Droning away: Which agencies requested FAA permission for spy drones?

Which Texas police agencies  and  educational institutions have requested permission to  use unmanned drones from the Federal Aviation Administration? Reports Texas Watchdog, via EFF:

Texas is home to many: the Houston and Arlington police departments; the Texas Department of Public Safety; the Hays County Office of Emergency Management in San Marcos; Texas A&M University Corpus Christi; Texas A&M – Texas Engineering Experiment Station in College Station and Texas State University in San Marcos

Further,

See a map of the agencies given permission to fly drones here.

EFF officials also obtained a list of private drone manufacturers authorized to fly drones domestically.

Montgomery Sheriff crashes drone into SWAT vehicle

One of the first civilian law enforcement agencies in the country to purchase an aerial surveillance drones last fall, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office yesterday crashed a drone into one of its SWAT team's armored personnel carriers during a practice run. (Please let there be video!) Further, it wasn't just surveillance equipment crashing into the SWAT vehicle which IT World reports was "being loaded with weapons and ammunition for a training exercise."

Notably, DPS at one point was using unarmed drones both along the border and elsewhere in the state, but according to the Electronic Frontier Founation DPS recently canceled its drone program because of maintenance issues with the high-tech craft. (I'd not seen that widely reported.) DPS shut down its program, they told EFF, because, "drones did not offer Texas significant advantages over the agency’s existing airplanes and helicopters."

Despite costs and crashes, though, the Obama Administration is pushing ahead to approve drone use by many more civilian agencies on US soil by this summer, reports IT World:

Expensive, crash prone or not, unmanned aerial vehicles will become far more common in the U.S. following legislation signed by President Obama ordering the FAA to approve more UAVs for law enforcement and fire/emergency uses beginning in 90 days.

The FAA has restricted use of drones domestically due to concerns that UAVs flown by untrained operators would become a hazard to other aircraft and danger to people on the ground.

The Obama order gives the FAA until Sept. 30, 2015 to make legal drones that are lighter than 4.4 pounds and fly lower than 400 feet.

They won't just be for police, though. The legislation doesn't limit the uses for which its drones can be used, which will almost certainly make life much easier for paparazzi, stalkative exes and hordes of the intrusive, nosy and curious.

It will also make life much less private for a population struggling with the loss of privacy online and, very possibly, not yet ready to give it up in their backyards to crash-prone, high-maintenance r/c helicopters that may be relatives of the Predators and GlobalHawks of the world, but without the reliability, trained operators and reason for poking their noses into someone else's business in the first place.

If the Congress and the Obama Administration are pushing drones, might a Texas Legislature that last year battled the TSA over intrusive personal searches decide to regulate them, and if so would they have any authority to do so? For that matter, do cities have authority to regulate low-flying commercial drones, or is that strictly an FAA responsibility? ¿Quien sabe?

We seem to be at a "leap before you look" moment regarding drone technology. I'm sure there are benefits, but it looks like we'll be finding out the detriments the hard way.

The newest toys in the box: Police deploy cell-phone trackers, drones

A pair of stories show how technology is rapidly reshaping old debates about the Fourth Amendment and privacy, raising questions about whether sketchy protections outlined in the 18th Century still serve to prevent government abuses using technologies the Founding Fathers couldn't imagine.

First, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a story about "a new cellphone tracking system authorized for purchase by the Fort Worth City Council this week."

The KingFish system, which gives police the ability to track cellphones without having to go through a provider or service, will cost more than $184,000 during its first year of operation, according to a memo prepared for City Council prior to its vote.

The memo said that Fort Worth police officers have already utilized the technology and have received training from agents with the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Marshal's task force, agencies that have assisted the police in using the tracking system in the past. The KingFish units are mobile and can be mounted on a vehicle or carried by officers in the field.

Those concerned about the technology's capabilities worry that police will use the system to monitor the movements of suspects or subjects of its investigations without first obtaining warrants or a judge's permission.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/02/24/3759099/fort-worth-police-say-theyll-follow.html#storylink=cpy

Fortunately Texas state law is actually better developed than federal law on this question, and the Fort Worth police would absolutely be required to get a warrant in most circumstances. (A recent SCOTUS case ruled that using a GPS tracker on a vehicle is a "search," but declined to decide whether it required a warrant in federal cases.) Of course, it doesn't take very much to get a search warrant, and if the information is never used in court, nobody would know if they failed to do so, so in practice even a warrant is a relatively weak limitation.

