A very sensible opinion piece in the Washington Post, which discusses us. A couple small technical errors (most DIY Drones aren't controlled by WiFi), but otherwise one of the best I've seen:
Here's how it starts:
The drone debate we need to have
By Vivek Wadhwa
Last week, a Virginia House panel approved a two-year moratorium on drone use within the state. In December, Berkeley’s City Council debated a similar proposal from its Peace and Justice Commission. The commission wanted to prohibit the city from purchasing, borrowing, testing or using drones, or allowing “drones in transit.” Hobbyists would, however, have been allowed to use drones which didn’t carry cameras or audio surveillance equipment. The legislation was shot down because, as Berkeley Councilman Gordon Wozniak argued, “Berkeley doesn’t have jurisdiction over its airspace and can’t enforce it unless we buy Patriot missiles to shoot things down.” Both of these bills were prompted by law enforcement officials wanting to use drones for surveillance and intelligence gathering.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls this “spying.”
These are the harbingers of debates to come as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) moves towards approving the use ofUnmanned Aircraft Systems for law enforcement. Groups such as the ACLU are working to stop this because of concerns over privacy. As M. Ryan Calo, my colleague at Stanford Law School and Director for Privacy and Robotics at theCenter for Internet & Society, has written, U.S. privacy laws don’t address these issues. This means we are in for some significantlegislative battles on Capitol Hill and in the Supreme Court. Calo says these “could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the twenty-first century.”
No doubt, privacy is an important issue. But this is going to be the least of our concerns as drone technologies advance further. We are entering the “drone age” writes drone-builder Chris Anderson, whose company 3D Robotics sells drone kits to mix and match capabilities. With sensors, optics, and embedded processors advancing exponentially and prices dropping precipitously, do-it-yourself-ers are building even more sophisticated and smaller drones than what the U.S. government had a few years ago.
Read the rest here.
Comments
As soon as the usual coffee and pizza delivery come up my eyes glaze over....
Its the technical equivalent of banning guns because they might be used to shoot someone despite the fact there may be legitimate reasons to own a gun.
They should focus on laws to make the bad use of the activity illegal, not the activity itself.
For example, make sure there is a law to make it illegal to spy on people. Whether you use a drone or not, it should be illegal to spy on someone. The drone is just one of a million tools you could use to perform the spying.
There is going to be a lot of silly media fed overreaction to the whole"drone" thing and it is probably going to take an honest effort on our parts to ensure that the "good" news gets out there sufficiently to combat all the paranoia and hysteria.
One of the great things about the Parrot and our small multicopters is that it presents a clearly benign reality in a sea of misinformation and inadequate understanding.