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FAA Bill Authorizes Surveillance Drones Over US
fyngyrz writes "Congress passed a bill this week that makes it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace. From the article: 'The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015. Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.'"
Why spend so much money shipping these things to drop errant bombs on brown people when we can save the cash and do it right here at home?
If you aren't doing anything illegal, you really have nothing to hide. The world will be a safer place.
"Eeeee! Teh dronz!" Ahem...
Put the same equipment in a manned aircraft and it's a snoozer.
Some appropriate Beechcraft antenna pron. I like antennae (328X0 represent!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beechcraft_RC-12N_Huron_in_flight.jpg
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
...as privately owned anti-aircraft missiles are also legalized :-)
Why spy on your citizens when the overwhelmingly large majority never do anything seriously wrong?
Seems this is not a cost-effective way to catch some bad guys.
Of course, it is cheaper than have helicopters with a 2-man crew... but "cheaper than ridiculously expensive" can still mean "too expensive".
Exactly. This has to do with unmanned aircraft, which is entirely orthogonal to surveillance aircraft.
Personally, I'd like to see unmanned cargo flights; there's no real reason why every UPS/FedEx plane needs any human beings on it at all. (Of course, I supposed that would have ruined the movie Castaway).
captcha: "airmail". heh.
> Put the same equipment in a manned aircraft and it's a snoozer.
Interesting point. I guess on some level, we're hoping that with a manned aircraft, an egregiously and obviously illegal order to target U.S. citizens might be disobeyed or even made public.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
View from a drone over the US:
- people, looking like ants, moving about their daily business
- drone operator clicks on a button, tags overlay on the image, connecting each "ant" with their phone number, sensed by nearby cell tower geolocation
Oh you poor fool, Ron Paul is one of "them" as well.
Until the automation fails and the plane crashes into a residential area.
There was an article on the bbc yesterday about small UAV's being used to verify crop types etc etc for the purpose of auditing EU farming subsidies. Certain subsidies are dependant upon farmers keeping wide headlands of wild flowers etc and there is also a subsidiy called "set aside" paid for taking land out of production. They were saying that in countries such as spain which has a large number of small fields and hilly terrain UAV's were far more practical than satelite imagery (shadows in valleys etc) as they allowed oblique imagery not just top down
This in itself is not unreasonable. I can see many potential legitimate uses for pilotless drones both for law enforcement and such things as disaster recovery. In itself there's nothing wrong with this law.
What is unreasonable is law enforcements desire to spy on everyone all the time. This is something that needs to be addressed, but it needs to be addressed directly. Not by attacking legislation that happens to enable it. We need to fight for legislation that explicitly sets limits on where the police are allowed to watch us.
The 8 foot high walls surrounding my backyard are the only things keeping me from being charged with exposing myself in public when I'm sunbathing in the nude to combat my pasty basement-programmer appearance.
I currently have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my own back yard, even though aeroplanes and satellites pass overhead because they're most likely not actively recording video of the ground.
Will children be prevented from accessing the drone footage? How can you be sure when such young hackers exist today?!
Will they be publishing the planned flight paths of the drones so I can know when my reasonable expectations of privacy have become unreasonable? If not... Why Not? I'm not sure I want children playing in the vicinity of flying machines build by the lowest-bidder of a government contract.
Additionally, I've been working up the plans for a very large parabolic solar reflector, capable of "flash-tanning" me in mere milliseconds, or even acting as a large out door oven. I won't focus the mirrors as high as airliners fly, for obvious reasons; However, I must leave the oven focused far above the ground to prevent children from accidentally burning themselves.
Won't someone Think of the Children?!
Without flight plans for these new low-flying craft, they can't possibly hold me accountable for such accidents involving the drones. I've done my duty by informing the government agencies of my physical address, and herein have publicly exposed my habits. It surely won't be my fault if a drone fails to avoid flying above my home, and gets caught in the path of my new death-ray...
private companies would be free to do much worse under the banner of "individual liberty."
- There is nothing that a private company can do that can ever compare to what a dictatorial totalitarian government can do and has done and is doing.
Government has the structure, the power and the legitimacy to operate in a way that is similarly legitimate, after all, the MSM and the courts and the police and the army is under the control of government and no private company can control people in this way, and even if a private company becomes de-facto government, it then is no longer just a company - it's either a dictatorship or it is a democracy of some sort with elections, etc.
Government is what governs, and it is up to the people to decide who governs them, and currently it looks like the people of USA have decided.