Another problem with spending that much on a piece of technology is that then the agency will feel compelled to find reasons to use it, if only to reduce the cost-per-case figure when trying to justify the expense in the budget..

Then, at CNBC there's an item about the increasing use of drones by civilian police agencies, news media and an array of other possible users. The story opens:

Heads up: Drones are going mainstream. Civilian cousins of the unmanned military aircraft that have tracked and killed terrorists in the Middle East and Asia are in demand by police departments, border patrols, power companies, news organizations and others wanting a bird's-eye view that's too impractical or dangerous for conventional planes or helicopters to get.

Along with the enthusiasm, there are qualms.

Drones overhead could invade people's privacy. The government worries they could collide with passenger planes or come crashing down to the ground, concerns that have slowed more widespread adoption of the technology.

Despite that, pressure is building to give drones the same access as manned aircraft to the sky at home.

"It's going to be the next big revolution in aviation. It's coming," says Dan Elwell, the Aerospace Industries Association's vice president for civil aviation.

Unlike mobile tracking devices, Texas law - either our statutes or case law - are no more prepared for the challenges posed by police use of drone technology than at the federal level. There's basically a vacuum that, for now, lets police and other users do nearly whatever they want.

Every kid wants to play with the newest toy in the box, and police are no different, so these technologies are going to be used. The question is can they be adequately regulated, or will their novelty confound the courts and prevent lawmakers from adequately constraining them?

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/02/24/3759099/fort-worth-police-say-theyll-follow.html#storylink=cpy

Droning on in Montgomery County: Unmanned aircraft could be mounted with weapons

Must we? Really?

From Montgomery County, the headline of the Click2Houston story was "New police drone near Houston could carry weapons." "To be in on the ground floor of this is pretty exciting for us here in Montgomery County," Sheriff Tommy Gage said, reassuringly, adding "We're not going to use it to be invading somebody's privacy. It'll be used for situations we have with criminals." Got that? Move along. Nothing to see here. No, don't look up ...

How much you wanna bet this new technology spawns a new felony of some sort next session for shooting a paintball or throwing a rock at a police drone flying over your backyard? Do you remember the brilliant shot from the intro to The Wire where the kid hurls a rock at the surveillance camera, cracking the lens? Run this drone flying low in urban areas and you're going to get a little of that. Also, the headlines won't be so cheerful the first time the remote pilot crashes the thing or flies into a building or through the electrical wires.

Of course, DPS is already operating drones in border counties (and elsewhere in the state), as is the federal government. Several Texas jurisdictions have bandied the idea about, including larger Harris County to the south, but Montgomery County is the first to decide that the technology is worth the bang for the buck ($300K plus fuel and ground staffing). The Sheriff has said he won't use the drone for traffic enforcement, but that doesn't mean that he won't change his mind about that, or that the next guy won't.

The legal theory allowing them to fly over your house with a camera zooming in to snap your picture is that police aren't invading your privacy if they see something while in a "public space" - in this case public airspace flying over your house with a zoom lens - from a spot off your property where they don't need your permission to be. That makes it formally constitutional, I suppose, since existing Supreme Court precedents have failed in any meaningful way to apply 18th century privacy principles to 21st century technology. But just because Justices Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Scalia and Kennedy (at least) would probably consider it constitutional doesn't make it any less creepy. The Legislature could and should regulate police drone use or even ban it except for certain, limited circumstances.

Whatever they do, I'd prefer the Lege decide on the front end, i.e., in 2013: Don't wait around for years like they did with red-light cameras, where dozens of jurisdictions adopted the technology before the Lege got around to creating rules to govern them. This technology isn't going away, so lawmakers should get out in front of the privacy issues surrounding its use by police agencies.

This appears to be a promo video for the model UAV purchased by the Montgomery County Sheriff:


Noisier than I'd expected, and rather unnerving for use in an urban setting, particularly if it were armed. I wonder what the rules would be regarding private use, e.g., by paparazzi or something?