Thermal cameras can help spot indoor pot growers, which is the likely purpose of such a drone. Growers may insulate their walls, but probably have not done so with their ceilings.
Of course people with terrariums and other heat sources may be victims in the cross fire of the War on Drugs.
Before this decision they could do a thermal image of your home and if it gave off a certain heat signature, the police could use that a probably cause to get a warrant to search the home.
Now, they need a warrant just to do the thermal imaging.
In this case, enforcement doesn't matter quite so much -- if a heat scan counts as an illegal search, the evidence is inadmissable. Illegal searches happen all the time, and for most people there isn't much recourse. The fact that evidence gathered through illegal searches is generally not valid is usually enough to discourage illegal searches to the extent that the cops are more interested in building a case than they are in harassing you.
In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the sole authority to control all airspace, exclusively determining the rules and requirements for its use. Typically, in the "Uncontrolled" category of airspace, any pilot can fly any aircraft as low as he or she wants, subject to the requirement of maintaining a 500-foot (150 m) distance from people and man-made structures...
So the law says that the FAA gets to determine the rules, and the current rules that the FAA has implemented require a 500 foot distance from structures. However, it would seem that the FAA could change these regulations tomorrow without any changes having to be made to federal law.
It is 1000ft over urban areas, but police helicopters are already exempt. The reason is because they want aircraft to be high enough they can try not to crash on top of a bunch of people or into some building when they loose power (rather than a privacy issue). A helicopter can do an emergency landing with better control in a no power situation. A 4 pound UAV is going to be able to fly lower than that because it is not going to kill a bunch of people when it looses power and crashes into a school or something.
Anyone that's played GTA Vice City enough knows an RC heli could manage at least one casualty pretty easily on failure (and, just to be sure, I've personally seen enough nitro-powered chicken dances to know this is possibly a _low_ estimate).
I know the law doesn't work this way, but there should really be some sort of rule of thumb that states if you need a UAV with special imaging equipment to determine if a crime has occurred, it's not a real crime. A real crime should be detectable in any number of less absurdly sci-fi ways.
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, should a noise complaint be filed? I'd say no.
If a murder happens in my home and no one notices, is it not a crime?
If fraud occurs at my business and is undetected, is it not a crime?
Politically, I am against drug prohibition. Legalize it all, and demand warrants for non-visible spectrum imagery of homes. But the idea that a crime isn't a crime if no one notices just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Murders are detectable outside of homes. Is someone missing? Yes? Then start an investigation.
Fraud can be detected with perfectly normal well understood investigation techniques. No literally peering through walls is required. It is an important difference because fraud investigation techniques were conceivable when the laws we run our legal system with, laws put in place to protect us from it, were created.
Nobody is proposing we deploy these sorts of technologies to patrol for these crimes. Once we are reasonably certain that a particular crime has occurred, break out the UAVs for all I care. And get a warrant first. That is how the system was intended to work; if you breach that intention you breach the implied contract citizens have with their society.
Any crime should have an effect that is noticeable in a reasonable way. If there are absolutely no other methods of even determining if a crime has happened, then it is not a crime. A crime must have an effect, and an effect is noticeable. If there are other methods, the use those.
The error in your reasoning is that all these things do have external effects, but the connection between an external effect and the source is not always apparent. To specifically use the example of fraud, a great number of business operations are under forced reporting requirements for specifically this reason. Your answer to this point is flatly incorrect, as fraud cannot and is not effectively detected in this manner today.
Regarding murder, you suggest "if someone is missing, start an investigation." Of course, the error in your logic is that we do have evidence of drug crime -- and plenty of it. There is no question that Alameda county is full of grow-ops, which produce drugs for the surrounding region. I know, because I live here. There are many, many busts every year. Mountains of evidence.
The reason to limit this sort of investigation is found in the 4th amendment, and it is more than adequate when applied here. Kyllo v. United States is very clear on this point.
You have completely missed my point. I have to wonder if you are being willfully dense; right now you are violently agreeing with me while nevertheless misconstruing everything I am saying.
My point, stated succinctly: If a law cannot be enforced without violating the 4th amendment, it is not a legitimate law.
Alternative expression of my point: "When the police cannot catch you legally, they are not permitted to catch you anyway"
Application of my point: If grow houses cannot be found without using drones, which violate the 4th amendment (or should), then grow houses should be legal. Bans on grow houses should only exist if there are legal ways of finding them. If there are legal methods of finding grow houses, than illegal methods should not be employed. Of course grow houses can be found without drones, so no drones should ever be employed.
