I thought that was interesting. Also, I'm not sure why we need a specific law on the books to prevent people from being summarily executed by the government without due process. It's substantially disturbing that it might be necessary though.
The problem is we are already executing American citizens overseas with drones without trial or due process. They may have been terrorists but they are still citizens and have a right to defend themselves against the charges presented to them.
It's not a huge stretch that someone could be considered a domestic terrorist and be targeted.
The rules of war on a battlefield are not and cannot be the same as the rules of civilized society. The problem is that today the two have become far too mixed, and the boundaries of what is a battlefield during a time of war have become indistinct and blurry. To the extent that basically anything outside US borders can fit the bill at any given time, depending on the circumstances.
I would say that this definitely goes way too far and we'll probably need a constitutional amendment to fix it.
I feel like we need an enforced Single Responsibility Principle for legislation. I sometimes wonder how effective it would be to require that all bills be less than, say, ten pages long. Banning armed drones except for the military is probably a good idea, but as anigbrowl pointed out[0], it doesn't have much to do with privacy.
"The bill stipulates that drones operated by the government must obtain a warrant before they can “collect information that can identify individuals in a private area.” In public areas, the government has to post notice that it will be collecting information in that location."
With cameras, infra-red, mics, and x-ray, they're a real threat to privacy. They could even be armed with mobile and wifi tapping technology.
Police or other government agents are already required to get a warrant before collecting information. It doesn't matter if it's a phone tap, an unmanned aircraft, or a GoPro on a stick! Is it necessary to re-iterate existing laws for every new technology that pops up?
The police are already prevented from using helicopters to collect visual information from places that would not ordinarily be visible. I can't see why drones would be any different.
I really think people are responding to the somewhat disconcerting idea of drones watching you from the air while you're out in public. Essentially, people are worried about cops having a more efficient way to do something they could legally already do: observe you while you are in public.
By what logic do you think the police are prevented from using helicopters to collect ordinarily unobservable areas? The main relevant Supreme Court case I could remember was Kyllo v. US [0], but in refreshing my memory, it seems that that case only applies to intruding the privacy of the home, especially with technology that is not widely available. In fact, two cases linked from that article [1][2] directly support the ability of police to perform aerial surveillance, but only for things officers can see with the naked eye.
As Stalin once said "quantity has a quality all its own", oddly apt for this situation.
It's one thing when public observation by the authorities is sporadic and rare, it's another thing entirely when technology makes it possible to track, record, and collate every single second of your life spent outside private property.
Imagine for a second what this might look like. If every time you were "in public" there was a video record, an audio recording, and a voice transcript (carefully filtered so that it was only of conversations that could be overheard, for example). We expect that when we are in public there is some loss of privacy, but not to that degree, not utterly. Such complete surveillance could track people's movements and relationships which would make many details of otherwise private information a lot easier to determine.
This is not only disturbing, it's a massive explosion in police power. Imagine how difficult it would be to avoid police monitoring if every doorway in all of the major metro areas and major highways are tracked by drones. Even if you were able to be in disguise a combination of kinesthetic analysis of your walking gait and physical characteristics and sheer process of elimination would put you back in the spotlight quickly.
Now, this sort of scenario isn't overly likely in the US, yet, but we should be sensitive of the fact that there are phase changes and qualitative differences that accrue due to mere quantitative changes in capabilities.
Drones are a relatively new technology. I'm sure some agencies are presently interpreting old laws very loosely. It's certainly worthwhile to spell out exactly what can and can't be done.
It will be interesting, should this pass, to see how broadly the phrase “collect information that can identify individuals in a private area” will be interpreted. Wishful thinking to hope for it to be applicable to our activities on social media, etc?
This is a pretty big waste of Congress' time. The Department of Defense, the only part of the government that actually has weaponized drones, is specifically exempted. I somehow doubt that any of the three-letter agencies will pay attention to the ban on using drones to collect information.
I hate the fake constitutional concern, too. The founding fathers didn't recognize privacy as a right. And even if they had, it wouldn't be in the constitution-- it would be in the Bill of Rights. The closest thing you can find is probably the fourth amendment, which protects against "unreasonable search and seizure." If we really cared about the fourth amendment, we'd get rid of stuff like the DEA, the TSA, and Echelon. Somehow, I don't see that happening in this bill. The net effect will probably be more red tape for anyone who wants to build a drone.
