Since we learned last year that President Obama uses unmanned aerial vehicles to rain death from the sky on American citizens, the word "drone" has occupied the space of your brain usually reserved for "ramps" or "hipsters" or any other topic that's repeated ad nauseum until its mere mention sounds like a weird bleat from a humanoid goat. But drones will almost certainly be more pervasive than the root that jazzes up your omelet. In October the Electronic Frontier Foundation received a list of the 81 public entities that had active permits from the FAA to fly drones. Today, Reuters reports that 1,428 public institutions received permits to use drones on U.S. soil—including the State Department, law enforcement agencies, and universities—and 327 of those permits remain active.
Commercial use of drones is prohibited until 2015, but because the FAA is busy with the 7,000 giant flying tubes that are in the sky at all times, drones are being used constantly to shoot movies, monitor crops, or detail property for real estate firms. "Turn on your TV and pay close attention to major sports events. You'll see that in many cases they are getting aerial shots using a UAS (unmanned aerial system)," said Ben Miller, a sheriff's deputy in Colorado who has a permit from the FAA to pilot drones. "I would venture to say that if you've seen an action movie in the last five years, chances are that a UAS was used."
Drone use by hobbyists is currently legal, so you can just ignore the persistent humming outside your window while you're showering.
Here's the EFF's interactive map of the active permit holders. Interestingly enough, the NYPD is not on the list of users as of last October, despite evidence in 2011 that they were looking into obtaining the technology. Then again, when you've got more than 3,000 cameras trained on Manhattan alone, you can probably afford to sit tight until the legal dust settles.
