Congressman Releases Draft of Legislation On Domestic Drones and Privacy 70
An anonymous reader writes "Police would be required to get a warrant to use drones for certain types of surveillance under legislation introduced on Capitol Hill. The proposed bill would also tighten regulations on what kind of data can be collected by the government and private companies and how it can be used. To safeguard against abuses, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus and a longtime member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, released a draft of the Drone Aircraft Privacy and Transparency Act of 2012 on Wednesday." In related news, garymortimer points out that a North Dakota court has preliminarily upheld the first-ever use of an unmanned drone to assist in the arrest of an American citizen.
Re:Simple Idea: (Score:2, Interesting)
Better idea: As long as they're unarmed how about treating drones the same way as police helicopters used for surveillance currently are, since they do the same thing except for Medevac missions? (Not to mention a higher-flying and undectable drone might be better in pursuit surveillance in terms of not panicking the pursued?)
And many police departments do indeed employ armored personnel carriers for SWAT or riot control duties. They do wear Flack Jackets and carry AR-15s, MP-5s, etc. as needed for their duties. In fact, there was a major felony bust at our complex where the entry team did indeed have everything you reference above.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful that in most day-to-day activities that gear stays stowed and out of the way, as opposed to countries whose beat police carry automatic rifles or subs. But if it's possibly trading fire with druggies, I'd still rather see the officers protected with everything possible short of heavy weapons.
Tricky defense (Score:3, Interesting)
This is tricky, because we certainly don't want our personal fun use of drones to be criminalized in any law, but we do want clear restrains on government and other forms of invasion of privacy.
The question I have is, if you're sitting on 3000 acres of land, you can probably use a jamming device without impacting your neighbor's cable reception. So, what type of jamming would impact a drone?
Re:Simple Idea: (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think /. has many overt authoritarians.
What /. has is lots and lots of pro-government power full idiots. They don't grasp that giving the government a large slice of GDP is a guarantee of abuse. Starve the beast, don't give it credit ether.
They will be along shortly.