Did any of you actually read the article? Despite the sensationalist title, they're only admitting to 10 incidents since 2006 including one where a young boy's life was possibly on the line. I'm as anti-spying as anybody, but ~1 incident per year seems like a reasonable rate to me if a serious threat is motivating it. This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky.
> This is a far cry from pervasive Big Brother in the sky.
Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets?
I certainly do. And I see a pattern here:
a) it's an evolution, and
b) they are doing all this behind our backs (without the promised transparency)
If we had a website where every such incident would be published and precisely detailed and justified, the situation would already be slightly different, b/c then, we would have an eye on it, every single day.
> Do you remember the day they said that drones would never be used against the population, but only for military targets?
It was drone strikes. I'm confident that's coming against the domestic population, with concomitant "oops, we didn't mean to hit the playground" events.
Yes, I'm well aware of that. That happened in 1985. So, one example from the last thirty years. One. To me, that says it is not, in fact, a big problem and we probably shouldn't lose much sleep over it, if any.
Remember that the government has PR people too. Everything is going to be presented in the best possible light. The "think of the children" case is the one they're willing to release details on - why do you think that is?
Perhaps they chose "late 2006" because earlier in 2006 there were many more, or more egregious cases.
"National security cases" is also a nice vague catchall that could encompass everything from Occupy to a single person crossing the border illegally.
The real problem is not with drones, or spying. It's the monopoly of violence that people think is okay. Government = violent agency that achieves any of its goals using threats with a gun. Taxation, regulations and border controls - all of it is a gun pointed at you if you disobey.
If you dislike what any group of people are doing:
1. They are typically funding themselves.
2. You can boycott them peacefully. Not pay them, discourage others from paying them, ostracize people who you disagree with etc. Without violence, absolutely voluntarily. (Everyone does that every day on the market by choosing what to buy and where to go and what NOT to buy and where NOT to go.)
So with the government it's a different story. You, for instance, not against drones. That's fine, I will not advocate any violent action against you. But if I am against drones, I cannot withdraw my participation. Taxman will point a gun at my face if I refuse to pay taxes, or try to use alternative currency (to bypass inflation) where it's not "allowed". So people who dislike some gov activity cannot do anything about it. And that's the real source of anger. They can do all the talking, but cannot vote their money out of what they dislike.
The real problem is not with drones, or spying. It's the monopoly of violence that people think is okay. Government = violent agency that achieves any of its goals using threats with a gun. Taxation, regulations and border controls - all of it is a gun pointed at you if you disobey.
Government does not have a 'monopoly of violence.' You are perfectly entitled to defend yourself if attacked by a criminal, for example. You don't have a right to initiate violence. It has not been monopolized by government; citizens have chosen, through law, to pool a part of their soveriegnty in government to fulfill certain ends, such as the creation of a police force.
Taxman will point a gun at my face if I refuse to pay taxes,
No he won't, he'll send you a polite letter and if you're intransigent he may garnish your wages or bank account or real property.
So people who dislike some gov activity cannot do anything about it.
Apart from voting, writing books, testifying on capital hill, enacting ballot measures, running for office, and all the other stuff you choose to ignore. If I've said it once I've said it a million times: government is not a monolithic entity, it's a bunch of people who are in large part simply representing the aggregate views of other people. It didn't land in a spaceship and impose itself on a bunch of free humans, we institute these things ourselves to advance our mutual interests.
The actual application of physical coercion is delegated or permitted by the state ... the law might permit individuals to use physical force in defense of self or property, but in this case ... the ability to use force has been granted by the state, and only by the state.
This market fetishism sounds familiar, have you been trawling through von Mises or something? I've heard the same diatribe from vocal internet libertarians and am curious as to the source of this meme.
So out the window with the rule of law as long as a 'serious threat' is motivating an action? Out of curiosity, under what other circumstances do you think suspension of the rule of law is a-okay?
If a serious threat, how about this: get a warrant. It should be easy, because there's an objectively serious threat. Novel idea, right?
>I'm as anti-spying as anybody
No you aren't, as evidenced by your comment here. This is the "I'm not racist, but _insert_racist_sentiment_here_" line of thinking.
We don't know if any laws were broken without more specifics. The FBI doesn't need a warrant to tail someone in a car, for example. If they're peering into windows with binoculars or planting GPS devices, then yes.
"Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace."
