As the Times reports today, drones aren't just for indiscriminately killing foreign enemies and civilians anymore: real estate agents, feral hog-killers and Hollywood directors are all realizing the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles. Camera-equipped UAVs can cost as little as $300 and be controlled from an iPhone, and we're about to see a lot more of them. On Tuesday President Obama signed a law that forces the FAA to "allow police and first responders to fly drones under 4.4 pounds" at an altitude of under 400 feet. This is "good" news for the NYPD, which first asked the FAA about acquiring their own drones in December of 2010.
In an email obtained last summer by a FOIA request by Gay City News, an NYPD detective states, "Currently, we are in the basic stages of investigating the possible use of UAV's as a law enforcement tool. So I am contacting the experts in aviation." The Miami-Dade Police Department currently has drones that are ready for use, as does the U.S. Border Patrol. A total of 266 certificates of authority have been issued by the FAA to government agencies to experiment with the use of drones, but they'll have to wait three months to use them in the field.
The FAA has through September of 2015 to implement "the safe integration" of non-governmental, commercial drones into US airspace, but the law the president signed, which "came after intense lobbying by drone makers and potential customers," will benefit the makers of drones sooner than 2015. “We see a huge potential market,” said Ben Gielow of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International told the paper.
But what if we don't want to be constantly under video surveillance, forever? “As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University says. “I don’t think this doctrine makes sense, and I think the widespread availability of drones will drive home why to lawmakers, courts and the public.”
