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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.
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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.
That's just the first layer. Now you also have names, perhaps also personal and social connections because you have a Facebook or similar account. It could be interesting for sociological studies and literally knowing who your audience is. The police state would be thrilled, too.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
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...
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.
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.
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
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 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.)
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