The judgement in Riley was very fact-specific and was reached only because O'Connor felt the respondent failed to meet what she viewed as the proper burden of proof. There was no majority opinion, and no support by a majority of justices for the sweeping conclusion you draw from it.
Honestly curious, but the "sweeping conclusion" I'm drawing is either that this i legal. According to this ruling (regardless of the fact that there was no majority opinion), am is it true that what the FBI is doing is legal?
I think the following amendments apply here: 1st (discourages free assembly), 4th (reasonable expectation of privacy on private property, and backed by many state laws regarding this for CCTV), 9th & 10th (the right to aerial surveillance of all land was never granted to the gov't).
Except that it usually does. The system of justice is run by people, and a guy who kills his six year old daughter's rapist is not going to get the same treatment the murderer of a six year old girl will get.
I am filled with such angry frustration about the current situation that all I want to do is lash out at you.
"It's ok. It's ok because it seems reasonable."
It is crossing lines.
It is governmental activity that the citizenry does not know about, does not consent to, and here you are going "Well, it was for a good reason I guess."
My conclusion reading your paragraph is that the rule of law means nothing to you.
Making it remote control could make it easier to do en masse. With only 10 incidents, that's obviously not happening at this point, but it'd be something to keep an eye on.
It's not crossing lines. Would you get angry if an FBI agent got into a plane and flew around looking for clues to some crime (eg tyre tracks)? Doubtful. But they put up a remote control plane and you're yelping that the rule of law means nothing to anyone who disagrees. The law is stands does not require a warrant for aerial surveillance. It seems to be you who dislike the rule of law.
Is your point here that past techniques are far more expensive and therefore the use of drones is an improvement? I'm a little unclear here, but that's what I'm getting.
Applying Alito's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment (and everyone who joined with him in the Jones concurrence), the fact that manned aircraft are probability expensive make them fundamentally different than a much cheaper technology. The idea is a reasonable person knows manned aircraft are super expensive and thus law enforcement will only use them in certain situations. Because of this, such activity is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment. However, according to Alito, this does not mean that the search is still considered reasonable when the same activity becomes much cheaper. Indeed, he held that extremely lengthy tailing of a vehicle on public roads with a cheap GPS device constituted a search while the _same_ activity done manually by law enforcement did not constitute a search.
For what it's worth, I think the FBI's use of drones here is fine. I'm one of the last people on HN who would ever jump on this surveillance bandwagon/train wreck we are seeing.
I bring this up because four Supreme Court justices believe that the cost of an activity can determine whether it constitutes a search (yes, it is not settled law). Because of this, drones being cheaper isn't actually an argument for them being ok. The correct argument here is that drones are cheaper, but still probability expensive to deploy en-mass against the public. If drones ever become cheap enough to do that (like the GPS device in Jones), then it's a whole different ballgame.
I totally believe that a universal (or even regional-scale) persistent drone surveillance program would be something for which specific checks and balances, applied at the level of standard Article III courts (or, for that matter, state courts, since this technology is going to ubiquitous 20 years from now), would be warranted.
The problem with the RT article is that it treats any instance of the DoJ using unmanned aircraft as a kind of constitutional crisis.
I suspect we are on the same page in regards to the constitutional issues and the problem(s) with this article. I personally find the massive suspension of common sense in our community about these types of issues quite irritating. I just wanted to point out that cost seemed to be used by you as an argument in favor of the use of drones by law enforcement, when according to four Supreme Court justices in certain cases lower cost can make it unconstitutional without first getting a warrant. Neither I or you believe that is the case with drones at this present time, but I think it's important to mention in these conversations that costs do matter (i.e. cheaper is not always better). My purpose here is not to nitpick. It's just that I'd bet that these issues will permeate Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the future and I think people who are part of this "anti-surveillance" camp should know what they're yelling about.
> I just wanted to point out that cost seemed to be used by you as an argument in favor of the use of drones by law enforcement, when according to four Supreme Court justices in certain cases lower cost can make it unconstitutional without first getting a warrant.
The only way I would see it being feasible to forbid government from using drones just because they're cheap, is to forbid it for everyone.
That might not be a bad idea (it's what we did for phone wiretapping), but then we still end up in a situation where the government has more power, as they would then exclusively control the use of public airspace for drones. Cops aren't the only ones who could make productive use of drones (nor is the government in general), so I'm not sure we'd want to make that tradeoff, at least unconditionally.
