WASHINGTON | Thousands of drones patrolling U.S. skies?
Predictions that multitudes of unmanned aircraft could be flying here within a decade are raising the specter of a "surveillance society" in which no home or backyard would be off limits to prying eyes overhead. Law enforcement, oil companies, farmers, real estate agents and many others have seen the technology that was pioneered on battlefields, and they are eager to put it to use.
It's not just talk: The government is in the early stages of devising rules for the unmanned aircraft.
So far, civilian use of drones is fairly limited. The Federal Aviation Administration had issued fewer than 300 permits for drones by the end of last year.
(The Polk County Sheriff's Office experimented with a 2-pound drone in 2009 and 2010, but decided that it would be too costly to continue using since the FAA requires anyone who operates one to have a pilot's license, spokesman Scott Wilder told The Ledger last month.)
Public worries about drones began mostly on the political margins, but there are signs that they're going mainstream.
Jeff Landry, a freshman Republican congressman from Louisiana's coastal bayou country, says constituents have stopped him while shopping at Walmart to talk about their concerns.
"There is a distrust amongst the people who have come and discussed this issue with me about our government," Landry said. "It's raising an alarm with the American public."
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WASHINGTON -- Thousands of drones patrolling U.S. skies?
Predictions that multitudes of unmanned aircraft could be flying here within a decade are raising the specter of a "surveillance society" in which no home or back yard would be off limits to prying eyes overhead.
Police, oil companies, farmers, real estate agents and many others have seen the technology that was pioneered on battlefields, and they are eager to put it to use.
It's not just talk: The government is in the early stages of devising rules for the unmanned aircraft.
So far, civilian use of drones is fairly limited. The Federal Aviation Administration had issued fewer than 300 permits for drones by the end of last year.
Public worries about drones began mostly on the political margins, but there are signs that they're going mainstream.
Fear that some drones might be armed, for example, has been fueled in part by a county sheriff's office in Texas that used a Homeland Security grant to buy a $300,000, 50-pound ShadowHawk helicopter drone for its SWAT team.
The drone can be equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 12-gauge shotgun.
Randy McDaniel, chief deputy with the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, said this year that his office had no plans to arm the drone.
However, he left open the possibility the agency might adapt the drone to fire tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.
Congress, under pressure from the Defense Department and drone manufacturers, this year ordered the FAA to give drones greater access to civilian airspace by 2015.
Besides the military, the mandate applies to drones operated by private companies or individuals and civilian government agencies, including federal, state and local law enforcement.
Power companies want them to monitor transmission lines. Farmers want to fly them over fields to detect which crops need water. Ranchers want them to count cows.
Journalists are exploring drones' newsgathering potential. Police departments want them to chase crooks, conduct search and rescue missions and catch speeders.
But concern is spreading.
Rep. Austin Scott, a freshman Republican from Georgia, said he first learned of the issue when someone shouted out a question about drones at a GOP meeting in his district two months ago.
The level of apprehension is especially high in the conservative blogosphere, where headlines blare, "30,000 Armed Drones to be Used Against Americans" and "Government Drones Set to Spy on Farms in the United States."
There's concern as well among liberal civil liberties advocates that government and private-sector drones will be used to gather information on Americans without their knowledge.
Giving drones greater access to U.S. skies moves the nation closer to "a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities," the American Civil Liberties Union declared in a report last December.
An ACLU lobbyist, Chris Calabrese, said that when he speaks to audiences about privacy issues, drones are what "everybody just perks up over."
"People are interested in the technology, they are interested in the implications and they worry about being under surveillance from the skies," he said. The anxiety has spilled into Congress, where lawmakers from both parties have met to discuss legislation that would broadly address the civil-liberty issues.
The backlash has drone makers concerned.
The market is expected to nearly double over the next 10 years, from current worldwide expenditures of nearly $6 billion annually to more than $11 billion, with police departments accounting for a significant part of that growth.
"We go into this with every expectation that the laws governing public safety and personal privacy will not be administered any differently for (drones) than they are for any other law enforcement tool," said Dan Elwell, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association.
Discussion of the issue has been colored by exaggerated drone tales spread largely by conservative media and bloggers.
Scott said he was prompted to introduce a bill to prohibit any government agency from using a drone to "gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a regulation" without a warrant in part by news reports that the Environmental Protection Agency has been using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska.
The Environmental Protection Agency has indeed been searching for illegal dumping of waste into streams, but it is doing it with piloted planes.
In another case, a forecast of 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by 2020 has been widely attributed to the FAA.
But FAA spokeswoman Brie Sachse said the agency has no idea where the figure came from.
It may be a mangled version of an aerospace industry forecast that there could be nearly 30,000 drones worldwide by 2018, with the U.S. accounting for half of them.
http://www.theledger.com/article/20...kies-Raise-Fear-of-8216-Surveillance-Society-
