Unmanned Aerial Drones—Not Just for Battlefields Any More

They customarily fly over war zones, but they could soon make their way to a neighborhood near you. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), remote-controlled aircraft that operate with no on-board human pilot, are foraying into civilian airspace as law-enforcement agencies and private citizens obtain these machines and fly them.

“We’re on the verge of a revolution,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Washington, DC, think tank Brookings Institution.

He said this while moderating an April 4 forum at Brookings on the helps and harms that UAVs could bring to society, and the steps that local and national governments should take before these aircraft to take the skies en masse. His four guest speakers— Kenneth Anderson, American University law professor; Paul Rosenzweig, Heritage Foundation visiting fellow; Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union; and John Villasenor, Brookings governance studies senior fellow—agreed that UAVs could be helpful tools for law enforcement and society in general; but that they could simultaneously be destructive weapons used by terrorists or stalkers, or by overzealous government agencies and police forces bent on monitoring and controlling private citizens.

“We have a moment to address the technologies while they are still being set in place,” said Anderson.

The forum was timely due to President Obama’s signature in February of a bill authorizing drones in U.S. airspace. The bill approves both “public” drones operated by governments and law enforcement, and “civil” ones operated by businesses and average citizens, and calls on the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a comprehensive system for licensing, regulating, and integrating both categories of UAVs throughout all U.S. airspace by Sept. 30, 2015.

It’s easy to see why police might want UAVs. Rosenzweig brought up border security and the vast long-range view a pilotless aircraft with cameras could bring to border-patrol teams.

“Instead of having border patrol at every 30 feet along the border, you could have people in cars who can respond when an intrusion is observed,” Rosenzweig said.

And any community police force could enhance its operations with drones, as Crump pointed out. A camera-equipped UAV can fly over an area and generate footage for human technicians to reconstruct moment by moment, zeroing in on any spot and retracing any individual’s movements as needed.

Furthermore—and ominously, in Crump’s view—a fleet of drones would make it easy for a police force to control large crowds with very few human officers present. Crump worries about the temptation for cops to cross from police work into police state—spying on people at will, no warrant necessary.

“We are concerned that drones not become tools of general surveillance,” she said.

Private individuals could spy on us, too. Villasenor foresees stalker-minded individuals outfitting their own UAVs with cameras.

“Non-line-of-sight operation would make it possible for someone to fly a drone into a fenced-in yard, lower it down to hover directly outside a window facing into the yard, and take pictures of the interior of the house,” he said.

The civilian UAV community is larger than you might think. DIYDrones is an “amateur UAV” Web site, replete with instructions on how to build your own UAV, plus directories of groups of amateur UAV enthusiasts. The site’s how-to instructions include the note “optional: a useful ‘payload,’ such as a digital camera or video transmission equipment.”

Even worse, Villasenor noted that a terrorist might lace a UAV with explosives and fly it into a power station, weapons depot, or government building. Unlike an explosives-laden car or truck, it could sail past conventional security gates and checkpoints.

Accidental disasters are possible, too. Villasenor warned that UAVs’ ground-based pilots will have to take care not to run their drones into conventional aircraft. UAVs have glaring blind spots around and behind the wings, so such aerial collisions are all too plausible.

“The sheer mathematics of the numbers means we’re going to have some hiccups along the way,” he said. “It is almost unimaginably complex to think about how in the world we’re going to successfully navigate the safety challenges of potentially tens of thousands of these unmanned aviation systems.”

He hopes that we can develop tools to prevent many of these frightening scenarios, though. For instance, a sensitive government site could install transmitter “jamming” equipment to confuse an approaching UAV’s computer systems. Also, governments at all levels can mitigate harms if they update existing laws on surveillance and personal privacy.

“The best solutions are probably technological,” Villasenor said.

I can imagine a few other scenarios. Some are good, some not so good:

• Automobile theft becomes a rarity. If your car has been stolen, phone it in, and an aerial drone will survey traffic far and wide. Perhaps its camera could deploy Google-like search algorithms to automatically zero in on the car whose license plate matches yours.
• Likewise, traffic fatalities drop precipitously. When a driver is driving erratically (a.k.a., under the influence) or is veering out of control (a.k.a. “road rage”), a drone could alert an officer to drive in and intervene before something tragic transpires.
• But what if law enforcement drones get the ability to fire weapons, just like their military predecessors? Military drones sometimes shoot the wrong targets or kill unarmed civilians. Armed drones operating in civilian areas could take innocent lives, too.
• Like anyone else, police risk becoming overly technology-dependent. Suppose a police department recalls too many officers from the beat and replaces them with drones. That may work fine until a blackout, cyber-terrorist attack, or run-of-the-mill software virus crashes their systems. Then the whole police force is handicapped.

There is no question that UAVs are coming, and that great dangers as well as great helps are possible from them. We will have to pay attention to see how they develop. And we will have to take it as a given that the friendly skies above us will never be quite the same.