
FBI admits to flying drones over US without warrants - northwest
http://rt.com/usa/fbi-drones-over-usa-653/
======
jurassic
Did any of you actually read the article? Despite the sensationalist title,
they're only admitting to 10 incidents since 2006 including one where a young
boy's life was possibly on the line. I'm as anti-spying as anybody, but ~1
incident per year seems like a reasonable rate to me if a serious threat is
motivating it. This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky.

~~~
Helianthus
I am filled with such angry frustration about the current situation that all I
want to do is lash out at you.

"It's ok. It's ok because it seems reasonable."

It is _crossing lines_.

It is governmental activity that the citizenry does not know about, does not
consent to, and here you are going "Well, it was for a good reason I guess."

My conclusion reading your paragraph is that the rule of law means _nothing_
to you.

~~~
tptacek
What line are they crossing? They used manned aircraft for all sorts of
things, and have for decades. Manned aircraft are prohibitively expensive.

~~~
jivatmanx
The same line between wiretapping in the analog age and wiretapping now:
impossible to use on a mass, routine, and suspicion-less basis.

~~~
jurassic
> mass, routine, and suspicion-less basis.

That is not at all how drones are being used according to this article. Until
then, plant some trees in your yard and keep calm. There are enough real
transgressions going on that we don't need to whip ourselves into a frenzy
over hyped stories like this one.

~~~
jivatmanx
It's easier to prevent it from getting there than it is to stop it once it
has. It's more economical to expend the effort now than wait.

If drones are physically visible I worry that an "implied consent" will
develop and the issue becomes unwinnable.

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lotso
"Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court
decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an
individual's property from public airspace."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Riley)

~~~
belorn
It should be noted that any citizen is allowed to do so, including with
quadcopters. Each time the police us arguing to forbid citizen to use
quadcopters to record a demonstration, they are working against their own
possibility to use drones.

So far, they can't eat and have the cake at the same time,

~~~
oleganza
Police eats and keeps cakes all the time because they are allowed to use guns
and violence much wider than any regular person. Almost every time when a cop
is "unnecessarily" brutal, he gets away with it while non-cop for the same
action would serve a jail time. Just check the news.

After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be
legally violent, while others must obey.

~~~
belorn
While I would normally agree with you, the cited supreme case above stated
that: _However, the Court stopped short of allowing all aerial inspections of
private property, noting that it was "of obvious importance" that a private
citizen could have legally flown in the same airspace. Any member of the
public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at
the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The
police officer did no more._

As such, the Police can't eat and keep cake in this case, except if congress
changes the law. The supreme court case is quite clear.

------
_delirium
Is the unmanned aspect the main difference here? Police have long used both
planes and helicopters, and warrants aren't typically required in those cases.

~~~
rainsford
Yeah, I guess I'm not quite getting why I (or anyone else) should be upset
about this. Using unmanned drones a handful of times in cases where I would
imagine a helicopter would have previously been used sounds pretty reasonable
to me.

~~~
fargolime
Reasonable to me too. But I'm confident the plan is to have hundreds of drones
in the sky 24/7 over major cities, covering every square meter every x
minutes.

~~~
mjn
That's an issue that's arising in many forms recently, and I'm not sure the
law has sorted out what to do about it.

The gut feeling, which I share, is that there's a qualitative difference
between a few targeted observations and pervasive surveillance. But the law
has traditionally not included a numerical aspect in 4th-amendment analyses.
Either the police need a warrant to fly a helicopter over a city and
photograph it, or they don't, regardless of whether they're flying one or a
hundred. Saying that something would require a warrant if done very frequently
but not if done occasionally would require a either a novel approach to the
4th amendment, or a new law passed by Congress specifying a new policy.

Two bits of 4th amendment law do point towards development of a new doctrine,
but I'm not sure very strongly:

1\. In _United States v. Knotts_ (1983), the defendant argued that allowing
the government to electronically track a vehicle without a warrant raised the
spectre of the government being able to pervasively track all movements. The
court dismissed that concern by writing: _[Defendant] expresses the
generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the Government would
be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be
possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the
reality hardly suggests abuse; if such dragnet-type law enforcement practices
as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough
then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be
applicable._

It's a bit of a confusing comment, though, because it doesn't explain the
basis for treating "dragnet-type" uses of GPS tracking differently from
scattered uses, from a 4th-amendment perspective. My guess is that Rehnquist
just wanted to dismiss the defendant's dystopian hypothetical by saying it's
not happening now and if it happens later, well we'll deal with it later.

2\. One lower court has introduced a "mosaic theory" of the fourth amendment
by which things that individually don't count as "searches" for 4th-amendment
purposes could constitute a search when aggregated. Here's an article on that:
[http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...](http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1718&context=faculty_publications)