The purpose of this rule of thumb (notice that I never claim that this principle could be effectively coded into law) would be to provide the population with an effective way of telling Sheriffs to "Fuck off" when they say "We need to violate your 4th ammendment rights to enforce this law.".
Murders are detectable outside of homes. Is someone missing? Yes? Then start an investigation.
They could be missing already, or be unregistered kids, or recently arrived unregistered migrants. Not everyone who is murdered is noticed missing. Also, very few of the people who are missing have been murdered.
So what do you propose we do, regularly search all houses looking for bodies? These hypotheticals are edge cases which we already accept will in practice go unpunished. To eliminate them would involve violating the 4th amendment.
No, just arguing against your suggestion that they are not crimes if they are not detected by straightforward means.
If someone detects a murder by extremely technological means, say while using muons from cosmic rays to image though a structure like they are doing at Fukashima at the moment http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i15/e152501, then that murder is still a crime whatever the method of detection.
Now it is reasonable to argue that growing weed should not be a crime in the first place, but to argue that growing it indoors should not be a crime on the basis of the level of technology required to detect it, does not seem to make any sort of sense.
So long as that somebody is not the police actively looking for a crime without a warrant, then that should not violate the 4th amendment.
I feel that I should emphasis that I am not proposing a change to existing law. I am merely advocating the point of view that new fancy technologies should, by default, be considered unreasonable searches.
I personally know someone who once maintained a heated greenhouse full of tropical plants and chameleons. (He was almost breaking even on his electrical costs by selling baby chameleons for the pet trade.)
He finally quit and sold the house specifically because he was tired of having agents show up on his door step every month, sometimes with guns drawn.
> Thermal cameras can help spot indoor pot growers, which is the likely purpose of such a drone.
What about LED grow lights? Also, one could rig a heat pump so that the extra heat would be dumped into a backyard "heated pool." This would probably be undetectable.
The drone will probably be considered a military officer just like dogs. Either that, or it's the same as shooting a police officer's car when he's not in it. Don't forget about the consequences.
Probably correct. And probably a bad idea to blind it with laser pointers too. But as a person concerned with the continuing erosion of civil liberties I get a bit frustrated.
I'd be more concerned with signal interception. Assume they use current RC tech[1], which is designed to elimiate interference or capture error, but that doesn't mean it's infeasible. That would be a troubling twist.
Suppose a related idea would be that the image captures from airport body scanners could be intercepted. I have not seen any reference to such an action, at all. Anyone have ideas about an attack vector for those?
Plenty of drones with camera are available. The problem usually is the length of time they can stay up there. Battery power has not caught up with the current demand.
stuff like this really drives home my fear of a dystopian future where police bots patrol the skies using all sorts of cameras and sensors to find 'the bad guys'. Facial recognition, thermal cameras, speech patterns and other tech we haven't even though of yet all used to find 'Bad People'. Creepy.
Casual use of thermal cameras is indeed too much (and as someone else pointed out, illegal.) Other things, like matching faces, speech, or even listening in public places, seem fine to me. (Someone else pointed to laws about flying so low, but if that can be worked around...) I know that's a popular image, but, if this is a new tool for officers patrolling, then I don't see what's so dystopian about this.
As long as we're not talking about cutting other officers and patrols, I would fully support police stations hiring a couple of people to alternate flying a dozen or so drones around the city. Just put some charging stations on top of light poles or city buildings, and have them automated to fly back when power is sufficiently low.
I really don't get why people are averse to such things so long as we keep in mind that they are tools are to help people. They're not magic robots that can not completely take the place of people. If we ever get to a point where it even seems like that, then that's another conversation to have. But we're not there yet, and I see no reason to not use tools if they seem worthwhile.
/edit: I understand that any tool can be abused, but can someone explain to me why this is met with such anger? Barring thermal or other vision modes, what's the huge difference in this and patrolling? (Aside from not being seen.)
Constant surveillance is one of those societal boundaries where the line is hard to find. We all agree that public spaces are... public but if a plane can follow everywhere you go and record all of it, you start to get into weird creepy stalker territory. If that plane is controlled by the state then it is doubly creepy.
There aren't easy answers but it ultimately goes back to the 'Why do you need to hide anything if you don't do anything bad?' argument. And we already know plenty of answers to that argument.
Of course people with terrariums and other heat sources may be victims in the cross fire of the War on Drugs.
Incidentally, afaik, current US law says aircraft must fly five hundred feet above any man made structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights