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Terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, the Sudan and around the world have been seriously worried since President Obama came to office. So far he has implemented 283 Drone Strikes on identified enemies of Al-Qaeda or Taliban proclivities. Those are the one’s we know about. How many surveillance Drones have we deployed? One we know landed in Iran by mistake. That one didn’t have any weapons on it – that we know of and the Iranians are still not talking much about what they found. In any event, the Drone Strikes have been very effective and less costly than using human blood. Much like Prairie Dogs….the next one that sticks their head up…..has every chance of having it removed with surgical excellence, in no time.
The Predator Drones deployed by our military utilize Hellfire Missiles that are known to mess up the local gentry once targeted. The rumors are that a bunch of super nerd military pilots located in St. Louis, Missouri stationed in a fortified bunker run the whole world operation. The Predator has been around a while and was first used during the Bush Administration for taking out Iraqis planting IED’s along the roadside to Damascus. We all remember seeing those first videos of the heat sensing radar images and then the dusty explosions. In the beginning of the war in Iraq….our armed Drone supply was limited and the whole program was just getting under way. Today, we seem to have plenty of armed drones and have been lucky by picking on Al-Qaeda leadership. There is probably little doubt that an armed or unarmed surveillance drone was used to find Osama Bin Laden….before Seal Team Six got him.
The big complaints about the Drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been the so-call “collateral damage” of both property and civilian deaths. Mostly the wives and kids of the bad guys. Occasionally, neighbors have been impacted. Probably sends that old Italian message: “Don’t live next door to Don Corelone unless you are part of his gang!” The calls that incursions into National Borders and violations of Sovereignty in the affected countries targeted, suggest that turn around could be fair play soon. What would the United States do if some Drug Cartel, Russian Mafia, Terrorist Organization or Foreign Government utilized drones to target US citizens in other countries or here in the America?
The International issues are complex and they involve several agencies of the US Government: The CIA, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Treasury, the National Security Agency and more. Where is Darrell Issa and his Congressional Investigation into the use of Drones in his Government Oversight Committee? The use of drones are not simply restricted to Foreign Terror Activities (or FTO’s). They can and probably are being utilized for surveillance activities in the US Domestically. Have “Home Grown Terrorists” been identified and taken out here in the United States? Perhaps Congressman Issa and and team should check into those activities. If not, what protections do US Citizens have from Drone video, audio and from armed intervention activities. They can already GPS you wherever you are through your Android, IPod or old time cell phone. What about a law for “Illegal Use of Drone”?
Police Departments around our country are budgeting for Drone Deployments for 2013 and beyond. A lot of issues involving personal privacy, security and public safety come to mind. The size of drones are coming down to the size of a honey bee. The so-called nano drones have been under development for several years. You might not care that some guy in the local PD…is watching your wife nude sunbathe in your back yard. Then again, if those photos show up on someone’s Facebook page…you may have empathy and truly understand what Kate and Prince William went through in France.
The the use of drones in not going to go away and unless the Congress acts to write laws to protect the people from improper use, every paparazzi in the world will be utilizing drones to get their next photo of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or even someone not that cute. The Genie is certainly out of the bottle and Pandora’s Box is exploding in the Digital-3D Age of Aquarius. In the words of Ray Kurzweil – “The Singularity is coming!” Someone should call the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a legal read out!
People are finally starting to understand that anything you put on the Internet will stay here forever. Whether anyone wants to read it or look at it will depend on how entertaining it might be to others. People are starting to understand that any e-mail, text message or phone call we make by any means, can be or will be and usually is being tracked. Most people really don’t care how much toilet paper they use….but…if the local PD drone was watching you on your window sill disguised as a fly or mosquito….or even a moth……well then? This may be why the folks in the Cisco area of San Francisco were all going nude in public. The Board of Supervisors finally had to write a law…..to cease that activity. Of course, 20 people watching the Board of Supervisors in SF all immediately dropped trow….boys and girls. Most were not arrested…however!
The old saying: “We are all living in a Fish Bowl….” may be very appropriate or perhaps; “Drones….and a new Bugs Life!”, might be an even better description!
About drones: first, we really have to distinguish between surveillance drones and armed drones. Each creates their own set of problems, but they’re very different.
The problem with surveillance drones is that they do keep within the constitutional limits of our right to privacy — which is that if something happens in public, where you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, the government is welcome to document it. (Justice Kennedy found an exception to this, when he rejected the government’s trawling the streets for large infrared emissions that might suggest a major home-based pot growing enterprise, but I’m not sure how far this stretches.)
The problem is that given this point of weakness in privacy protection, the government is now (at least potentially) “flooding the zone” — and we might reasonably think differently about the constitutionality of potential universal surveillance in public than we do about its being a tool that is pulled out only occasionally. The law is going to have a hard time adapting to this, especially given the weakening of 4th Amendment protections (mostly) by conservative judges.
The use of drones to kill people (and violent actions short of that) is different — and how legitimate it is depends on the alternative. Defenders of drones say that the alternative is something like saturation bombing a la Vietnam. OK, even relatively well-targeted drones are presumably better than saturation bombing — and the reason that I hedge there is that the fact that they seem more benign means that they may be used way more often. But there’s another alternative to the use of drones — flat out not using them and not trying any alternative to them.
This means that “bad guys” go free — as well as protecting the lives of those around them, especially innocent people. Let’s presume for now that letting identified enemies go free is bad. (Some of you will disagree; just recognize that you’re not in the mainstream of public opinion.) There’s another benefit to not using drones that is easier to overlook from here in our country, but that is clearer to those outside:
Using drones makes us look like cowards who fear being vulnerable to personal harm. And looking like cowards who use robots to do our dirty work for us, rather than going out and facing our military opponents like “honorable warriors,” may well build world opinion against us and help justify (in the minds of our enemies and those who would not otherwise be our enemies) terrorist attacks on civilians because we leave them no alternative means to fight.
I don’t endorse that view — but I recognize its prevalence and I think that it’s foolish to pretend that people don’t think that our use of robots to fight our wars and kill flesh and blood enemies (and non-enemy “collateral damage”) makes us look like the sorts of supervillains that people generally root against. Anyone who doesn’t think that that is a problem for Americans hasn’t thought it through hard enough.
*A very thoughtful response Dr. D., we can only say that if a family member or friend of yours was aboard Flt. 103 over Lockerbee…..you might not be so concerned that the bomb maker and lead dog in that endeavor was living safely in Libya. You would just want things taken care of….no matter who was living next door to him at the time. Just the threat of Armed Drones is a very cool deterrent to Foreign Terrorist Organizations. They are always looking over their shoulders and listening for the low flying aircraft.
Our opinion is that tracking down and dispatching bad guys that either already or are planning on planting IED’s or wearing Suicide Vests to kill innocents is surely worth the so-called “Collateral Damage” along the way. There are too many events to even mention….but they started a ways back with the Red Army Faction in Germany. They have been the poster children for most of the modern day terrorist activities and if you consider the old days when the Sibonese Liberation Army kidnapped Patricia Hurst….
there is little doubt that members residing in SF at the time would have been taken out with dispatch…..had we used modern day drones.
There are some bad folks out there, and there is little doubt abuses by law enforcement will eventually raise their ugly heads. Those people would need the death penalty to make it intelligent. When you use deadly force…you also have to
be responsible and have it bought off at a higher source who will suffer the same penalities as those that pull the trigger.
The Nano-Drones are going to be another problem and more invasive than any others. Imagine leaving your sliding door open and having one of those take up
residence inside your house. Now we are really talking Big Brother!
Guess we will have to design a better mouse trap for those varmints!