There's a slight misunderstanding here. It's not that we need to forbid the government from using drones when they are super cheap. Checks and balances are already at work here and are likely to arrive at a reasonable solution. Based on on the opinions of a few of the current Supreme Court, it seems highly likely that the government has to get a warrant to use a drone to follow someone around 24/7.
In my opinion the only thing to be concerned about is Ginsberg being replaced by Thomas/Scalia. If that happens, the way the Supreme Court will come down on this issue is not so clear. It's definitely something to worry about. According to a certain block in Congress, winning two presidential elections still doesn't entitle you to make appointments.
> The problem with the RT article is that it treats any instance of the DoJ using unmanned aircraft as a kind of constitutional crisis.
Their source is Rand Paul so this is not all that surprising. His 2012 anti-drone bill would have made it so improper use of a drone would exclude the evidence collected by drone, and authorized civil suits against operators of said drones. Sounds good...except it was extremely broad.
Here is an example of drone use that would be covered. An endangered species of bird has nested on a university campus. A bird researcher at the university is using a small drone with camera to periodically observe the nest. His research is partly funded by an NSF grant.
While flying the drone to the nest one evening, the researcher sees a man attempting to rape a woman in a public area of the university, and alerts the police.
This would have been forbidden drone use under Paul's bill unless the researcher had a warrant. The researcher would have been covered because he was partly funded by the Federal government, and that was sufficient to put one under the bill. The evidence stemming from the drone use would be inadmissible and the researcher could be sued by the attempted rapist.
There was an exigent circumstances provision in the bill that provided an exception when swift action was necessary to prevent danger to life. That would at first SEEM to apply to an attempted rape in progress. Alas, the exigent circumstances only applied to drones operated by a "law enforcement party", which the bill defined as authorized by law or funded by the Federal government to investigate or prosecute offenses against the United States. A university bird researcher is not a "law enforcement party", and so the exigent circumstances exception does not apply. (Heck, even state and local police would not be law enforcement parties, because they investigate offenses at the state and local level, not offenses against the United States).
Fortunately this bill died quickly. There is a 2013 version. The House version takes out the part about it covering anyone who is funded in whole or part by the Federal government, so would remove my hypothetical biologist from coverage. It would only apply to drones operated by entities acting under the authority of the Federal government.
The Senate version still covers anyone who is funded in whole or part by the Federal government.
While these cases don't sound bad, this argument is.
Manned aircraft are large and obvious, and as you say they are prohibitively expensive, naturally limiting the extent of their use.
Drones can be expected to continue to get smaller and smaller and less noticeable. They can also be expected to become cheaper and easier to deploy in larger numbers than manned aircraft.
In general, the barrier to monitoring by obvious means ought to be lower, as if it is generally going to be noticed, it can be challenged - whether in person or through the courts.
And high costs of manned aircraft also creates a natural barrier that makes excessive surveillance of this type less likely and so less problematic.
The less obvious monitoring becomes, and the easier to becomes to employ en masse, the more oversight it needs because the resulting abuse potential is substantially higher.
They can get detailed images from two miles away. It would be pretty hard in most city environments to notice that a helicopter two miles away is following you. That covers enough area that the helicopter could fly patterns that make it look like it is doing some kind of survey or training or something innocuous, so that even if you notice it, it would not seem suspicious.
I agree insofar as I think this is a discussion we need to be having. I don't think it makes sense to be freaking out over 10 instances of drone surveillance in the course of years, in the same way that it does make sense to be freaking out (to some degree) over the NSA leaks. Thus far, in practice, there has not been a difference between drones and other, presently legitimate, surveillance.
That is not at all how drones are being used according to this article. Until then, plant some trees in your yard and keep calm. There are enough real transgressions going on that we don't need to whip ourselves into a frenzy over hyped stories like this one.
So the line is in fact one of scale? I agree, if the FBI had anything even remotely close to pervasive surveillance, we'd have a problem. But we'd have a problem no matter how they did it. The article says they used drones maybe once a year. That's probably less than the LAPD uses one of their helicopter in a week.
This is true - drones become as big of a problem as wiretapping, once they're mass-produced and flying all over the place. They could conceivably track everyone's movements.
However, at the moment, this is overly expensive and kind of far-fetched, so most people aren't aware of the long-term implications. 30-40 years from now, though?
You generally seem pretty sharp, but your viewpoint here (and elsewhere) seems to be me to be (to use your occasional bluntness) simple contrarian idiocy.
