When most countries' laws governing the privacy of citizens were drafted, decades or even centuries ago, the Founders had no way to imagine flying robots capable of spying on private citizens or even obliterating them with a missile strike launched from miles away. Yet this is the current reality we now inhabit, where battlefield skirmishes against a foreign enemy cross a very thin line meant to guard a country's own citizens from similar treatment by their government.

Within the strict confines of law, drones currently reside in a very gray area, due to the relatively short time they have been utilized. Most countries' systems of government are not set up to move particularly quickly, favoring deliberation of an issue over incisive and rapid action. Thus, laws governing the use of drones have not moved as quickly as the implementation of the drones themselves. Drone use is also subject to extreme secrecy, with countries claiming such information is a matter of national security and is therefore not open to public debate or even knowledge.

Advocates for the use of drones tout the various benefits, extolling their comparative low cost of operation, silent infiltration, ability to engage specific targets in surgical strikes or even eventual private sector pizza delivery and disaster relief usage.
Yet such benefits could come with a wildly increased loss of basic privacy for the average citizen just trying to go about everyday life. Philosophical questions regarding the trading of liberty for security have fueled public discourse since the time of Benjamin Franklin. Security at the cost of privacy will always be a necessary trade-off, but just how far should citizens be willing to secede their rights to their own government? 

The Nature of Future Battlefield Conflicts

Wars are expensive, and the high cost of human life becomes an unpopular issue for politicians to overcome back home. Drone use circumvents these two major negative points, allowing governments to engage in "off the books" conflicts that are essentially warlike actions without the negative baggage of actual war. Drone use becomes a convenient way for politicians to dodge pesky issues of engaging foreign nations in actual combat and the bad press that inevitably results. It is also far removed, sometimes literally, from the sort of hand-to-hand combat traditionally part of any aggressive engagement of an enemy. Because of its sterile killing style, drone use does not raise the sort of questions from a country's own citizens that the floods of pictures featuring wounded women and children that are the collateral damage of "boots on the ground" warfare inevitably raise -- but it should. 

There is also the question of the lingering effects such use in foreign conflicts has on the radicalization of survivors. Drone strikes with high collateral damage are the fodder of Al-Qaeda recruitment materials, driving the argument that such strikes might create far more future enemy combatants than they could ever eliminate with strikes here and now. 

The drones' main selling point, that of antiseptic warfare that spares a country's actual fighting force, may also not be as strong as once believed. In the opinion of many experts, drones are of limited use; soldiers are still required to maintain order and conquer or secure high value targets in a country's infrastructure, such as dams, power plants or oil fields. With a near certainty that U.S. will once again have to deploy significant numbers of troops into a rapidly devolving situation in Iraq, the question of a drone's overall effectiveness is once again raised.

When Use Turns into Abuse

In the United States, the FBI admitted in 2013 to drone use for the purpose of observing the country's own citizens. Such use is a gray area not implicitly addressed in the country's Constitution, yet seemingly in violation of its Fourth Amendment governing the use of improper searches. 

While FBI director Robert Mueller attempted to assure the public by claiming such surveillance use was "very seldom," it can be argued that even one use is a violation of a citizen's civil rights governing the probable cause necessary prior to a search of property. The number of vehicles set aside for such use and the amount of times they have engaged them was information that was also conveniently left out of Mueller's discussion. Drones are capable of collecting information normally requiring the use of a warrant to obtain, leading to a clear violation of a citizen's civil rights under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment. 

The killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who certainly met the ad hoc definition of an enemy combatant, was the killing of an American citizen without benefit of a trial by peers guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The question of whether he deserved the death penalty for his crimes is entirely separate from the question of whether he deserved to be stripped of the basic civil rights promised to each and every American citizen. When a government has the power to define what a "terrorist" is and then remove all previous guaranteed rights from that person, it begins to move from a democracy governed by the rule of law to something else entirely. 

Ultimately the question of whether engaging a drone is use or abuse falls on the eye of the beholder. To a policeman, soldier, or politician, they are necessary to carry out operations that humans are unable to undertake or who are unwilling to pay for in either human life or monetary expenditure. To the innocent lives that are the price of drone strikes on foreign soil, to the private citizens whose personal daily lives are violated in the name of "securing the Homeland," such use can be nothing other than the most egregious kind of abuse. Do the costs outweigh the benefits? Can we even trust politicians to tell us the truth about such costs? Such questions have always been asked of warfare and should continue to be asked of this new brand of technological warfare that seems innocuous on its surface yet harbors ways to violate basic civil rights undreamt of by even the most totalitarian regimes of the past.

Gabriel Welch from http://geekfortunes.com/