Big Brother is watching you more closely than ever — and soon, perhaps, with drones. The pilotless aircraft that the U.S. government has used to spy on (and kill) insurgents in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were approved by the Federal
Big Brother is watching you more closely than ever — and soon, perhaps, with drones. The pilotless aircraft that the U.S. government has used to spy on (and kill) insurgents in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were approved by the Federal Aviation Administration last week for local law enforcement. Federal officials already had that permission.
Police drones soon could be flying over Americans’ heads, surveilling everything from people watering their lawns when that’s banned during a drought to swimming in their backyard pools. It’s similar to what police already can do with helicopters. But drones are much quieter, cheaper — and getting cheaper by the day.
Police choppers can cost $500,000 to $3 million. Drones cost from $20,000 to $30,000. Fuel, maintenance and operations also are much cheaper. Drone crashes also don’t kill pilots, perhaps only the occasional civilian.
Recent technology allows drones to spot patterns of crop growth, such as that of a sick person growing medical marijuana on an apartment porch, people smoking cigarettes where banned in public parks or drivers talking on hand-held cellphones.
The privacy issue is “similar to that raised by videos” in public places, Jacob Sullum told us; he’s a senior editor at Los Angeles-based Reason magazine and has written widely on privacy issues. He said that court rulings have allowed police surveillance in public places because there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy. “The problem is, you can set up networks of these cameras on street corners,” he said. “It’s cheaper than putting a cop on every corner.”
Another analogy, he said, was to police attaching tracking devices to a person’s car without a warrant. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that intrusion unconstitutional. That ruling concerned the violation of a physical piece of property, a vehicle. But a majority of justices also expressed concern that the amount of data collected — aside from the property issue — also could be a violation of privacy.
Although the courts allow government helicopters to spy on people, there relatively aren’t that many such aircrafts in use. It could be another matter if a much greater number of drones were routinely patrolling the skies.
And the courts still haven’t declared whether police can gather cellphone data, such as whom someone has called during the past month, without court permission. All these matters “will have to be sorted out” in court, Sullum said. “This is very intrusive surveillance without court supervision.”
For now, at least, Orange County is in the clear. Jim Amormino, director of media relations for Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Sandra Hutchens, told us there’s “no plans for that.” He also didn’t “know of any” plans for drone use by any city police department in Orange County. That’s commendable. We urge Orange County supervisors and city councils to resist the urge to deploy such drones.
But we’re still not in the clear. “The feds predict that they will dispatch or authorize about 30,000 of these unmanned aerial vehicles across America in the next 10 years,” warned former Judge Andrew Napolitano, now senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. He asked, “If the drone operator sees you doing anything of interest (Is your fertilizer for the roses or to fuel a bomb? Is that Sudafed for your cold or your meth habit? Are you smoking in front of your kids?), the feds say they may take a picture of you and keep it.”
Ubiquitous government surveillance was one element of the nightmare society depicted in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” Authorities today should not be in a hurry to make the analogy any more apt.
