up ADSB Exchange Virtual Radar [1]
This is really neat. However, it's only showing 10 flights in the Southwest (USA) area. O_o How come it shows nothing in the El Paso area? I find that hard to believe (also: There are none flying in OR, ID, UT, CO or NM?)
Without the filter, it shows all aircraft broadcasting ADS-B [0]. The filter procedure I outlined restricts the aircraft shown on the map only to those that have been flagged as "interesting", usually because they're related to law enforcement, government agencies, or celebrities.
adsbexchange.com collects data from volunteers, of which there are currently fewer than 500 around the world. One person can usually only pick up aircraft within a hundred miles or so. Many "interesting" aircraft don't broadcast their position, so you won't see them on a map unless they can be triangulated (actually multilaterated)--but that requires that multiple nearby volunteers receive their signals.
That's why you don't see a lot of aircraft on the map, not a failure of realism.
Cool, I was just wondering why no one was mentioning the pink elephant in the room.
> not a failure of realism.
Actually it's exactly that. What you just said proves it. In reality, there are a lot more aircraft than being shown on that map due to the low number of volunteers and stealth nature of the aircraft.
That's N404KR, which over the past year has flown over Los Angeles on average one day in five. It's one of the top 10 planes I receive transponder pings from, in frequency.
I found that the adsbexchange site had a JSON feed (that adheres to the virtual radar standard, even) but couldn't find any direct guidance about permissible usage. Do you know of any aggregators of ADSB data (without filters) that one could use to set up a site for constant logging/tracking/visualization of this stuff? I'm thinking of mashing this up with geolocated tweets/pics/videos to try and figure out if the public can identify what the hell these planes are doing. Maybe also a way to get alerts when you're in an area that is being surveilled. I have a toy Python script doing some of that now with the adsbexchange feed, but I don't want to let something into the wild that uses someone else's feed without permission.
Hey there - I am the operator of adsbexchange.com. We can talk offline - send me a message with your contact info through the contact form on the site.
Those are just the pings from the transponder that almost every aircraft carries to help air traffic controllers keep track of it. You can receive and decode them with a $20 RTL-SDR dongle and free software.
It's pretty bright line that no warrant is required under current law.
Like it or not, since the 1980s it has been the law that from "public airspace" police can use any visual technology to look at the outside of your property. Right or wrong, it's pretty settled law that if the public can fly somewhere then law enforcement can also fly there without a warrant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley
Ciraolo is another case where police, without a warrant, intentionally flew over a backyard that was enclosed by a fence. In that case, the police found marijuana plants growing. The court upheld the conviction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Ciraolo
The interesting question is what about infrared and other "through the wall" technologies that give an indication as to what's inside a structure. In Kyllo, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 (with Scalia writing the majority opinion) that using a thermal imaging camera to investigate heat emitted from the wall of a house was a "search" that required a warrant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
Looking at several stories on this, it seems that the drone was used to aid in executing a lawful arrest, not to gather evidence.
The exact timeline is unclear, but many of the stories indicate that the drone was brought in after the arrest turned into an armed standoff, with the drone being used to figure out where the armed people were so that the arrests could be made safely.
Under those circumstances, I don't see how using the drone would require a warrant.
That's an important distinction IMO because we've already got police helicopters and such in many cities and they're clearly useful when you quickly need to get an aerial view of an accident or someone running after committing a crime. There is still potential from abuse but whether the craft is manned or not would likely not change that.
At the same time, I guess on a personal, gut reaction level, it seems a bit more threatening or overreaching to think about any aircraft, manned or not, constantly flying around just recording everything for reference under the argument that it could help identify other crimes or locate individuals.
It may be illogical to be OK with a police chopper but not other surveillance craft but I think the potential for abuse and overreach skyrockets when you have the ability to find and track individuals at any time or create a record of their actions and travels for later analysis. I guess my emotional reaction stems from law enforcement responding to reports of crime versus just recording everything in case there's a crime. In the latter case, it wouldn't be hard to find something to nail someone on if you had a long enough record of their lives and activities and that's what unsettles me.
