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How You Too Can Be Shut Down By the Feds For Flying Drones
An anonymous reader writes "University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Matt Waite waived a government cease and desist letter recently received for his experiments using 3-pound, $500 drones for news reporting (specifically, for a story about drought in Nebraska). He gave journalism organizations the lowdown on what they can expect from the government on this front going forward and said he's posting his experience in trying to get certified by the FAA on GitHub so they can follow along."
Drones have an ability to make truth more evident. Not only people but governments do not like it when truth is available. Any effort to make good use of drones will be met with huge resistance. For example we are willing to spend billions of dollars on a border control as long as it does not work. Imagine what a fleet of drones could do to halt illegal immigration. Now tell me just how likely it is that drones will be heavily used to patrol our borders. I have seen this same phenomena in police work where a couple of cops came up with a great way to curtail drunk driving. Two cops simply waited outside popular bars and stopped drivers who pulled out of the parking lot late at night. Almost 100% of the stops resulted in a valid drunk driving arrest. The city quickly halted the practice. The problem was that the town bordered another town and when word got out people simply drove a few hundred yards to get drunk in the next town's bars. In other words the real working policy of the city was to make a show of stopping drunk driving while making sure that they really did not stop drunk driving.
Drones work too well. By using drones we can expose situations and that endangers all kinds of social institutions. With a good swarm of drones on patrol we could really knock out almost all home burglaries at night. But how many companies and jobs depend on a busy criminal justice system? Society really is that perverted.