I Hope You Have Nothing to Hide

And I mean NOTHING.

Federal law enforcement agencies and local police forces are buying more and more [drones] and putting them to increasingly diverse domestic uses, as well as patrolling the border, and even private corporations are now considering how to use them. One U.S. drone manufacturer advertises its product as ideal for “urban monitoring.” Orlando’s police department originally requested two drones to use for security at next year’s GOP convention, only to change their minds for budgetary reasons. One new type of drone already in use by the U.S. military in Afghanistan — the Gorgon Stare, named after the “mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them” — is “able to scan an area the size of a small town” and “the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that [can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity”; boasted one U.S. General: “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

[...]

Even leaving aside the issue of weaponization (police officials now openly talk about equipping drones with “nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun”), the use of drones for domestic surveillance raises all sorts of extremely serious privacy concerns and other issues of potential abuse. Their ability to hover in the air undetected for long periods of time along with their comparatively cheap cost enables a type of broad, sustained societal surveillance that is now impractical, while equipping them with infra-red or heat-seeking detectors and high-powered cameras can provide extremely invasive imagery.

[...]

Employing them for domestic police actions is following the model quickly being implemented in surveillance-happy Britain, where drones are used for “the ¬’routine’ monitoring of antisocial motorists, ¬protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.”

[...]

The holes eaten into the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protections by the Drug War and the War on Terror means there are few Constitutional limits on how this technology can be used, and there are no real statutory or regulatory restrictions limiting their use.

[...]

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the head of the drone program for Homeland Security, Tom Faller, is being investigated for possible ethics violations because he joined the Board of [a] drone industry association while overseeing the drone program for that agency.

  Glenn Greenwald

Isn’t that the way it’s normally done?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

NPR's "commercial" for drones...