From a tech angle it's impressive and, sure, it seems great that they're able to use this sort of tech to track down seriously dangerous people responsible for brutal crimes.
At the same time, I can't help but be a bit uneasy with the potential for abuse. When you've got a complete aerial recording of a (city/town/etc) for days or weeks in a row, all you've got to do if there's someone you're after is "rewind" far enough before you catch them doing something you can nail them on.
Taken to extreme, imagine you're an a public official or law enforcement agent with an authoritarian bent. There's a pesky blogger or activist or reporter that's been making your life difficult and you'd like them out of the picture. How far back do you need to rewind before you catch them speeding or running red lights? What will the public think when you've got video of them visiting their secret lover or they learn how this person goes to the bar or liquor store every night to get drunk? Or how about the easy unmasking of their confidential info sources you're able to track backwards from their meetings?
I'm not necessarily one to kneejerk against any application of tech because of the potential for abuse because it misses the potential for very positive outcomes. At the same time, genies don't go back in their bottles willingly and I think it's important to identify these abuse potentials so they can be addressed early and decisively rather than after the abuses have become par for the course.
Personally, I think its one of things that sounds scarier than it is. I mean, sure, I would be nervous if there was evidence that armed helicopters/drones are flying over the US in the situations we are talking about here. But as long as they are unarmed, I'm not too worried.
Even if the government used a specific fleet of non-combat related drones, that wouldn't stop them from switching over to combat-ready drones tomorrow if they so wished it.
Only because the police don't have the funds to purchase them regularly. A lot of police helicopters are surplus Hueys, Blackhawks, or Kiowas. They may not have the targeting packages in them any more, but it doesn't take a ton of ingenuity to up-arm them, as was done in the early stages of Vietnam, before the specialized gunship helicopters were developed.
The account I saw at the time it happened (I am in ND) said the drone was used to find the cows which would be an illegal search without a warrant. The reporting is very, very poor on the chain, but that's what I remember from the initial reports.
No. From "public airspace" police can use any visual technology to look at the outside of your property. Right or wrong, it's pretty settled law that if the public can fly somewhere then law enforcement can also fly there without a warrant.
The interesting question is what about infrared and other "through the wall" technologies that give an indication as to what's inside a structure. In Kyllo, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 (with Scalia writing the majority opinion) that using a thermal imaging camera to investigate heat emitted from the wall of a house was a "search" that required a warrant.
Edit: I forgot about Ciraolo, which is another case where police, without a warrant, intentionally flew over a backyard that was enclosed by a fence. In that case, the police found marijuana plants growing. The court upheld the conviction of the homeowner despite the lack of a warrant. Again, right or wrong, it's pretty settled that the police can use visual observation without a warrant, even if you fence in your yard.
"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."
They targeted a specific farmer and used a high power camera in a drone to check the cows. So, they did quite a lot more than the general public could have done. This was closer to Kyllo than Riley. Beyond that, the legality of using a drone over other people's property is going through the courts now.
Right or wrong, the problem that the court had in Kyllo was that the infrared scope gave an indication as to what was going on inside the home. The Supreme Court reasoned that the inside of the home was entitled to more privacy protection than a yard. The fear was that future infrared scopes would give the ability to see individual people moving around, or otherwise invade the privacy of the inside of the house.
This case is more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Ciraolo , where the police intentionally targeted a suspected marijuana farmer with a flyover (without a warrant). The farmer lost. I can't imagine the court would think that a ranch with cattle is entitled to more privacy protection than a fenced-in backyard growing pot.
To my knowledge, no Supreme Court case has ever said that advanced visual optics can't be used outside the home.
Probably, it's just noticing something visible through a normal camera from outside the house and doesn't use any thing like thermal cameras that have been ruled to cross the line. It's a really thin thing to hang a warrant on but it doesn't get immediately through out through a prior ruling.
Not illegal in this case, because the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is a department of the Department of Homeland Security, is not covered by the Posse Comitatus Act. Although the CBP is an armed service, it has a federal regulatory agency mission.
The Act only specifically applies to the United States Army and, as amended in 1956, the United States Air Force.
