

FBI Surveilling U.S. With Drones - smaili
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/fbi-drones/

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asynchronous13
I work in the field of unmanned aircraft. I'm always amazed by the enormous
disconnect between public perception and what I see going on inside the
industry.

I've talked directly to members of several police departments about why they
want unmanned aircraft. In Brevard county FL, for example, they want infrared
cameras to help find patients with Alzheimer's disease that have wandered away
from home. Several police departments want a cheap way to take aerial
photographs of accident scenes so they can move wreckage and debris off the
roads faster and keep traffic flowing. In general, it's for surprisingly
mundane tasks. I happen to live in Colorado, and I'd love to use our products
to help with forest fires, but the FAA won't let us.

Of course, any tool can be abused. It seems like that's the primary fear that
people have with this new technology.

~~~
ferdo
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil)

"Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963
work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is
that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular,
were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who
accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view
that their actions were normal."

~~~
asynchronous13
Are you proposing that unmanned aircraft can only be used for evil purposes?

I see huge potential for use in agriculture. I talk to wine growers in
California and we figure out how much money they can save using one of our
products instead of using a tractor. I see that as a good thing, but perhaps I
am simply living the banality of evil.

~~~
__--__
> perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.

Possibly. Since we've already gone godwin, IBM sold computers to Germany.
Those machines were used for something we do these days as a matter of routine
- a census. It's hard to get more banal than a census. Yet that census was
invaluable in identifying and segregating large chunks of people based on
ethnicity. It was so instrumental to the Third Reich that James Watson of IBM
was given a medal of honor.

The tech is just a tool. It's who you give it to and what they do with it that
matters. The question is, what do you do about it? You can't really restrict
the dispersion of technology. Every attempt to do that so far has failed, for
everything from munitions to cryptography. You can make certain uses illegal.
That doesn't seem to be stopping the government or police these days. All that
seems to do is put a lot of private citizens in jail. The only solid solution
I can come up with is to come up with countermeasures of some sort.

How to solve a problem like human nature. It's quite a humdinger.

~~~
jlgreco
> _" James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor."_

Specifically the "Order of the German Eagle", if anyone else was confused
about this.

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ChuckMcM
Not much of a surprise, although calling your low level agents "drones" is bad
management :-) More seriously though, the FBI and police have, since the 60's,
had helicopters which they use for surveillance and initial investigation.
When my father-in-law stayed at our apartment in LA he said he felt like he
was back in Viet Nam (there had apparently been a convenience store hold up
that evening with the suspects fleeing on foot). So having aerial things
flying around and looking _during an investigation_ is going to be pretty much
a non-issue to most Americans I suspect. The DHS gigapixel camera in the sky
ARGUS [1] was a bit creepier for me.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/06/argus_is_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/06/argus_is_could_the_pentagon_s_1_8_gigapixel_drone_camera_be_used_for_domestic.html)

~~~
discostrings
The real issue is scale--it costs a lot of money to put a helicopter in the
air, and that's a _good thing_ because it ensures restraint in use.

Maybe Americans won't notice that aspect and assent to this sort of thing
because it's "just like what's already going on". But if so, they'll be
missing that due to the economics, it'll be a totally different ball game.

~~~
stonemetal
For now drones cost more than helicopters. On NPR the other day they mentioned
the drones used for border security are 18 million each. Maybe that will
change with time, and maybe it won't. The only reason to use a drone vs a
helicopter over American soil at the moment is the stealth factor of a much
smaller bird in the air.

~~~
discostrings
Thanks for pointing that out. The current cost of high-end surveillance drones
is higher than helicopters, yes. I do wonder if that $18 million is only for
the drone, or for its associated infrastructure on the ground as well, though.

My point was more theoretical than based on current costs. To me, it seems
prices will almost certainly drop fairly quickly. There are many fewer
constraints in building a vehicle that doesn't have to hold a human. As the
technology is produced in greater numbers, and as the technology is refined, I
imagine the cost will plummet. And as the process becomes more automated, it
will require less personnel as well. I imagine there will also be "light
drones" that cost much less, if there aren't already.

If there's a counterargument for the price dropping, I'd love to engage with
it, but I'm having trouble coming up with it myself.

I'd love to see some real numbers. My suspicion is that the amount of
surveillance per dollar spent already heavily favors the drone and will only
get better, but I could be wrong. In a situation in support of an ongoing
event, I imagine the helicopter is currently a lot more useful.

~~~
stonemetal
Good quality optics aren't getting any smaller as far as I can tell. So a good
surveillance drone is always going to have to be a certain size to carry that
payload. I can see them getting cheaper than helicopters but not cheap.

~~~
psb217
Smaller drones with worse optics should be cheaply producible. With large
numbers of such drones, lower altitude surveillance with greater redundancy of
coverage would become affordable. The computational costs associated with
patching together the key-hole views provided by a swarm of fungible drones
could be offloaded to ground-based computational resources.

In my opinion, the result will be a net shift towards favoring many small
cheap drones coupled with fancy off-board image processing. Though, one or two
large expensive drones capturing monolithic images with great onboard optics
should remain the better option for some situations.

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epoxyhockey
Just some anecdotal evidence, but drones surveilling citizens seems to
resonate more with the 65+ aged members of society than does the recording of
all internet & phone traffic.

 _Moments later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) said drones were a huge
privacy threat to Americans._

Yet, regarding NSA activities, Feinstein _said on Thursday that the
authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in
the future._ (Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-
obamas-d...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-
dragnet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0))

~~~
ChuckMcM
Playing to the Californian voters who are currently pestering local law
enforcement trying to acquire and deploy drones no doubt.

~~~
charonn0
I don't understand your statement... is she playing to CA citizens who _want_
the drones or who are _against_ the drones?

