There are a lot of obvious benefits to drone technology: Tracking fugitives. Examining ecological changes. Disaster response (a drone might have spotted the huge crowd of refugees that gathered at the New Orleans Convention Center for days in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; as it was the people at FEMA and DHS were effectively blind and ignorant).
But the coming of drones is also going to hand a singular new power to any public or private entity that makes use of drones, powers that are easily abused. Consider what we already have: large law-enforcement bureaucracies fighting a war that never ends and has no boundaries, operating in legally-ill-defined manners which infringe on the common understanding of individual rights going back several centuries. Add into that a new domestic surveillance tool, and a weapon. It raises some knotty issues.
Here’s (of all people) Charles Krauthammer:
I'm going to go hard left on you. I'm going to go ACLU. I don't want regulations. I don't want restrictions. I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military, inside of the United States. They didn't like standing armies. It has all kinds of statutes against using the army in the country. A drone is a high-tech version of an old Army-issue musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt the bad guys. But not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home. You can say we've got satellites, we've got Google Street, and London has a camera on every street corner.
But that's not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you're always being watched by the government. This is not what we want. I would say you ban it under all circumstances. And I would predict -- I'm not encouraging, but I would predict the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's hovering over his house is gonna be a folk hero in this country.
A ban on all domestic drones is short-sighted, not to mention politically impossible; the technology is there, and valuable, and the political and economic pressure to put it to use will be irresistible. (Read this New Yorker piece - paywalled, alas - to get a sense of who is making the drones and what their business plan is.) But his point is compelling: sooner or later, the use of drones (even if not armed) will result in a collision between the ever-more pervasive surveillance state and individual rights. So far the surveillance state has quietly won out every time, with little serious public objection, but it functions almost entirely sub-rosa, in the sphere of electronic surveillance, with the exception of air travel and border crossings.
With domestic drones, the surveillance state (or, since we are dealing with multiple levels of government now, states) will grow progressively harder to ignore. It’s one thing for Americans to hear about Afghans in remote villages getting blown up by a drone. But what happens when drones are employed in tense police situations in your hometown? They’ll get credit when things go well, but blamed if Krauthammer’s Second Amendment scenario comes to pass. The more of them there are, the more likely accidents and abuses will occur. Some public anger will be directed at the parties directly responsible, but it will also turn to the sky, and the web of eyes on us.
At this early stage, it's hard to tell how this will go. But there are some warning signs. So far the possible domestic military uses of drones remain unclear. Nor do we know much about current drone operators:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based free-speech advocacy group, filed suit against the FAA last year to force the agency to reveal the identities of drone operators.
“I don’t think the FAA should be increasing the number of drone flights until they at least release the information on who is flying drones already,” Jennifer Lynch, a foundation staff attorney, said in a phone interview today.
The FAA released names last month of agencies that had applied to fly drones. It has not provided any additional details about the restrictions it imposes and how those drones are used, Lynch said.
I wish I had some sense that out politicians and agencies were capable of anticipating problems and acting judiciously; unfortunately the bureaucratic surveillance state is all about pushing boundaries.
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