You can't handle the truth.
have you seen the number of stories floating about talking about how primitive, out of touch, our Constitution is.
As in, its getting in their way more and more and they really don't like it. Worse, there are people in our country clamoring for stricter adherence to it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Actually, it's reasonable, knowledgeable and aware citizens this country needs. Ron Paul isn't insane, 98% of Americans are.
That's because most automation failures are corrected by pilots. Electronic components fail regularly, which is usually no big deal as long as there are humans to fix things and fly manually if necessary. If every autopilot failure would result in a crash, there would be multiple crashes every day.
This is what gets me about my countrymen: they get all bent out of shape and spew shit like "small government", "freedom" and whatnot over TAXES - one of the lowest rates in the industrialized World, but when it comes to government surveillance and monitoring under the PATRIOT Act, no problemo. If you do nothing wrong, there's nothing to worry about is the attitude among John Q. Public. Outside of the Slashdot crowd here, most people that I know at least, think there's nothing wrong about the Patriot Act. I keeps them "safe" after all from those Muslims that want to kill us over our fredom and make us live under Sharia law. You'll never see a Teabagger dress up as Franklin or Jefferson saying "Abolish our police state!" Nah uh. Not gonna happen.
Americans don't know what Freedom is, I'm afraid. Most of us think Freedom is no taxes.
A person is smart. People are stupid.
...as long as civilians get to use drones to watch the police, members of congress, etc. You know, the stuff we're supposed to do in a democracy.
I mean, what is wrong with the current aviation laws in this regard, there is nothing stopping them operating unmanned aircraft under the current laws. They are fairly relaxed laws, one can fly any unmanned aircraft provided certain conditions are met (line of site, fail safe radio control, low altitude limit...), if one goes outside these regulations one must have flight worthiness certificate, registered pilot, contact air traffic control, transponders onboard... same as any other aircraft. There is nothing in the current (FAA) regulations as far as I know that would require a new bill to allow police and private companies to fly unmanned aircraft.
So far I haven't had any fellow pilots fail on me, but I can't begin to count the number of failures of navigation systems, autopilots, etcetera that I've experienced. The automation does usually work much more precisely than humans, but it lacks common sense and sometimes just completely fails. That's when things get interesting for us pilots. The industry is not even close to beginning to consider getting rid of pilots or even going down to a single pilot in airliners. Except the military with their drones which, guess what, do crash frequently. For them, the benefits outweigh the cost of losing the occasional piece of equipment.
Ok, I understand the concerns about privacy and all but what can a drone do that a well placed spy satellite can't? If they want to have tabs on all citizens in the country the can do that already, from space. Or they can fly manned air craft. The US Federal Government does not need this bill to spy on you and though cost might be an issue does it really look like the Fed cares about how much it spends? What this is about is whither or not local/state governments, or private citizens can use drones. I for one would like to see drone based delivery services, who doesn't want pizza delivered by a small helicopter hovering out your apartment window.
Please sell me an EMF pulse gun to use against any drone flying in my airspace.
BTW, what is a property owner's airspace? How high from the ground does "No Trespassing" apply? It has to be more than just a few inches from the ground. How much more?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I juat want to paint a huge dick on my roof now
Spending is fundamentally different when you're spending other people's money. When you spend your own money (for example you own a business), you view every dollar as an investment and make damn sure every dollar is accounted for. When your spending doesn't bring a return, you stop.
In the business of government, on the other hand, the people spending the money aren't spending their own money. They don't care where it comes from or where it goes -- what matters is that it passes through their hands, giving them a chance to exploit that cash flow for personal gain. The rules are different, the outcome is different, and the people making the decisions are different. They are there for personal gain, same as the private business owner -- but their business strategy is entirely different. Their profits don't come from making an honest return on every dollar. Their profits aren't tied to success or failure, but rather how much political leverage they control with those dollars.
When the bureaucrat's spending fails to bring a return, this isn't a reason to stop. This is a justification for more spending.
You're not in the business of government, are you?
I am placing the blame on the people who have not held the government to the standard, the only standard that matters - only electing people who strictly adhere to the law above the government - the US Constitution, which would have prevented all of the nonsense, from IRS with all types of income taxes and Fed with money printing and fixing price of money (interest rates) and FDIC and minimum wage and SS and Medicare, to permanent wars and Patriot Act and NDAA and ACTA and DMCA and eventually SOPA and this bill and everything else.
You can't handle the truth.
Schiff's bizarre and self-contradictory farrago of truths, half-truths, and outright lies
- you can say whatever you like, but none of it is factual.