CBP in name, but its serviced and housed at the Air Force base. Its still outside their mission (CBP does not have a charter to deal with cattle rustlers). Also, the fact Customs and Border Patrol is doing anything away from the border (that 100 mile thing is pure BS) is still troubling.
Every one of their powers and directives is worded against foreign threats, not people inside the border. The mission creep is similar to how anti-terrorist laws are used for drug enforcement.
"While its primary mission is preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States, CBP is also responsible for... protecting American businesses from intellectual property theft."
(a) it took a freedom of information request to make this information public.
(b) the Pentagon did it's own internal report and found that there was no wrongdoing.
(c) that nobody in the government is going to hold these clowns responsible or create any sort of legitimate process for determining whether these flights were legal or not.
"A senior policy analyst for the ACLU, Jay Stanley, said it is good news no legal violations were found"
"the Pentagon established interim guidance in 2006 governing when and whether the unmanned aircraft could be used domestically. The interim policy allowed spy drones to be used for homeland defense purposes in the U.S. and to assist civil authorities."
That's something that really sets me off; the hiding behind the umbrella of "well, that's legal"
Just because something is legal or some twisted definition thereof (eg waterboarding is not torture) does not mean that it's right. And for people of power to hide behind the guise of legality is so often not sufficiently called out and deterred.
Sure, but it's hard to make the case that using aerial surveillance to assist in lawful arrest operations is "not right". Weather the surveillance is manned or unmanned isn't of ethical concern. To which branch of government it belongs may be of ethical concern, but I think such concern is better described as "legalistic".
So at a micro level, this may seem like a good idea. I believe we need considering such activities in a larger context.
For example, there have been multiple laws passed/proposed in various countries because "think of the children" or "terrorism". The Patriot Act was written before 9/11 and passed in a hurry. To the point, where the original architect of the act now regrets his actions [1]. Or the fact that the act is now overwhelming used for prosecuting drug activities instead of its original intended purpose [2].
> "Weather the surveillance is manned or unmanned isn't of ethical concern"
I would disagree with this statement. It's the difference between a police stakeout and them planting a webcam [3].
I repeatedly stress at work to people involved with big data projects that want to advance the notion of a data lake. "Just because we can does not mean that we should". I'm not convinced that the legal route is sufficient to check such activity and is why I'm a proponent of systems that prevent bad actors from intercepting (zero knowledge?) instead of "we promise not to look" solutions.
I'll end with:
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
The article talks about less than 20 missions over a 9 year period. This is hardly mass surveillance and it's disingenuous to suggest it is simply because the platform was unmanned. I'll add that it's detrimental to the quality of discussion we enjoy here on HN to conclude such hyperbole with a holocaust reference.
I think all of us on HN are familiar with the qualitative effects of "big data" both in general and as it pertains to surveillance. I hope we're all sophisticated enough to realize that the issues at hand revolve around scale, probable cause, and data retention/mining, rather than the canard of whether the platform involved was manned or unmanned.
My original comment did not mention anything about manned vs. unmanned. I was merely responding to your claim that it does not make a difference which I do not agree with.
As to your statement that it's <20 over 9 years, at the risk of sounding a little tin-foilish, but that's what is publicly being admitted to.
There's could be, which is of course anything, and is known to be, which AFAIK is only JSOC aka the folks in charge of seal team 6 and delta force, lately of the drone attacks in the middle east, etc.
The Sec Defense can make available for "expert advice" and "training" and stuff like that, and that's what JSOC operates under. AFAIK they're the only army command running under those rules on a continuous basis.
Note that the Army does bust active duty MPs for doing things off base.
Another rarely understood part of the Posse Comitatus act is a state governor can do anything he wants inside his own state with NG / ANG troops. Its only when they're federalized or operating outside their state that they can't enforce laws. NG troops can "pretty much" do anything their governor orders them to do within their state borders. The active, reserve, and guard components are at least sometimes deeply intermeshed. Would not surprise me for a guard pilot to casually be called an "army dude" by a journalist with no military experience (aka all of them)
> an unnamed mayor asked the Marine Corps to use a drone to find potholes in the mayor's city
Let's play a guessing game! San Diego? We've got Miramar and Camp Pendleton here, along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible potholes. Although the city certainly doesn't need help finding potholes around here...