What you say is true but irrelevant. More than that, if you paid attention to the actual issue at hand instead of performing, I dunno, some basic cost-efficiency exercise, you'd see that "Manned aircraft are prohibitively expensive" is a source of pressure in the system.
Manned aircraft are increasingly flown largely by machine. The recent San Francisco crash may have been prevented if a computer had been more active (if not in full control).
Cost-efficiency might indicate we should push for such a thing, but we're comforted by the thought of a man at the helm.
Why's that? Because that means a man has oversight of the automatic system.
But we're going to want our planes to be fully automated at some point.
So a drone flown by a man elsewhere may well be replaced by a drone flown by a drone elsewhere.
And cost-efficiency means that there can be a great many of these drones in play.
---
All of this would be fine if it were an earnest conversation about the role of government in society. This is not the case.
The rule of law is being violated and it is an affront.
Now I'm not exhorting you to share my viewpoint. I'm quite honestly just contemptuous of what I see as your waffling grey in a situation that is increasingly black and white.
10 incidents since 2006. The rule of law? Where does the law say that planes must be manned? I don't buy the idea that we should be hamstringing the government just for the sake of doing that; I think you have to point to an actual abuse of the program to make a case against it.
Also: at no point in this or any other thread did I choose to make an argument by calling you a name. Perhaps you could extend everyone else that same courtesy.
"Admitted" is RT's carefully-chosen wording, since the fact that no warrants or "operational guidelines" were required for this activity was decided over 2 decades ago.
If you're going to make up hypothetical scenarios that have neither (a) happened ever nor (b) been actually mentioned, even by the inflammatory source we're commenting on, would you mind being clearer about that?
Either way: what does it matter that drones have been used as lethal weapons? Manned aircraft have been used as lethal weapons for almost as long as there's been manned aircraft.
Guns have been used as lethal weapons as well, and are far more pervasive, and can also be operated remotely. I don't see anyone calling to take the guns (remotely-operated or otherwise) away from the military though.
It's good that he's being contrarian, because the general opinion here stems from a bunch of tech enthusiasts being riled up at an imaginary boogeyman that's supposedly an affront to their internet rights — because in the end, they really only care about their ability to be jerkoffs online. When the NYPD started frisking every other black person, where was HN? What about when the right for women to have affordable birth control was being oppressed? But suddenly the government is peeking at your search history and it's "tyranny!" and "the government is out of control!" on the front page each day.
All of these arguments are looking increasingly like conspiracy theories.
>When the NYPD started frisking every other black person, where was HN? What about when the right for women to have affordable birth control was being oppressed? But suddenly the government is peeking at your search history and it's "tyranny!"
That's not really fair, right? I mean this is Hacker News, so it makes sense that people are expressing interest in and concern about things related to technology.
>All of these arguments are looking increasingly like conspiracy theories.
I don't get this talk about "conspiracy theories". It's not a theory once it's unveiled and right in your face, is it? Trying to dub people's reactions or sentiment about these topics as conspiracy theories is dismissive and effectively a back-handed ad hominem attack.
It is not a reason-based response to people's legitimate concerns and, worse, it's just plain incorrect. It is not theories that the government is using drones, massive surveillance programs, etc. These are admitted facts.
There are two (maybe three) articles on the front page right now unrelated to technology or "hacking." HN has long been an aggregator of all things interesting to SV, not just tech — and that's my point. You guys are bouncing around in your own little bubble (admittedly a bit faster now) but you're still just in your bubble. Meanwhile, you stay ignorant to the rest of the country and what it actually cares about, which means you will never have any far-reaching effect. People here are literally saying that we're in a dictatorship or a tyranny because the FBI asked for the use of unmanned drones 10 times in the past 10 years.
Obviously I'm not talking about using unmanned drones when I talk about conspiracy theories. I'm talking about Helianthus' entire argument and the arguments I see being perpetuated here. He walks you through it (in true conspiracy-theorist style), asking questions you would never really ask and then answering them as though he makes some big revelation.
They are taking this fact, that the government is flying unmanned blimps around DC as a more cost-efficient way to patrol DC's skies than having manned fighter jets, and using it as proof that the government is spying on civilians with absolutely no evidence. You see these types of folks pop up in news articles like this all the time, because they think they finally have the proof they need to convince the unwashed masses that there's something deeper going on. It just happens that HN is on an anti-government crusade, so they're passing out upvotes like candy to anyone who posts something remotely angry about the NSA.
