Slashdot Mirror
Predator Drone Helps Nab Cattle Rustlers
riverat1 writes "KTLA reports police in North Dakota arrested three men accused of cattle rustling with the help of a Predator B drone from nearby Grand Forks AFB. The sheriff of Nelson Country was chased off by three armed men when he went to serve a warrant, so he came back the next morning with reinforcements, including the drone, which, while circling 2 miles overhead, was able to determine the whereabouts of the men on their 3,000 acre spread and the fact that they were unarmed. A SWAT team quickly moved in and apprehended the men. Local police say they have used the Predator drones for at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and DEA have used the drones for domestic investigations as well."
I never would have guessed that they would actually take HL2 as a guide. Did someone forget to tell them it was just a video game?
three men accused of cattle rustling with the help of a Predator B drone
You know, the story would have been a lot cooler this way.
Before anyone goes all ape-s$%t about this being an intrusion of the military into civilian affairs, the drones in question are owned and operated by Customs and Border Patrol, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. They are housed at an Air Force base, but not used nor owned by the USAF.
CBP had been using drones for a couple of years to patrol the borders and this is an extension of that mission. Works better than a helo, especially for very large areas.
I'll take some cattle rustlers over militarized police chasing cattle rustlers any day, thanks. Much like the cure/disease metaphor, not every policing measure targeting every crime improves society, even if successful...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I mean ... that could just as easily be a police helicopter up there as a drone.
It's poorly identified at the story link. The original can be found at latimes.com.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Some bizarre version of Phil Dick, Orwell, Terry Gilliam and Mat Groening.
If William Gibson had imagined anything like "The Kardashians" in Count Zero? It would have seemed over-the-top.
Now, we have the dystopian technologies, without the advances in immersive entertainment that these were supposed to come with.
Predator drones and Jersey Shore. The Jeffersonian experiment is really over.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The six adult Brossarts allegedly belonged to the Sovereign Citizen Movement, an antigovernment group that the FBI considers extremist and violent. The family had repeated run-ins with local police, including the arrest of two family members earlier that day arising from their clash with a deputy over the cattle.
So it's a good chance they were violent nutters, which makes the use of drones a lot more reasonable in my book.
Still, you have to worry about the cost (~$3200 per hour) of using predators for civilian use.
This looks suspiciously like an effort to make the use of Predator drones in conjunction with police investigations seem acceptable to the general public. The fact is the Department of Homeland Security was behind the use of drones in this affair, and this is yet another camel's nose under the tent. A few more stories like this and then stories about the use of drones in police surveillance will no longer be "newsworthy". That's when their use will become truly ubiquitous ... when no one's paying attention any longer.
SWAT teams are often called in when a suspect has threatened violence, and especially when violence is threatened against (presumably) armed law enforcement personnel, as it indicates even less fear about using it. Just because the suspects did not appear armed from the air does not necessarily mean that they couldn't have retrieved weapons rapidly from a vehicle or structure, or that they were not carrying concealed weapons.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The other reason is that there are a lot more SWAT teams than they used to be, so the threshold for calling them out is a lot lower. Gotta justify that taxpayer money spent on fancy equipment somehow...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Once you chase off a sheriff with weapons, your claim to use of excessive police force goes out the window, in my book. Further, the drone technology may have limitations that prevent it from being able to determine whether the suspects were truly unarmed. If you have 3 guys walking around a field, a drone can probably tell that they don't have long guns on them, but I highly doubt that the scan (thermal mode or visual) can detect sidearms. If I were a sheriff, I certainly wouldn't bet my life on that technology.
"The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior."
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The FAA is still trying to figure out how to integrate UAS's. (They are not called UAV's in the FAA NAS system).
Many legal issues remain:
- Enforcing see and avoid rules required in VFR flight
- Defining standards for communication with aircraft
- Who do you enforce rules with a violation when there is an accident if there is no pilot
- How to handle technical issues such as loss of control / software failure, physical issues such as loss of a trim type control, flap system, etc.
- Weather issues such as high winds, icing
As a pilot and somebody active in aviation software, I'm interested to see where things go here. The reason the military has been able to fly UAV's is because they don't have any rules. Do whatever you want. But in the civil area, we have rules because we choose to protect ourselves from our government and others.
The tech is not infallible. They appeared unarmed would be more accurate.
I do feel that the whole "police UAVs = 1984" thing is slightly odd, given that all a UAV is in this role is a cheaper police helicopter. Unless your objection is specifically against all cameras between altitudes of 1.6m and 100km, I don't see much difference between the platform being manned or unmanned.
"The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior." http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556
Yeah. Whoda thunk cattle rustling was against the law?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I do feel that the whole "police UAVs = 1984" thing is slightly odd, given that all a UAV is in this role is a cheaper police helicopter. Unless your objection is specifically against all cameras between altitudes of 1.6m and 100km, I don't see much difference between the platform being manned or unmanned.
It's the same thing as a GPS tracker on a car vs a full surveillance team. In both cases the problem is that the new tech is much cheaper. Because it is cheaper it will be used much more frequently and by many more agencies. My local police department can't afford their own helicopter, but 10 years from now I wouldn't be surprised if they have a drone.
It boils down to the previous expense made it much less common, and traceable. You probably couldn't use a police helicopter to follow some guy who made your shitlist 24/7, but drones will soon make that sort of thing inevitable. At least when this stuff was less common abuses were also less common; when it was more expensive, accountability was also higher.
Because the government was never meant to have near omnipotent power over its citizens, which is where we are headed.
Originally, citizens were allowed guns to protect them from the military (and conceivably the police).
But now technology and tactics have advanced to where you cannot protect yourself from the government at all.
Sure crime, murder, and disorder are bad. But I don't want to live in a country where absolutely none of those exist because the government has absolute control of everything. The government does not even have to abuse this power (simply for that amount of power to exist is an abuse of power) for it to be a dystopia.
It helps to keep the government honest and just to know that really to control the country you need at least 50% of the citizens behind you. But with all the weapons, tech, and know how we have today the government could enforce anything on the people with only a comparative handful of people working with them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The original LA Times article says the drone belongs to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. No military involved.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211,0,72624,full.story
It's not just the UAVs. It's probably also the red light cameras. A war the will never end (there always has been and always will be the threat of terror/fear). The bill going through congress to allow the military to detain U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without trial (with huge bi-partisan and little outrage from the citizenry). Carrier IQ. The idea that a private vendor doesn't have to play by the same rules as the government even if they're acting on behalf of the government. The government needs a warrant to tap your phone, or they can just buy the info from your provider. No one thing makes 1984 and each piece can be justified.
When drones become autonomous we will just say 'I don't see what the big deal is, if you're breaking the law it's no different than a person catching you'. That's already the argument for traffic enforcement via cameras.
It's a hard argument to say any one thing equals 1984.
Here is the problem that I haven't seen anyone else mention yet:
The problem is that it is military personnel and equipment that are helping local law enforcement. If law enforcement wants to get their own drones, that's a different matter. But the military has absolutely no place getting involved in civilian law enforcement affairs, even to offer "innocent" help.
If there was ever something that could be called a genuine slippery slope, this is it.