Using drones for this kind of thing actually makes a lot of sense, although not a $20 million militarized Predator.
> Using drones for this kind of thing actually makes a lot of sense, although not a $20 million militarized Predator.
The later might make some sense, though, as part of training for the drone operators. Spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street such as a pothole could require similar skills to spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street due to someone having buried a timed or remote-control explosive there.
Similar considerations could apply to many other uses of military drones in civilian operations. Using a military drone to find a missing hiker in a state park, for example, would involve similar skills to using a drone to find a missing military pilot shot down in hostile territory.
In fact, aside from actually shooting guns or missiles at people or dropping bombs, I'd expect that for most skills that a military drone pilot needs for their military missions there are civilian situations where those same skills are useful, and for which using their skills in those civilian situations would improve their ability to do their military missions.
As long as proper safeguards are in place to make sure that they are not put to use in ways that violate our rights, and these civilian uses have a military justification (such as providing cheap or convenient training for the drone operators), I'm open to considering allowing these uses.
>The later might make some sense, though, as part of training for the drone operators. Spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street such as a pothole could require similar skills to spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street due to someone having buried a timed or remote-control explosive there.
Okay never thought of that situation, it would be a good training scenario.
One drawback of this is that some populations are less likely to contribute (eg: immigrants with poor English, poorer communities that don't trust civil authorities, short-term residents in an area filled with rentals) so you end up prioritizing by citizen engagement level and not just by actual pothole level.
You can also report potholes on Waze. Some city governments actively follow Waze [0], so it would be easy for people to report potholes, and the government to watch and see where they need to be filled.
That seems like a good idea but a slight overkill. Why not allow the residents to submit specific location info/pictures of potholes? I wouldn't want to send the city of Boston every car trip I take--especially since I usually do my best to drive around potholes and then it wouldn't be registered in the app.
Your cost is a little off. The Predator system costs $20 million which includes 4 aircraft and a ground station. Each aircraft is roughly $4 million.
According to Time Magazine the operating cost of a single MQ-1 Predator per flight hour is $3,679 which might actually make it cost effective depending on the size of the area to be imaged.
There are both crowdsourced and fleet-oriented apps and systems to do that, and anyone in charge of a bid would know this within 5 minutes of googling the topic from a cold start. It is such a lame excuse I'm inclined to call BS and think it's a cover story.
It's either a cover or the kind of propaganda gig that you see in military dictatorships - "Troops rescue cat from tree!" "Paratroopers deployed to give children candy!" "Death squad visits old people's home with cake!"
For just potholes, yeah, but there is a lot of other municipal infrastructure that could benefit from aerial inspection, especially if they are in non-public, low traffic or otherwise inaccessible areas.
It wouldn't surprise me at all. Up here in Carlsbad, someone is flying an IMSI catcher over the city out of Palomar every couple of weeks or so. I have no doubt they wouldn't bat an eyelash at flying military drones in the sky.
> "Sometimes, new technology changes so rapidly that existing law no longer fit what people think are appropriate," Stanley said.
Sometimes, maybe. I'd argue rarely. I don't see much difference between an unmanned drone and an unmanned satellite or a manned helicopter in terms of applicable law.
Believing that a new law is needed because computers/drones/robots/AI/whatever now exist can lead to bad laws, or laws that are out-of-balance in terms of punishment. (i.e., commit a crime - 5 years. commit the same crime WITH A COMPUTER - 10 years)
> "It's important to remember that the American people do find this to be a very, very sensitive topic."
I think the media finds this to be an eyeball-grabbing topic, but AFAICT, the American people do not care much about it.
Using the military against US citizens is such a horrendous thought, that it's explicitly outlawed. And those drones are easily armed, so if you want a comparison, this isn't like a manned helicopter. It's like a manned Apache helicopter, that just happens to not have a complement of Hellfire and 70mm rockets, patrolling the US skies. People would freak out if they looked up and saw that doing law enforcement duties.
And Americans have been extremely upset over the militarization of our police (much of which gained public exposure after Ferguson). Obama talked about it fairly regularly since then, going so far as to ban sales.