~~~
rainsford
I'm not a lawyer, but I could see an argument being made for a "numerical
aspect" to privacy protections. The idea of a reasonable expectation of
privacy as a standard seems well supported, and I think it could apply to this
situation.

Certainly the police COULD track me when I'm out in public, but my expectation
is that they won't unless they have a valid reason for doing so. So while I
may not have an explicit legal protection against being tracked in public as
an individual, I have an expectation that I'm not being tracked unless I'm the
subject of an investigation.

I suppose this is less of a numerical aspect as it is a reasonable expectation
factor for the majority of people who would be tracked with pervasive drone
surveillance. People just going about their business don't expect to be
randomly tracked by the FBI, but most people would probably expect to be
tracked if they were specifically being investigated.

But like I said, I'm not a lawyer, so it might be impractical for the law to
work that way. If so, then maybe a change in the law will be necessary if it
becomes practical to engage in pervasive drone surveillance and it turns out
that's what the FBI ends up doing.

------
darkxanthos
This doesn't bother me. I get that it's being equivalated to living in a
police state but I don't view it that way. Police or FBI patrolling more
efficiently seems progressive and economical. When I'm in public I expect that
I don't have privacy.

EDIT: typo

~~~
noonespecial
I'm going to have to disagree. The _possibilty_ that you might be observed in
public is a whole different animal than the _probabilty_ or even _certainty_
that you will.

Knowing that someone might be watching is different than being sure that
someone is. And that is just where this train is headed.

Edit: I'm going to go ahead and urge people not to knee-jerk downvote the
parent here. Outside of a certain group of the HN crowd, I find this to be the
prevailing opinion. A downvote is just a shout of "you're wrong". We need to
start educating people of the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance carried
to its logical end.

~~~
darkxanthos
I appreciate the call to not down vote. I see a larger picture of things
getting out of hand surely. The issue I have with drones and being watched all
the time is that there are so many laws we all probably break one daily and
that opens us to be treated as criminals.

I'd rather have fewer laws and perhaps further increase the burden of proof
necessary to bring charges.

~~~
fargolime
If you see the larger picture of where things will be, why not be bothered by
movement down that slippery slope?

~~~
darkxanthos
I try to focus on root causes. There's too much noise and wasted energy
otherwise.

------
iandanforth
Two questions:

1\. If I'm in my backyard and I have a high fence (private). And an FBI target
walks by my property (public), how can they claim to not be surveilling me as
well?

2\. Is it unconstitutional surveillance to use Google Earth to see if I was
home on the specific day their imagery was collected?

~~~
DannyBee
high fence does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy

    
    
      Even within the curtilage and notwithstanding that the owner   
      has gone to the extreme of erecting a 10-foot high fence in 
      order to screen the area from ground-level view, there is no 
      reasonable expectation of privacy from naked-eye inspection 
      from fixed-wing aircraft flying in navigable airspace.
    

California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207

See also Oliver v. United States, where even "locked gate + no trespassing
signs" does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy.

~~~
northwest
Another right bites the dust.

~~~
rayiner
It's a simple extension of a very old principle: you don't have an expectation
on areas viewable from public property.