~~~
ihsw
The statement is indeed ambiguous, however CA citizens are pestering local law
enforcement regardless of their intent (be it for or against). The amount of
people fearing 'illegals' is certainly not small, however the amount of people
fearing overzealous police departments is also not small.

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forgotAgain
This smells like an attempt to get the story out before it became public via a
leak. From here on out politicians can treat it as old news.

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Uhhrrr
This is a little creepy and Skynet-ish, but compared to the massive CF that is
NSA's unconstitutional, invasive, pile of private information, it's just a
distraction.

It's no different than when the police fly over your house in a helicopter and
look down.

EDIT: I should have said "no different, legally, than when". This does allow
surveillance on a greater scale, and maybe that will change people's feelings
about it. But the information asymmetry isn't as great as it is with NSA.
Ordinary citizens are allowed to fly drones, so why not the FBI?

~~~
discostrings
> It's no different than when the police fly over your house in a helicopter
> and look down.

It's at least an order of magnitude cheaper and easier to do. Thus, it will be
much more prevalent.

It's like looking at how many people have printers at home when there are $50
inkjets out there compared to a world where the least expensive printer was
$3500. And in which the consumables for the $50 inkjet were also less than
1/10 the price.

EDIT: I'm referring to the near future, not the present. Currently, drones are
still quite expensive. It's like a time when inkjet printers were just
developed, and only 100 were produced. Once production ramps up and the
technology is refined, the price plummets.

~~~
jm4
I saw you make this argument elsewhere in the thread. Do you have a source? I
would expect the opposite to be true- at least until drones become more
prevalent. There is a lot more that goes into these systems than a model-sized
self flying aircraft.

On a somewhat related note, there was a recent AMA on reddit from a drone
pilot:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ghkm7/iama_drone_sens...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ghkm7/iama_drone_sensor_operator_i_have_flown_hundreds/)

~~~
discostrings
I guess I got a little ahead of myself. In my comment, I was referring more to
the near future than to the present. I think you're correct--until this
becomes common and has undergone a few rounds of revisions, the numbers I gave
are not in line with the current situation.

I still maintain the numbers as a likely reality in the near future. Once
drones become common, they will be much cheaper than helicopters. If there are
facts I'm missing in that assessment, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks for sharing the AMA--checking it out now!

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motters
Compared to surveillance of the internet and phone calls drones don't pose
much of a threat to privacy. It's technically difficult to recognise people
from aerial photos, although when combined with mobile phone geolocations and
unlimited access to personal metadata that would be possible.

There are also entirely legitimate kinds of drone surveillance, such as land
surveys, detecting diseases amongst crops, monitoring livestock or shipping or
general environmental monitoring (temperature, atmospheric gasses, etc).

~~~
ldh
Maybe it's technically difficult _now_ , but what happens when that technology
inevitably improves? Once this becomes acceptable, what next? The "abuse of
power" knob only ever seems to get turned in one direction.

~~~
coldtea
Plus, who said it will remain about "surveillance" only? How about taking down
people?

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clubhi
Is anyone bothered that the government misuses a term meta data? They are
collecting data about us. They aren't collecting information about our schema.

~~~
krapp
If it's data that describes a call rather than the data of the call itself
then maybe the term applies...

~~~
clubhi
This is data though. It's the same as them reading our phone bills. "Big data"
movement was initiated to handle very large log files.

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llamataboot
Of course, presumably it can work the other way as well. I look forward to
small private copwatch organizations that can keep a camera on police
interactions with the public through small UAVs.

The threat of ubiquitous surveillance through camera phones and drones has the
potential to radically change policing tactics in the US and curb brutality.

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fudged71
I've heard that some police forces in Canada have been using small helicopters
for emergencies and SWAT-type situations. I don't think that counts as
surveillance, though.

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mtgx
I have a feeling over the next 2-3 decades, there will be a ton of revolutions
in most countries, because governments will keep wanting to create total
surveillance states, and eventually many people will get fed up with it, but
it will be too hard to fight from the beginning, and it will just turn into
revolutions later on.

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ianstallings
My main concern is integration with existing manned aircraft and the dangers
associated with that. Just the other day the news broke about a close call in
Afghanistan between a passenger jet and a German Luna UAV:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NOar...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NOar22TX2k)

The privacy issues have been the same issues brought up about manned aircraft
surveillance. IMHO it's just a larger hill to mount a camera on. They could
just as easily sit outside and watch you, or in a helicopter, or via remote
sensors, or using one of the millions of cameras that watch us everyday. It's
a much broader issue than just "should they use drones".

