The Senate Judiciary Committee is hearing testimony from legal experts today, who warn that the privacy laws currently in place at the federal level are woefully unprepared for the drone technology about to explode nationwide.
To the extent aerial surveillance is covered at all, the law professors say, it is related to manned helicopters and planes, and not the sort of constant overflight of cheap, unmanned drones.
And flying drones are just part of the problem. There’s nothing on the books to even theoretically cover wall-climbing spider-shaped spybots, which horrifyingly enough actually is a thing now.
The experts were divided on whether the federal government should try to tackle the issue, however, with some arguing that the state governments should be the ones tackling this upcoming concern. Some states have already passed laws limiting spy drones, but most have not.
God help me to flee this screwed up country and find a quiet corner of the globe in which to be left alone.
Domestic drone usage is ill-conceived, elitist, and end-runs our inherent Constitutional protections.
Here are two (2), very well-produced, videos that anchor my points:
Emmy Award-winning newscaster Shad Olson’s ‘The Great Drone Debate’, featuring US Senator John Thune (7:41):
Here’s a mind-blowing, well-done animated short that really captures our collective angst that if the road to perdition is paved with good intentions, then domestic drones are a superhighway to an Orwellian panoptic gulag (3:22):
For national security purposes, Americans are already subject to warrantless wiretaps of calls and emails, the warrantless GPS “tagging” of their vehicles, the domestic use of Predators or other spy-in-the-sky drones, and the Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of all our behavior through “data fusion centers.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsada…
http://www.conservative-daily.com/2013/03/22/obam…
America’s promise has always been the power of the many to rule, instead of the one. Ungoverned drone usage, particularly domestically, gives power to the one.