And, in any case, I was referring to the bad analogies you'd used: No, I don't expect a lot of discussion about women's reproductive rights here. I do expect discussions about search engine privacy.
>You guys are bouncing around in your own little bubble
Who is "you guys"?
>Meanwhile, you stay ignorant to the rest of the country and what it actually cares about
No. I just don't discuss everything here. I'm curious though: what do you think the rest of the country cares about?
>People here are literally saying that we're in a dictatorship or a tyranny because the FBI asked for the use of unmanned drones 10 times in the past 10 years.
No. It's also the NSA surveillance, Patriot Act, Guantanemo, torture, and a ton of other erosions of trust. I am curious to know at what point you think it will be appropriate to have some concern.
>and using it as proof that the government is spying on civilians with absolutely no evidence
But, the evidence is that the FBI admitted to doing just that. You may argue that the number of cases to which they admitted don't bother you, but you can't really argue that there's no evidence that they are doing it, can you?
Listen, if you disagree because you're not concerned, then that's your prerogative. But, please argue your point instead of pretending that these factual things aren't happening and calling everyone who acknowledges them "conspiracy theorists".
Because for me, there need not be anything "deeper" going on to be greatly concerned. The admitted facts are by far enough to make me worry about the future of our nation. And, really, with everything we know, the biggest question in my mind is when do people like you grow concerned?
"Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace."
"Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace."
It should be noted that any citizen is allowed to do so, including with quadcopters. Each time the police us arguing to forbid citizen to use quadcopters to record a demonstration, they are working against their own possibility to use drones.
So far, they can't eat and have the cake at the same time,
Police eats and keeps cakes all the time because they are allowed to use guns and violence much wider than any regular person. Almost every time when a cop is "unnecessarily" brutal, he gets away with it while non-cop for the same action would serve a jail time. Just check the news.
After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be legally violent, while others must obey.
While I would normally agree with you, the cited supreme case above stated that: However, the Court stopped short of allowing all aerial inspections of private property, noting that it was "of obvious importance" that a private citizen could have legally flown in the same airspace. Any member of the public could legally have been flying over Riley's property in a helicopter at the altitude of 400 feet and could have observed Riley's greenhouse. The police officer did no more.
As such, the Police can't eat and keep cake in this case, except if congress changes the law. The supreme court case is quite clear.
> After all, the whole government idea is a double standard. Some people can be legally violent, while others must obey.
To be fair, the original idea is that some people are legally violent on behalf of the rest. Any implementation is thus plagued with principal agent and quorum problems. As the system precesses, it becomes an autonomous entity working to keep up an illusion of subservience lest we stop feeding it.
We allow the police to use violence that is not allowed for ordinary citizens. The doesn't mean the police have authority to do whatever they want.
Yes sometimes police officers will drag somebody into the back of a van and beat the shit out of them for no reason other than their own sadistic amusement, and yes police generally get away with it, but it's not something they are legally allowed to do. The problem is not to do with trite libertarian buzzwords like 'government monopoly on violence'. The problem is a culture of violence within the police, and a culture of closing ranks and not 'snitching', together with a court system that tends to take police officers at their word. Additionally in most of these cases you have a 'police investigating the police' situation, if it even gets that far.
There is also a wider social indifference towards certain section of society which means many people just don't care about the police 'cracking skulls' to put certain groups 'back in their place'. For examples go look at the comments on Fox articles in relation to Occupy protests or cases of police violence against minorities.
It really comes down to people in positions of power getting away with things that less powerful people wouldn't get away with, and that extends to groups other than just the police; the rich and well connected can get away with plenty of crimes that the ordinary person would get locked away for.
You can make a decent argument that giving people as much power over others as we give police (or other people in similar situations like prison guards) will inevitably lead to them abusing that power[1]. That is an argument for stronger oversight and regulation of police forces, not privately funded militias with no regulation at all, which seems to be what the 'government have a monopoly on violence' crowd desire.
Is the unmanned aspect the main difference here? Police have long used both planes and helicopters, and warrants aren't typically required in those cases.
Yeah, I guess I'm not quite getting why I (or anyone else) should be upset about this. Using unmanned drones a handful of times in cases where I would imagine a helicopter would have previously been used sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Because drones can be used in cycles to record an entire city 24/7 for months on end. If a police helicopter constantly circled your neighborhood for months at a time you'd start asking questions and feel like you were in a police state.