A lot more training and stricter rules of engagement - personally id prefer seal team 6 for dealing with a mass shooting incident ala Paris rather than which ever Podunk police swat team happens to be local.
> Sometimes, maybe. I'd argue rarely. I don't see much difference between an unmanned drone and an unmanned satellite or a manned helicopter in terms of applicable law.
I think the important distinction is police vs millitary, not drone vs satellite vs helicopter. As @protomyth pointed out, there is existing law (Posse Comitatus Act) which may prohibit such things. The article does say that the drone flights were done in accordance with existing laws. But, given the propensity for the FBI to flaunt laws and mislead the public about doing so, I'm not sure how much I trust that statement in the article.
> Believing that a new law is needed because computers/drones/robots/AI/whatever now exist can lead to bad laws, or laws that are out-of-balance in terms of punishment. (i.e., commit a crime - 5 years. commit the same crime WITH A COMPUTER - 10 years)
I agree with this. I don't think new laws should necessarily be specifically created for this. At any rate, it seems like the Posse Comitatus Act should cover this already.
I like your communication here. I would love to explore this in a separate discussion at first glance I would say certain crimes are not possible at magnitude without a computer or technology to assist. With extreme simplification I consider computers to be a tool to increase productivity. With that said, I will agree, the same exact crime in type and magnitude should have the same punishment, not altered.
Laws, and democracy, should be evolving just like we do because our ancestors - 100s of years ago, even 10s of years ago - simply did not come up with timeless solutions to much stuff any more than the people who wrote the bible did a couple thousand years before them.
Some of the things we once defined as just we now consider to be heinous human rights violations that only occur in the worst corners of the world - slavery, inequality etc. Some laws are commonly considered out of date and failing today's society - drugs, mass-incarceration, copyright, patents, marriage.
And if the drones carry ADS-B transceivers and if they show up on other transceivers during flight. (Which would make them visible/trackable to anyone ground or air based that is listening)
Personally, from a law enforcement perspective I don't see the big difference between drones and manned aircraft. What really matters is what kind of sensors are on the aircraft and what they do with the data.
I see a difference. Not today, because military drones (as far as I know) are still human-piloted. But that won't last. And then...
It is the same difference as exists between automatic license plate readers and people standing on a corner with a pad and paper. I realize that a certain mindset (active in legal circles, but not exclusively so) that doesn't see that capabilities end up swallowing the original tradeoffs in some contexts.
Put a different way, you're right. There's no capability difference. Lower cost and automation will simply allow much, much more of the same. Like how automatic weapons offer no capability difference over a single shot rifle - they just do the same thing faster. Hm...
There's a lot of talk about the Posse Comitatus Act[0]. The real distinction is in "intent of the mission". A mission that is:
A)Conducted by United States Army or the United States Air Force, and
B)Conducted to enforce domestic policies within the United States
Would be in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. However, there is disagreement over whether this language may apply to troops used in an advisory, support, disaster response, or other homeland defense role, as opposed to domestic law enforcement.[1]
I guess what I was trying to say is that if it's considered illegal to fly these drones over the US because it violates constitutional rights, consider why that would be and then compare that with the reasoning for allowing it to happen to other citizens of other nations. What exactly is the difference other than the laws?
If the goal of these drones is to spy on terrorists, then isn't it possible that terrorists exist in the US too? If we shouldn't have drones spying on US citizens because it violates our privacy, then shouldn't other citizens of other nations have privacy too?
Maybe it's not so bad (or illegal?) if these drones fly over some middle eastern nation, but what if we started flying them over some western nation like the UK, or Germany (potentially without their consent). Is it still okay then?
The term you are looking for is 'airspace violation'. Violating another countries airspace like that is a dangerous game, in some cases leading to planes being shot down. Now with drones the pilots life are not at risk so countries will have a lower barrier to try this but eventually the country that you this on might retaliate. Wars have started over less in history.
A couple of weeks ago, I was taking in some scenery around Creech AFB, North of Las Vegas. While there, I saw a Predator (although it might have been a MQ-9 Reaper) being launched from the airstrip.
