(Defence Images/Creative Commons)

WASHINGTON – Drones – the same unmanned aircraft used for attacking the Taliban and killing Islamist terrorists – could soon come to a sky near you.

On Feb. 14, President Barack Obama signed the Federal Aviation Administration’s Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, accelerating the timetable for unmanned air vehicle use in U.S. skies. The bill greenlighted both public and private UAVs – or drones – for domestic liftoff by September 2015.

But privacy advocates are hotly protesting the law, warning that the FAA bill is the first step down a dangerous road to a surveillance society. UAVs’ high-tech cameras and sensors, they say, coupled with the current lack of regulation regarding drone use, could lead to a nation in which Big Brother watches from the sky.

The FAA previously blocked domestic UAV use due to safety concerns. But the military’s growing drone arm – they now make up a third of military aircraft – has driven improvements in the sense- and-avoid technology that helps prevent mid-air collisions.

Experts agree the bill opens the door for a commercial industry that could bring UAVs to any area from crop dusting to personal photography.

Drones’ main draw, however, is in the public sector – and therein lies their main controversy.

Advocates like Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., say bringing UAVs to U.S. skies will lead to unprecedented gains in border defense, public safety and emergency response.

“Our state and local law enforcement agencies need a faster, more responsive process,” McKeon said in a statement. “Our neighborhoods deserve safer streets, and these systems can help provide that.

Source: FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (David Uberti/Medill)

Opponents of the FAA bill don’t dispute drones’ policing capabilities. But they say the same components that allow drones to stalk and strike terrorists in the Middle East and South Asia will be used to scout crime scenes, follow suspects and patrol wide areas. Thermal imaging, for example, makes it easy to look at suspects inside buildings. And high-resolution cameras let operators follow several subjects simultaneously.

The rapidly improving technology is privacy advocates’ main concern. The FAA expects as many as 30,000 UAVs – as minute as small birds and as large as the 116-foot Global Hawk  – to fly in U.S. skies in 10 years.

Keeping up with technology 

“The technology is getting cheaper and more powerful and smaller,” said Jay Stanley, a policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s entirely predictable that the use of this technology will spread greatly unless there are obstacles put in its way.”

Stanley wrote a December ACLU report urging the FAA to expand its regulations to include privacy measures – not just safety guidelines. Although the air agency has repeatedly denied this responsibility, civil liberties groups insist that ensuring personal privacy helps protect individuals on the ground.

If the FAA doesn’t consider privacy safeguards in its UAV regulations, advocates want Congress to fill the gap. The main concerns are overuses by government and law enforcement agencies that include mass surveillance, video retention and see-through imaging, Stanley said.

“It’s important that these protections be put in place in the infancy of this technology so that everybody understands the ground rules of the game,” he said.

But UAV supporters think otherwise. Ben Geilom, government relations manager for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said current regulations for manned aircraft should extend to their unmanned counterparts.

“The aircraft itself…is new and maturing,” he said. “But the systems payload – the cameras and sensors that are on the unmanned system – are not new. In fact, they have been used by law enforcement and others on manned aircraft for decades.”

Small drones are able to hover outside of house windows to capture images and sounds, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal under current air regulations, Geilom said. Most of the privacy fears, he added, are due to unfamiliarity.

“With any new technology, there will certainly be the ability to abuse that technology,” Geilom said. “But there are also safeguards that are already in place that can serve as the framework.”

Complicating things further is that drone technology is progressing at a furious pace. The last time Congress passed a comprehensive FAA bill before February’s legislation was in 2003, when UAVs were in their infancy.

Future regulations should be limited to “broad safety parameters,” Geilom said, as more-detailed guidelines will be hard pressed to keep up with the accelerating technology.

“If unmanned aircraft can prove that it can seamlessly and safely integrate into the current manned aviation airspace…then they certainly should be able to integrate,” he said.