Reasonable to me too. But I'm confident the plan is to have hundreds of drones in the sky 24/7 over major cities, covering every square meter every x minutes.
That's an issue that's arising in many forms recently, and I'm not sure the law has sorted out what to do about it.
The gut feeling, which I share, is that there's a qualitative difference between a few targeted observations and pervasive surveillance. But the law has traditionally not included a numerical aspect in 4th-amendment analyses. Either the police need a warrant to fly a helicopter over a city and photograph it, or they don't, regardless of whether they're flying one or a hundred. Saying that something would require a warrant if done very frequently but not if done occasionally would require a either a novel approach to the 4th amendment, or a new law passed by Congress specifying a new policy.
Two bits of 4th amendment law do point towards development of a new doctrine, but I'm not sure very strongly:
1. In United States v. Knotts (1983), the defendant argued that allowing the government to electronically track a vehicle without a warrant raised the spectre of the government being able to pervasively track all movements. The court dismissed that concern by writing: [Defendant] expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the Government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the reality hardly suggests abuse; if such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.
It's a bit of a confusing comment, though, because it doesn't explain the basis for treating "dragnet-type" uses of GPS tracking differently from scattered uses, from a 4th-amendment perspective. My guess is that Rehnquist just wanted to dismiss the defendant's dystopian hypothetical by saying it's not happening now and if it happens later, well we'll deal with it later.
2. One lower court has introduced a "mosaic theory" of the fourth amendment by which things that individually don't count as "searches" for 4th-amendment purposes could constitute a search when aggregated. Here's an article on that: http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
I'm not a lawyer, but I could see an argument being made for a "numerical aspect" to privacy protections. The idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy as a standard seems well supported, and I think it could apply to this situation.
Certainly the police COULD track me when I'm out in public, but my expectation is that they won't unless they have a valid reason for doing so. So while I may not have an explicit legal protection against being tracked in public as an individual, I have an expectation that I'm not being tracked unless I'm the subject of an investigation.
I suppose this is less of a numerical aspect as it is a reasonable expectation factor for the majority of people who would be tracked with pervasive drone surveillance. People just going about their business don't expect to be randomly tracked by the FBI, but most people would probably expect to be tracked if they were specifically being investigated.
But like I said, I'm not a lawyer, so it might be impractical for the law to work that way. If so, then maybe a change in the law will be necessary if it becomes practical to engage in pervasive drone surveillance and it turns out that's what the FBI ends up doing.
Kind of interestingly, the government actually does use that mosaic theory elsewhere, when dealing with 'national security information'.
There is a concept that there are types of information which are unclassified individually, but which can 'become classified' if joined as part of a compilation.
Of course the law is not exactly the same as information security but I don't see why the government should use mosaics in one area and then claim they can't be used for similar concepts elsewhere.
I'm wondering about that too. Because of the ubiquitous planes and helicopters, and satellites too, I've assumed no warrants would be needed for a drone surveillance net. (My plan is to move to a smaller town, if only for less noise.)
This doesn't bother me. I get that it's being equivalated to living in a police state but I don't view it that way. Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical. When I'm in public I expect that I don't have privacy.
I'm going to have to disagree. The possibilty that you might be observed in public is a whole different animal than the probabilty or even certainty that you will.
Knowing that someone might be watching is different than being sure that someone is. And that is just where this train is headed.
Edit: I'm going to go ahead and urge people not to knee-jerk downvote the parent here. Outside of a certain group of the HN crowd, I find this to be the prevailing opinion. A downvote is just a shout of "you're wrong". We need to start educating people of the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance carried to its logical end.
Even more so, the constant fear of being watched changes who you are, how you act and the choices you make, even how you think. That is the whole idea behind the concept of the Panopticon.
Just putting cameras that might not even work in places or put those dark glass domes like you see in the stores makes one act and feel different.
There is an expectation of how police works with a given set of constraints. It seems like a _quantitative_ difference whether a police car can drive by and see your house or a police car is assigned to follow you vs small drone constantly hovering above your house or a tracking device attached to your car. Legally those are the same but they shouldn't be. The distinction is so dramatic like you put it that it is a _qualitative_ difference between the two cases, not just a matter of degree.
I appreciate the call to not down vote. I see a larger picture of things getting out of hand surely. The issue I have with drones and being watched all the time is that there are so many laws we all probably break one daily and that opens us to be treated as criminals.
