Drones are annoying as hell.

Like Radar on M*A*S*H, you hear the flying machines before you see them. “Bzzzzzzzzzz!” You gaze upwards and see the whirlybird eye-in-the-sky hovering overhead and buzzing like a hornet’s nest. You feel you’re being watched because most likely you are.

Chances are it’s just some kid playing with a toy or a real estate agent taking pictures of a property.

But more and more across America that buzz is likely the fuzz.

More Toys for the Boys in Blue

Intensifying the Minority Report vibe in an already dystopian 21st century, police departments across the country are deploying drones in a variety of capacities.

One concept is called “Drone as a First Responder” (DFR). How’s it work? When it gets a 911 call, the police department sends an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with a camera to the scene to check for dangers and acquire situational awareness.

It’s a practice that dates back half a dozen years. “DFR programs have been growing in popularity since first launched by the Chula Vista Police Department in 2018,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Now there are a few dozen departments with known DFR programs among the approximately 1,500 police departments known to have any drone program at all, according to EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance, the most comprehensive dataset of this kind of information.”

DFR raises many red flags. For example, the drone, while traveling to the site of the alleged offence, is likely to surveil and record everything in its path, according to the EFF. The practice could lead to “mission creep,” policing of low-level infractions that previously wouldn’t have attracted any attention because they wouldn’t have been seen. What’s more, DFR flights tend to fall disproportionately on minority neighborhoods, increasing the possibility of aggravating already fragile racial relations.

Another concept is using drones to augment human resources. This is quite popular in cities overwhelmed by mostly unvetted Venezuelan immigrants.

The Denver Police Department (DPD), for example, is planning to roll out a DFR program to account for budget shortfalls due to costs associated with an influx of over 40,000 Venezuelans.

Then there’s the Big Apple. Earlier this summer the New York Police Department (NYPD) assigned hundreds of policemen to help curb a huge spike in crime in Central Park -- a trend attributed to gangs of young Venezuelans. But the officers are still struggling to keep watch on ne’er-do-wells and are calling in drones to help with the work.

"We’ve got the autonomous drones coming by the end of the month,” said Tarik Sheppard, the NYPD deputy commissioner for public information. “There are over 800 acres in this park. It’s going to allow us to cover a big territory very quickly and also allow us to get images and video in places where we don’t have cameras.”

In addition, SWAT teams across the country are also using drones in indoor spaces to assess risks before acting to resolve a conflict, such as a hostage situation.

Who Will Watch the Watchmen?

All these practices are relatively new, and it takes time for public policy to catch up with today’s quickly emerging and advancing technologies.

The following are recent legislation on the subject, according to EFF:

• In Alaska: The Alaska Supreme Court ruled police must acquire a warrant for drone surveillance in otherwise private areas.
• In California, Hawaii, and Vermont: Courts ruled that aerial surveillance without a warrant violates constitutional guarantees regarding unreasonable search and seizure.
• In Minnesota: The state requires law enforcement to report on drone program costs and the number of times drones have been deployed each year, including without a warrant.
• In Illinois: The state enacted a Drones as First Responders Act that requires agencies to report the number of drones they own, how often they’ve been deployed and whether video was captured and retained following deployments. They also must delete drone footage after 24 hours and in most situations are prohibited from using facial recognition technology.
• Also in California: The state also enacted a law requiring inventories of drones and the gathering of public feedback regarding drone acquisition and usage.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) provides some interesting insight and guidelines.

“Drones have many beneficial uses, including in search-and-rescue missions, scientific research, mapping, and more,” explains the ACLU. “But deployed without proper regulation, drones equipped with facial recognition software, infrared technology, and speakers capable of monitoring personal conversations would cause unprecedented invasions of our privacy rights. Interconnected drones could enable mass tracking of vehi­cles and people in wide areas. Tiny drones could go completely unnoticed while peering into the window of a home or place of worship.”

The Origins of the Right to Privacy

It’s good to have organizations like the EFF and ACLU looking out for the people.

After all, many feel there’s a natural or God-given right to privacy.

The concept of privacy goes all the way back to Aristotle and his ideal duality of life with the polis representing the public sphere and the oikos representing the private domain.

Jump ahead two millennia, and the thinking in the 17th and 18th centuries furthered the idea. “[The right to privacy] is a particularly ‘Western’ concept, founded on the Enlightenment view of the individual being the focus of the society and possessing rights to live and act without interference from government so long as society is protected from unreasonable acts,” according to Stimmel Law.

There’s no explicit mention of the right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution, although the Bill or Rights refers to the concept implicitly in the first, third, fourth, and fifth amendments.

Still, the most influential writing on the topic is “The Right to Privacy,” an article in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 which argued for the right to be let alone.

And, subsequently, the issue was legislated through case law in the late 20th century.

The right of privacy has evolved to mean, among other things but most pertinent to this piece: “the wrongful intrusion into one’s private activities in such manner as to outrage or cause mental suffering, shame or humiliation to a person of ordinary sensibilities.”

The godlike “gaze” of the drone could evoke all these emotions.

The Oppression of Eyes Everywhere

The mere presence of drones in the sky tend to cause feelings of uncertainty and anxiety.

The dynamic is reminiscent of the panopticon. The original panopticon, a concept of English social theorist Jeremy Bentham, was imagined as a centralized observation tower in a middle of a circular prison. Without being seen, it was possible for one person to monitor any of the prison cells at one time but not all of them at the same time; since the prisoners never knew if they were being watched they tended to behave as if they were.

The concept has been implemented everywhere from prisons to mental hospitals to, arguably, the skies.

Regarding the DPD’s plan to rollout drones for DFR, Laura Moraff, a staff attorney for the ACLU, said, “There is also just the risk that the more that we normalize having drones in the skies, the more it can really affect behavior on a massive scale, if we are just looking up and seeing drones all over the place, knowing that police are watching us.”

Eerie, right?

So, what’s to be done?

Get busy. Instead of sitting idly by while the police state continues to erode civil liberties consider writing your local, state, and national representatives with any concerns.

Otherwise, the normalization of police drones will be a slippery slope to a greater dystopia.

Image: Magic Studio