For example I can say about your post: "this half brained comment indicates that the poster is mentally challenged and is also a Marxist sympathiser, which makes him dangerous for the well being of economy and by extension of the society, we should all pay attention to this posters and make sure to isolate him as soon as possible to prevent the inevitable repercussions of his ideology as it takes hold of the feeble minds of the public in various public forums."
Does that mean that everything that is said above is true and correct? It doesn't mean such a thing, but it would put you on a defensive.
--
a vast and self-righteous greed
- translation: complete and unapologetic understanding of economics and ability to use that understanding over the past 20 years to make a multi-million dollar fortune from scratch.
expressed as a desire to bear no part of the cost of civilization
- translation: strict adherence to the principles of private property and individual liberty that allows Mr. Schiff to make money for his clients and for himself, thus ensuring that their personal wealth is not destroyed and is saved from the whims of the crowd represented by the so called 'democracy', which in reality is the dictatorship of the mob, which is only voting itself to steal from others and give to themselves, to maintain their 'bread and circuses' way of life.
evulsion for any moral or ethical conduct that might conceivably cause loss of personal wealth.
- translation: basing the moral code on the only meaningful standard - adherence to the individual rights of property and liberty, denouncement of the ability of the collective to destroy the individual.
He has deified the worse aspects of his own character and expects all of us to worship at his altar.
- translation: he has successfully predicted the debt bubbles of the dot-com era, the housing bubble and the incoming currency and bond bubble, which allowed him to make money for his clients and for himself and now he owns a number of businesses specialising in ensuring that his clients are unaffected by the destruction of the economy caused by the political system of bread and circuses.
He admits openly that he will do everything he can to betray his own country economically whenever he can find a foreign land that will allow him to treat his workers in a way that he himself is clearly unwilling to be treated.
- translation: he firmly adheres to the principle of voluntarism and non-violence, he is only interested in the market pricing of everything, including the pricing of labour. He owns parts of various businesses, for example oil extraction business that uses modern technology of hydraulic fracturing in order to achieve much better efficiencies. He owns equity in various income producing companies around the world and he owns real money - gold, silver. He is absolutely dead set on making sure that his clients and himself are sheltered from the incoming economic collapse that will be caused by the central planning and bills of credit issuing authority the way he understands it . He sees it not only as his fiduciary obligation but also as his moral obligation to protect investments of his clients and of his own against the immoral and illegal behaviour of the government systems.
He has either never heard of the Categorical Imperative, or is incapable of comprehending its pragmatic utility.
- translation: he is unbending in his quest for personal freedom and liberty, and he is fully aware that this can only be achieved by completely denying the power of the collective over the rights of the individual (and obviously he is absolutely unabash
You can't handle the truth.
You can pretend that your socialist ideology has nothing to do with totalitarianism and dictatorship, but you will only be able to lie to yourself, not to people who see it for what it is, and especially not to people who lived through it, and I have.'
Socialism is only possible with a strong dictatorial control gby government power and I am as uninterested in socialism as I am in fascism and to me their differences are so irrelevant because their similarities are so unbearable.
I say no to any form of government controlled health care, social security, wars, wage and price fixing, control of money, regulations of business, destruction of individual liberties and freedoms and all forms of 'social safety nets'. These are all immoral and unjust and must be fought with every bit of strength we can master to prevent us being slaves of that system.
You can't handle the truth.
I know everyone here in /. is going to be all up in arms over this as either police state violations of privacy or the "military-industrial complex" attacking citizens (thus the first post) But you all need to know that this was a MUCH less problematic bill than the regulations that the FAA was coming up with ON THEIR OWN.
The FAA was working on a new set of rules and regs that would have put UAV use and development COMPLETELY into the hands of the big military provider companies (Northrop Grumman, Boeing, etc.) Basically they started a new SUAS (Small Unmanned Aerial Systems, the formal name for what we call a UAV) rule process and completely left out ALL the small business and FPV hobbyist (not to mention regular citizen) concerns. The bill passed in Congress is actually a direct reaction to that and is designed to MINIMIZE the lock-in that the "Militray-Industrial complex" has on the sales and USE of SUASs in the United States.
It also has large set-asides for Hobbyist users (such as myself) and for regular citizens to create and use SUAS technology. Basically, it leaves WIDE OPEN the door for regular citizens to "watch the watchers". It's not perfect, and there are some restrictions in there that should be lifted or modified, but it's far and away better than what the unelected FAA members were about to do under the influence of "The Military-Industrial Complex".