I'd rather have fewer laws and perhaps further increase the burden of proof necessary to bring charges.
I think it comes down to something that people don't like to say outright: Many of us want the ability to evade the government. We are afraid of the government being too good at their job.
Government is power. And power simply must be limited.
If not, there will be even more abuse, meaning: democracy will be curbed or even eliminated.
And that means, general injustice will increase sharply.
And this leads to a lock-in situation where injustice cannot be reversed b/c it protects itself. It's already the case to a certain degree in Washington, today, when you look to what extreme extent money is replacing democracy ("money" of course being a handful of ultra-rich people).
This is the equivalent of saying "too much of x is toxic". The tautology arises from the fact that the line between "not too much" and "too much" is what defines toxicity.
Saying "power simply must be limited" doesn't do justice to the individual-collective trade-off. Yes, power must be limited, but deciding at what point and to what degree is the whole debate. Simply stating that power needs to be limited at some non-specific threshold doesn't add to the conversation.
I suppose we pretty much all agree that a general "too much of power" level was reached a while ago, in Washington. Of course, we could go more into detail regarding what and how exactly, but the main thing seems to be:
All this centralized and money-based power has caused too much corruption in the general system.
Exactly. That's the point I'm making in my other reply. The problem isn't that the government is watching... it's that it claims to have jurisdiction over too many issues that it shouldn't be involved in.
Right, but my point is that there's no magic that makes the government act within its jurisdiction. We should try to force it to limit itself to that (and then some, but that's another discussion), but we shouldn't assume we'll succeed.
Generally, I do agree with you. No expectation of privacy. Generally, this doesn't particularly bother me. Which means I would guess (from a very lay point of view) that there's no justification to require warrants for flying drones. Anybody should be able to fly a drone. However we should arguably be fighting against this anyway, to keep the government from being too good at its job, since we can't trust it to do the right thing with whatever power it's asserted.
I'd be inclined to agree if this were limited to public spaces only. But here's the issue: aerial surveillance isn't limited to public areas only. If I'm surveilling a public park aerially I'm also necessarily surveilling the houses next to it. If I have to get a warrant to perform that survellance then good enough. The warrant will limit the surveillance. No warrant? Now it drifts into that surveillance state place.
A police officer on patrol can't police private property without trespassing; the houses bordering the park likely have privacy fences, foliage coverage, etc. to prevent their owners from being watched (by a anyone, not just police) on their pool deck or wherever. Drones (and planes) see right over those, and without warrants they're quite likely to result in privacy violations.
I didn't downvote you, I can't. But I think, you are seriously wrong. And it's because because you lack to see what all this will enable, abuse-wise. I'm pretty sure you will change your mind once you'll effectively feel the consequences. The thing is, if we, as a society want to advance, we need to reflect more on what is happening.
Why wouldn't a reasonable person assume that, given the historical trend? The gov't has been steadily implementing the strategies laid out in the book 1984, my whole longish life.
> and invoking Godwin (two posts in!) is unwarranted
I expressed an unpopular opinion in a civil way, and your response is pure snark. I didn't mean to offend you by saying the G word. Maybe I'll talk about another over-reaching police force. Would that be more palatable for you?
> "I listed supporting arguments to the contrary.."
Yeah, and those were fine. It's like writing a great refutation and ending it with "but sure, go have tea with Hitler". The snarky "you don't support us so clearly you must support [insert evil thing]" undermines a valid point made, and verges on ad hominem.
The parallels of the ubiquitous American surveillance state certainly have shades of the Stasi or the Gestapo, but the insinuation that OP must, by virtue of his disagreement with you, support the extreme end of this institution, is unjustified. He stated his opinion with civility, the accusatory, with-us-or-with-pure-evil angle is unwarranted and cheapens the discourse.
> but the insinuation that OP must, by virtue of his disagreement with you, support the extreme end of this institution, is unjustified
OP States: Police or FBI patrolling more efficiently seems progressive and economical.
I'm not insinuating anything. I'm simply questioning OP about his self-proclaimed principles in an obviously Socratic method. The only thing I'm accusing OP of is being ignorant of principled reasoning.
1. If I'm in my backyard and I have a high fence (private). And an FBI target walks by my property (public), how can they claim to not be surveilling me as well?
