ACLU wants tighter regulations on use of drones by police, public: DRONELIFE Interview
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DroneLife: I saw the white paper report you probably did on police use of drones for surveillance purposes. What would you say are the major issues that you just’re concerned about?
Stanley: Our overarching concern is that drones not grow to be infrastructure for routine surveillance of American life and American communities. There are police departments, police chiefs who I believe would like to have drones up over their communities 24/7.
Baltimore police tried it. The ACLU filed a suit against them and won, but there’s still loads of room for using drones for surveillance. They may also be used, not only for surveillance but additionally for intimidation, and for supposed shows of force where — one of the simplest ways of putting it’s the police seek to discourage bad behavior by making everybody very, very aware that the police are present. One other way of putting it is that they seek to frighten and intimidate protesters.
So, our job is to fret about checks and balances on government power and police power, and the potential of abuse of technologies and the likelihood for his or her overuse in ways in which diminish the standard of life in communities. Drones are a really powerful surveillance technology, and so we worry that they’ll be used particularly for privacy evasions, but additionally for routine surveillance to create chilling effects.
DroneLife: Have you ever seen any examples of this police overreach of drone use with the recent pro-Palestinian protests?
Stanley: We do know that the NYPD was putting drones over Columbia (University). It’s unclear how vital that was, or whether it helps law enforcement perform legitimate duties in knowledgeable and peaceful way.
Reports were lacking in some situations, but additionally, the NYPD banned media from covering what they were doing, so we don’t really know whether or not they were skilled or not. But I actually have spoken to activists who said that they felt like drones were deployed at protests, not for legitimate peacekeeping missions, but swooping low and attempting to intimidate people.
DroneLife: You furthermore may have stated that you just’re concerned about police agencies’ use of drones as first responders. Are you able to tell me what your concerns are about this issue?
Stanley: One query is about the price/profit balance and what the bounds of those programs shall be. If you have got police drones flying over a community consistently, on their ways to numerous calls and for this and for that, their uses may be expanded in other ways. We just might find yourself having police drones overhead on a regular basis, and potentially recording the whole lot that they’re seeing below them.
You can see drones deployed to follow people. Certainly one of the concerns is that they evolve from incident-based responses to routine patrols. Already, Beverly Hills appears to be doing routine patrols. We don’t think Americans should should feel like there’s a police eye within the sky watching them from once they leave their house within the morning to once they get back at night and each time in between.
Plenty of the calls, the explanations that drones are sent out across the town, look like very minor, things like a child bouncing a ball against a door, or things like a suspicious person, and it just means the quantity of drones flying over the town on a regular basis could get very high.
That might be ameliorated by policies that limit recordings, in order that they’re not recording once they’re coming to or from a call. That’s a part of what we call for; guidelines for DFR programs, similar to usage limits, in order that they’re not used for an ever-growing list of things, and transparency about how they’re getting used.
Chula Vista (California) and other places like Canada have commendable transparency portals. But most other places should not have transparency about exactly what type of sensor payload these aircraft are carrying, what the police agencies’ policies are around data storage, retention and access sharing, and whether or not overall these programs are well worth the bang the buck. Is the cash being spent on these programs improving the community greater than if we put that very same money towards making life higher in the neighborhood in other ways that may cut the general crime rate?
There must be clear rules for when video is retained and when it’s shared with the general public. If the video captures people in private moments or something, then there could also be no public interest in it and it shouldn’t be released. If it captures an officer shooting, then the general public has a really strong interest in getting access to that details about how these public servants are using or possibly abusing their power.
It’s a brand-new technology, that’s never existed on the planet before. There are going to be numerous questions as to the way it plays out over time. There must be transparency so people can determine what they consider it.
DroneLife: You will have also expressed some concerns over the FAA expanding using beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights. Are you able to comment on why that’s a priority?
Stanley: I believe that from a law-enforcement perspective, it opens the door to a much wider law-enforcement use of drones. While there can actually be good uses of this tool, we don’t need to see drones flying overhead on a regular basis for all manner of minor incidents, making people feel like they’re being watched on a regular basis.
For [the commercial and recreational] uses of drones, similarly, it’s privacy and nuisance issues. We don’t really know whether Americans want drones over their community. Perhaps they’ll. Perhaps they’ll love them or possibly they’ll hate them. Perhaps they don’t want the noise or they don’t want the sensation that something’s flying over their homes.
We’re aware of numerous incidents of individuals shooting down drones, and if our skies are being darkened with — whether it’s police drones, or Amazon or UPS delivery drones or a drone delivering pizza slices — we don’t know the way persons are going to love that. And other people must have a say in what their communities appear like.
And so, what I’ve called for is for the FAA and Congress, or policymakers generally to permit communities to have greater regulatory authority over BVLOS drones of their community. This just isn’t like a flight from JFK to LAX, where obviously you may’t have every county in between setting their very own rules.
But local drones fly around on a 20-minute average battery charge. They’re more like bicycles than they’re like jetliners. And in addition, they’re going to be rather more intimately intrusive and entangled with people’s private lives of their homes and of their communities. And so, I’ve argued in an op-ed within the Wall Street Journal that local communities should give you the option to ban drones in the event that they wish.
For those who’re living somewhere and there’s an excessive amount of traffic by your own home you call up your city council member and also you say, ‘I need to lower the speed limit, I need to place in speed bumps, or I need to show this right into a one-way street.’ Those quality-of-life arguments occur on a regular basis in communities, and other people get more enthusiastic about them than they do about any foreign policy issue. But in the event that they have a drone that’s bothering them, and so they should call the FAA, how’s that going to work? So, it’s a conservative localism argument that individuals must have control of their lives.
And there are privacy issues here too, which is absolutely what I’m concerned about. Delivery drones might be buzzing everywhere in the city, and so they’ve got cameras recording the whole lot. That’s a privacy issue. Say, I’ve got drone cameras flying over my house 30 times a day, taking pictures of me, everybody in my backyard.
Are they sharing video with the police? Will the police ask nicely? Will they use A.I. to do evaluation of how much time I spend in my backyard? Are some creepy employees pictures of my family? There’s just numerous questions to return with having every kind of drones flying long distances across the community.
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