This is why I'm conservative. Bureaucracies are by far and away the easiest things for Big Corp. or the MIC to corrupt. Bureaucrats are unelected, unaccountable, and largely uncontrollable. Thus large centralized governments INEVITABLY become corrupt, regardless of how many "controls" we put on them. (in the end, they just ignore the law anyway, so why have them?)
If concerned citizens hadn't started action on this item in time, the FAA's version of the rules would have gone into force and citizens and small businesses would have been completely locked out of SUAS and possibly even HOBBY airplane use. It would have been very bad indeed.
So while I'm not entirely satisfied with the new law, it is FAR better than the alternative we would have received otherwise. (Sadly, because of the existence of over-sized and corrupt bureaucracies like the FAA, the "Just leave us alone" option wasn't available.)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Would a human pilot have done any better with his sensors and position data jammed?
Yes, a human pilot with sensors and position data jammed would still know how to fly out of enemy territory. He could find north by simply looking where the sun is, for example. He might have trouble finding his base, but he sure as hell would be able to get out of enemy territory.
Look at the 2009 Air France crash, the pilots ignored the warnings by the computer and did just the opposite of what they warnings told them and crashed the plane.
They had to take control because the autopilot had disengaged. Without pilots, the plane might have continued flying until it ran out of fuel and then crashed. With different pilots, similar events have been correctly handled on numerous occasions. Also, the information available to the pilots was ambiguous. In fact, at some point the stall warning stopped and then started again each time they (correctly!) tried to push the nose forward, giving them the impression they were doing something wrong.
Yes, they should never have put the plane into a stall by pulling back on the stick, but no, they were not doing "the opposite of what the warnings told them".
What can I tell you, I spent plenty of time in Germany within the last 2.5 years, I don't do too much business here, it's just a place I spend time in except for a number of other places, where I spend time and do business (and I moved almost all business out of North America), but I do what I do specifically to avoid the mix of socialism/fascism that is permeating USA, and I see Asia as a much freer market to work with and it is proving to be the case. I pay for the health care out of pocket and have a health insurance in case something very bad and very expensive actually happens, which is what health insurance is supposed to be in the first place. I worked and studied back in my school and later college and university years, always paying out of pocket with the money I actually earned to do all that studying, and no, I never see entitlements for some and obligations upon others as 'rights', thus it is never a 'human right' to expect the collective to provide anybody with any product and or service.
You can't handle the truth.
Can a drone do more? Yes:
- see under clouds
- move in any direction to get a better look
- get much closer
The big thing is that a drone can do the same thing a LOT CHEAPER. Cheap enough to be available for just about anyone. That's the scarier part. Just a few examples:
- cheaper cameras - because it is a lot closer and doesn't deal with hardships of space.
- cheaper radios - because it is a lot closer and doesn't deal with hardships of space. In fact it can just record to a card then fly back to is owner, not even needing a transmitter.
And yet, every day we are witness to and victims of the depredations of unelected bureaucrats who trample our civil liberties and freedoms in clear violation of the Constitution and nothing whatsoever is done about it save said bureaucrats having a good chuckle about it over coffee.
Also, if the task of electing that many officials is a problem, then perhaps we could do with an order of magnitude LESS officials. Very few bureaucracies are actually critical to the function of good government. Most could be partly or wholly done away with and nobody would notice, now or in the future.
Smaller, cheaper, leaner and less intrusive government is something every freedom-loving person should want. Those who want MORE government invariably want to use it against YOU.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Oh, fercrissake... Ron Paul? Who do you think wants this "socialist" authoritarianism? THE GOD DAMNED CORPORATIONS! Aside from the right to smoke dope, the only freedoms Paul are after are the freedoms to screw workers, wreck the environment, and screw corporate "consumers".
Most of the repressive laws that have been written in my not short life have been passed by conservatives.
The Libertarian idea of "freedom" is insane. Take Illinois, they're talking about outlawing hand held cell phones while driving. The Libertarians are screaming about how it "takes away our liberty, just like seat belt laws." Wrong. Whether or not you're wearing a seat belt doesn't affect me at all, but your inability to pay attention to the road certainly does.
I've worn seat belts long before they were mandatory, but I'm dead set against the mandate (I'll make an exception for kids). Cell phones while driving? Hell, why not make it legal for my next door neighbor to manufacture explosives in his garage? If he's out in the country, fine, but not next to MY house!
Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. There's no reason whatever why you can't have both liberty and good social structures. "Socialist" Europe seems to be freer in most respect than we Americans.
Free Martian Whores!