It looked like a giant model aircraft getting launched when the wind hit it. Pretty cool at the time, although after reading this, I hope it was just a training mission over some non-existent Nevada AFB...
I'm definitely no expert, but I'm almost certain I saw low flying drones around Dulles Airport in VA (about an hour from DC) near where I lived in 2005-2009.
While I share your apparent concern for civil liberties, the assumption that we're likely to see armed drone strikes on US soil is hyperbolic and rooted in misapprehension of why the state uses drone strikes abroad.
Drone strikes are used as a replacement for manned air strikes, which in turn are used when a target is too isolated to engage with ground forces.
The reason that we're not going to see drone strikes on US soil is the same reason we don't see air strikes on US soil: you can deploy SWAT teams on US soil.
The actual danger from militarized drones actually comes not from "strikes", in the sense that the military uses them (mostly from large predator style UAVs), but in the militarization of police as it relates to using drones. In this case I am mostly seeing gas powered helo-uav's with armaments attached, and the laws are quickly being passed to dot the i's and cross the t's for LE.
So you are correct in that we won't see hellfire missles deployed on US ground, but rather small arms on wings... which is almost scarier to me simply because a hellfire would raise eyebrows, but a news snippet of using a armed drone to engage a $villan is sure to become normalized far too quickly.
The guy was a very bad person according to his indictments. A judge signed off on it as long as there was no way to arrest and try him, and given it was Yemen, there wasn't.
Now his son on the other hand is extremely questionable and smacks of revenge.
"The Pentagon has publicly posted at least a partial list of the drone missions that have flown in non-military airspace over the United States and explains the use of the aircraft. The site lists nine missions flown between 2011 and 2016, largely to assist with search and rescue, floods, fires or National Guard exercises.
"A senior policy analyst for the ACLU, Jay Stanley, said it is good news no legal violations were found, yet the technology is so advanced that it's possible laws may require revision."
This sounds a lot less dramatic than the article headline, but it's good that this is being reported and discussed publicly.
Total shot in the dark, but perhaps Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel due to his ties to the White House (former Obama chief of staff). What other mayors would even know this type of opportunity existed?!
I also learned at NSA,
we could watch drone videos
from our desktops.
As I saw that, that really
hardened me to action.
- In real time?
- In real time.
Yeah, you... it'll stream
a lower quality of the video
to your desktop.
Typically you'd be watching
surveillance drones
as opposed to actually
like you know murder drones
where they're going out there
and bomb somebody.
But you'll have a drone that's just
following somebody's house
for hours and hours.
And you won't know who it is,
because you don't have
the context for that.
But it's just a page,
where it's lists
and lists of drone feeds
in all these different countries,
under all these different code names,
and you can just click on
which one you want to see.
=======================================
He doesn't say explicitly that this includes the U.S., but I made that assumption and here it is: proven.
The article says absolutely nothing to support your belief. For your assertion to be credible, there would have had to been many more than <20 flights in ten years.
>I doubt any level of wrongdoing within the US Government could shock me anymore.
Worse is that less and less of the population sees any of the things they do as wrongdoing. After all, they're not doing it for power grabs or control - they're doing it to keep us safe and stop the terrorists and catch the paedophiles!
Mass surveillance is one of the first signs of a totalitarian state. History is easier to read about than to learn from. "Not this time." or "That wouldn't happen in {currentYear}" are the defenses.
I'm sure those were the same defense several centuries ago. But this time will be different!
I'm really scared of what the world will look like in another 2-3 decades.
What I don't understand is that the Pentagon isn't the CIA, it is not prohibited to operate in the US, is it? I mean you have ICBM deployed in the US. What not drones?
According to the article (which is all I have to go on) the ACLU reviewed each incident and said they were all legal. Lobby to change the law if you like, but you can't put someone on trial for taking legal actions you find distasteful.
Awesome, another post downplaying the severity of the issue. Why don't YOU lobby to change the law? Right, because I guess you're fine with the surveillance state.
Military resources, such as The National Guard, get called up for disaster relief all of the time. I think I'd rather drones helping people in these scenarios than what they're primarily used for.