2. Is it unconstitutional surveillance to use Google Earth to see if I was home on the specific day their imagery was collected?
high fence does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy
Even within the curtilage and notwithstanding that the owner
has gone to the extreme of erecting a 10-foot high fence in
order to screen the area from ground-level view, there is no
reasonable expectation of privacy from naked-eye inspection
from fixed-wing aircraft flying in navigable airspace.
California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207
See also Oliver v. United States, where even "locked gate + no trespassing signs" does not give you a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Depends. The 4th amendment protects people, not places.
For your house?
Probably
For your yard?
Probably not, but it depends what part of the yard.
Cameras arranged on poles?
I'm too lazy to look up cases.
See Kyllo and friends.
The reason it's divorced from "freedom from observation" is because the constitution does not guarantee you a freedom from observation, only a freedom from search.
These are not the same.
As one of the cases says, "the police are not required to shield their eyes as they pass homes if they do not have probable cause"
> It's a simple extension of a very old principle: you don't have an expectation [of privacy] on areas viewable from public property.
Wandering off-topic just a bit, there's an oddball trade-secret case from 1970 that has always puzzled me: A father-and son photographer team flew over a DuPont chemical plant that was under construction and took aerial photographs. DuPont tracked down the photographers and asked who had hired them; when they refused to say, DuPont sued them for theft of trade secrets.
The photographers moved to dismiss, in part on grounds that aerial photography from the public airspace was fair game. The appeals court upheld the trial court's ruling rejecting the photographers' contention and said they could be compelled to disclose who hired them.
The appellate court said, "To require DuPont to put a roof over the unfinished plant to guard its secret would impose an enormous expense to prevent nothing more than a school boy's trick. We introduce here no new or radical ethic since our ethos has never given moral sanction to piracy. The market place must not deviate far from our mores. We should not require a person or corporation to take unreasonable precautions to prevent another from doing that which he ought not do in the first place. Reasonable precautions against predatory eyes we may require, but an impenetrable fortress is an unreasonable requirement, and we are not disposed to burden industrial inventors with such a duty in order to protect the fruits of their efforts." [1].
Tailing someone on a public road is a very old principle as well, but that didn't matter Alito and the other three justices who joined with him in the Jones concurrence. He found that 24/7 monitoring for 28 days on public roads only with a GPS device constituted a search. I don't think the FBI did anything wrong here, but you're drastically oversimplifying what surely is an un-litigated issue. The fact that a GPS device was so much cheaper than 24 hour surveillance via a tail car is what Alito's concurrence hinged on, despite the fact that the monitoring was exactly the same.
I'm somewhere between meh and concerned about this. One one hand, this is nothing new. Police have used airplanes to catch speeders for a long long time. But the breathless, OMG we're in a police state pushes me, for some reason, to take the contrarian stand.
i think people (and government pushing for drone usage) missing one important aspect - where police/FBI will launch 100 drones, the citizens will launch tens of thousands drones (and if it is outlawed like it is in some states already - it will be Anon's drones) and will observe and record each government/police action. People are worried about government's gigapixel Argus while hundred citizens' drones with 10M cameras can do the same job.
While citizens can claim protection of 4th, the government/police while performing their duties - can't as their actions are allowed to be observed by citizens. It will be a police state for police. Right now a citizen recording police is easily intimidated, like by arresting him and shooting his dog for example. Good luck doing it in case of anonymous drone :)
It will surely be illegal for the citizens to have their own drones. It will be gov't-only airspace at that altitude. (The people won't object in sufficient numbers either, giving gov't the mandate.) I doubt an Anon could launch or land a drone very many times without getting caught.
I used to live in a city with cops everywhere, where you'd get pulled over for doing 38 mph in a 35 zone. This city is surely intent on using drones to auto-fine all such criminals, making the place even safer by narrowing it to 35.01 mph.
It's kind of amazing that people who fear the US government becoming oppressive are willing to listen to the propaganda arm of what's developing into a truly oppressive strong-arm government. Not to say it's not a valid concern, but RT's rise as a source people listen to is equal parts fascinating and disturbing. The USSR, or the USA during the cold war for that matter, would have killed to have this kind of influence on people in their opposing spheres.
The NYPD fly helicopters over the city pretty much all day every day. And they are probably armed with something or other. The FBI drones are not. Drone surveillance can never be illegal by definition since they can only observe things in public view. I wish people would stop worrying about specific tactics, be it drones or decrypting SSL traffic, and worry about due process.