~~~
dctoedt
> _It 's a simple extension of a very old principle: you don't have an
> expectation_ [of privacy] _on areas viewable from public property._

Wandering off-topic just a bit, there's an oddball trade-secret case from 1970
that has always puzzled me: A father-and son photographer team flew over a
DuPont chemical plant that was under construction and took aerial photographs.
DuPont tracked down the photographers and asked who had hired them; when they
refused to say, DuPont sued them for theft of trade secrets.

The photographers moved to dismiss, in part on grounds that aerial photography
from the public airspace was fair game. The appeals court upheld the trial
court's ruling rejecting the photographers' contention and said they could be
compelled to disclose who hired them.

The appellate court said, _" To require DuPont to put a roof over the
unfinished plant to guard its secret would impose an enormous expense to
prevent nothing more than a school boy's trick. We introduce here no new or
radical ethic since our ethos has never given moral sanction to piracy. The
market place must not deviate far from our mores. We should not require a
person or corporation to take unreasonable precautions to prevent another from
doing that which he ought not do in the first place. Reasonable precautions
against predatory eyes we may require, but an impenetrable fortress is an
unreasonable requirement, and we are not disposed to burden industrial
inventors with such a duty in order to protect the fruits of their efforts."_
[1].

[1] E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Christopher, 431 F.2d 1012, 1016-17 (5th
Cir. 1970) (affirming denial of defendants' motion to dismiss for failure to
state a claim),
[http://gozips.uakron.edu/~dratler/2010tradesec/materials/chr...](http://gozips.uakron.edu/~dratler/2010tradesec/materials/christopher.htm)

------
woofyman
I'm somewhere between meh and concerned about this. One one hand, this is
nothing new. Police have used airplanes to catch speeders for a long long
time. But the breathless, OMG we're in a police state pushes me, for some
reason, to take the contrarian stand.

~~~
VladRussian2
i think people (and government pushing for drone usage) missing one important
aspect - where police/FBI will launch 100 drones, the citizens will launch
tens of thousands drones (and if it is outlawed like it is in some states
already - it will be Anon's drones) and will observe and record each
government/police action. People are worried about government's gigapixel
Argus while hundred citizens' drones with 10M cameras can do the same job.

While citizens can claim protection of 4th, the government/police while
performing their duties - can't as their actions are allowed to be observed by
citizens. It will be a police state for police. Right now a citizen recording
police is easily intimidated, like by arresting him and shooting his dog for
example. Good luck doing it in case of anonymous drone :)

~~~
genwin
It will surely be illegal for the citizens to have their own drones. It will
be gov't-only airspace at that altitude. (The people won't object in
sufficient numbers either, giving gov't the mandate.) I doubt an Anon could
launch or land a drone very many times without getting caught.

------
rayiner
In other news, my wife showers without a drivers license.

A warrant is not required for anything you can see from public airspace.

------
stormbrew
It's kind of amazing that people who fear the US government becoming
oppressive are willing to listen to the propaganda arm of what's developing
into a truly oppressive strong-arm government. Not to say it's not a valid
concern, but RT's rise as a source people listen to is equal parts fascinating
and disturbing. The USSR, or the USA during the cold war for that matter,
would have killed to have this kind of influence on people in their opposing
spheres.

------
tootie
The NYPD fly helicopters over the city pretty much all day every day. And they
are probably armed with something or other. The FBI drones are not. Drone
surveillance can never be illegal by definition since they can only observe
things in public view. I wish people would stop worrying about specific
tactics, be it drones or decrypting SSL traffic, and worry about due process.

------
northwest
Here's 1 map by the EFF (click the red link at the end of the article for the
map by Google):

[https://www.eff.org/foia/faa-drone-
authorizations](https://www.eff.org/foia/faa-drone-authorizations)

------
donpark
What's disturbing is that we're replacing clear lines with trust.

------
serge2k
Do they need a warrant to sit in a car and watch a building?

