How you going to feel when you get a glimpse of a drone circling high above your neighborhood? Ready for an all out war on your privacy? Seems the feds would like nothing more than to approve drone use for local cops. The FAA is working on rules and regulations to allow public agencies to fly them bad boys over America’s skies. Yea, the same ones that fly over the Middle East are going to be in the hands of law enforcement. Seems the cops want the toys. I say hell no.
FoxNews reports:
…the government is taking a tool that has become synonymous with U.S. counterterror warfare in countries like Pakistan and Yemen — and putting it in the hands of U.S. law enforcement.
Unlike some of the drones used overseas, these will not be equipped with missiles. They are to be used purely for surveillance. But that alone has raised serious privacy concerns on Capitol Hill and beyond.
“Our Founding Fathers had no idea that there would be remote-control drones with television monitors that can feed back live data instantaneously — but if they had, they would have made darn sure … that these things were subject to the Fourth Amendment (protecting individual privacy),” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, told Fox News.
Proponents argue that they will not be used for constant surveillance. That they can only stay aloft for 30 minutes. Yea. Sure. And you believe anything the government says?
Drones will be flying in the American skies. They already have been. The question is how intrusive into our privacy are we going to allow them to get.
Lawmakers like Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, say there are “legitimate uses” for drones on U.S. soil, but that strict privacy standards will be needed.
“It would be okay for a drone to be used in order to make sure that all the cattle on a ranch are identified on an ongoing basis. It’s okay … to survey a forest to make sure there are no forest fires. But it would not be okay if that individual who purchased the drone then decided ‘I think I’ll go and check and see what’s going on over in my neighbor’s backyard’,” Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said. “That would be wrong and that has to be protected against.”
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed.
“We don’t want a situation where every time we walk out of our front door we have to look up and wonder whether some invisible eye in the sky is monitoring us, you know, constantly,” he said. “There are good uses for drones that everybody agrees with, but what we don’t’ want to see are drones used for constant, persistent, suspicion-less surveillance where we are all being watched for no particular reason.”
Leviathan must be fed.
