Will it take things like motorized aircraft or flying cameras banking over the Shoppes at Grand Prairie or Bradley University, hovering above the Par-A-Dice Hotel & Casino or Glen Oak Park, or zooming from Dunlap and the South Side to Bellevue and West Peoria to make us think, “Hmm. That’s not right.”?
It took Tea Party darling Rand Paul, Kentucky’s junior Senator, to hold an old-fashioned filibuster this spring about drones, forcing the Obama administration to publicly assure Americans that – oh, no – military drones wouldn’t be used over U.S. soil.
However, the Border Patrol and the Customs Service reportedly already have and use 10 Predator drones.
More startling in what’s becoming a giddy stampede to surrender more of our rights, 2012’s Drone Act (the FAA Modernization and Reform Act) requires the Federal Aviation Administration to start using drones, some police agencies are starting to study their use of drones, and a few communities are beginning to appeal to the drone industry to locate testing facilities in their areas for the jobs that might result.
(Willingly relinquishing civil liberties for work is reminiscent of a short chat I had with a building trades leader. I said, “You support anything if somebody promises construction jobs. You’d sign off on a project to build stockades for building trades labor leaders if there was work.” He laughed and said, “How many jobs?”)
After April’s flooding around here, using drones to survey disaster damage might make sense, as would search-and-rescue missions or maybe scientific research. But aerial surveillance? Without warrants?
Did the Fourth Amendment get repealed while the NRA focused on the Second?
Has the technology of airborne electronic snoops made privacy obsolete? After all, anyone who’s looked at Google knows what satellites already made available. (I didn’t realize how faded the umbrella on my deck was until I saw Google’s image from orbit.)
The military use of Predator drones – modern versions of Nazis’ buzz-bomb rockets targeting England in World War II – has become notorious for inflicting massive “collateral damage” (killing innocent bystanders). The UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that more than 800 civilians have been killed in Pakistan, a supposed ally.
Will the privacy Americans take for granted be another casualty?
True, there’s no expectation of privacy in public places, so even ardent civil libertarians haven’t attacked the security cameras that picked up the Boston Marathon bombers on the street. But drones are proposed to be OK to fly overhead if they’re less than 25 pounds and less than 400 feet above us (presumably to avoid commercial aircraft), and the FAA has yet to even draft rules for drones’ use above population areas.
Question: Isn’t that why police want them?
So, Congress and dozens of state legislatures are supposedly starting to draw up bills to protect society from what the FAA predicts will be 30,000 drones and a $90 billion industry by 2020.
Congress? State lawmakers? Uh-oh
Besides adding to the congestion of airspace (even airliners are at low altitude when they take off and land), isn’t there the possibility of someone hacking a drone system and wresting control from a “virtual pilot” when Chinese hackers seem able and willing to steal technology, intellectual property and other data almost at will?
The United Nations (which sometimes makes the Illinois General Assembly seem functional) recently issued a report denouncing killer robots, which “should not have the power of life and death over human beings.”
Wait what?
And in Europe, an anti-drone movement is gaining traction after Germany asked to buy weaponized drones from the Pentagon, and after England’s RAF announced that it was increasing its drone arsenal to 10 MQ-9 Reapers and to start controlling surveillance and drone strikes in Afghanistan from an airbase in Lincolnshire.
So far in the United States, we have Rand Paul, a lot of indifference and a corporation, Darwin Aerospace [www.darwinaerospace.com/burritobomber], that’s reportedly developed the “Burrito Bomber,” a drone outfitted to carry and drop a parachute-wrapped burrito, which it calls “truly the world’s first airborne Mexican food delivery service.”
For now, as another Flag Day is marked this June 14, we might recall the radio reporter at the end of 1951’s movie “The Thing,” warning, “Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”