Medium to large-sized drones used by the U.S. military. (Congressional Research Service

Public up in the air

Despite widespread support from law enforcement agencies and the defense industry, the public remains deeply divided over domestic drone use. A February Rasmussen poll found that only 30 percent of voters approve of UAVs flying in American skies.  More than half, meanwhile, oppose it altogether.

Congress has thus far ignored any privacy concerns, including few regulations in the FAA bill and making no effort yet to add rules elsewhere.

Privacy advocates – notably the ACLU, Consumer Watchdog and the Electronic Privacy Information Center – called for added guidelines in a Feb. 24 petition to the FAA. Regulations must be added to keep up with UAV technology, they wrote, because drone use “poses an ongoing threat to every person residing in the United States.”

But law experts question the likeliness of such safeguards. Ryan Calo, director for Privacy and Robotics at Stanford University’s Center for Internet & Society, said that U.S. privacy law doesn’t hold back drone use.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that no warrant was required for government agencies to take aerial photographs of a person’s backyard. And in 1989, the justices ruled that police do not need warrants to observe private property from public airspace.

“Citizens do not generally enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, nor even in the portions of their property visible from a public vantage,” Calo wrote in the Stanford Law Review. “Neither the Constitution nor common law appears to prohibit police or the media from routinely operating surveillance drones.”

Geilom and others within the UAV industry insist current rules for manned aircraft will suffice for domestic drones. Over-regulation of a potentially lucrative industry before it gets off the ground could squander opportunities for not only law enforcement, but also photographers, real estate agencies and farmers, they say.

Opponents, however, paint a much darker picture. Only a few hundred of the 19,000 law enforcement agencies in the country have a manned aircraft arm. Stanley said the ACLU fears that without further privacy protections, government organizations could overuse or mishandle such drone technology.

“That would fundamentally change the nature of our public spaces and public life and the nature of the relationship between an individual and government,” he said. “It’s not a road we should not go down.”

WASHINGTON — After his first year of law school, Jim Harper was driving across the country with a friend when sirens suddenly started flashing in his rearview mirror.

Harper, who is now the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, said in a mid-February interview that what ensued after he pulled over ultimately shaped his libertarian outlook on life.

The police officer, Harper recalled, told him he detected the scent of marijuana and not only brought out a drug-sniffing dog to search the car, but also a television show crew to document the process.

“I thought to myself, ‘If a police officer can invent a smell and take well-educated, well-spoken white guys out of the car and mess with them, imagine what it’s like for people who aren’t as well-educated or from minority communities,'” Harper said. “What do you suppose life is like for them?”

Such questions have formed the ideological basis of Harper’s career, which coincided with the Internet’s rise in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

He served as a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee in April 2005, providing input at the intersection of personal information and national defense. In his free time, he began laying the groundwork for his own consulting firm.

He joined Cato in September 2004, shuttering his private consulting firm, Policy Counsel.

Harper explained he lost his “team mentality” in transitioning from the Department of Homeland Security to the lobbying industry to the libertarian-leaning think tank.

“Once I left the Hill, I really abandoned the idea that one party is better than the other,” he said. “It’s all about policy — I work on what the right policy is.”

For libertarians, the right policy tends toward less government intervention in Americans’ day-to-day lives, Harper explained.

“It’s so important for individuals to protect themselves, rather than rely on the government to protect them,” he said.

Harper downplayed the notion that the country is at risk for another large-scale terrorist attack, saying that he is not concerned if someone in a foreign nation declares he or she is targeting the United States because it’s that person’s ability to actually carry out those intentions that matters.

“Terrorists have very little capability — happily so,” Harper said. “They got lucky on 9/11, but they won’t get lucky again.”

Instead, Harper suggested Americans should be more focused on little-known threats against their civil liberties on the home front. For example, he pointed to Internet monitoring as a real danger most Web users overlook.

He added it’s “very likely” that the National Security Agency, which operates under a confidential federal budget, has peeked at Americans’ Internet browsers on occasion.

“They might have everything that happens online — the surveillance possibilities are enormous,” Harper said. “And obviously the civil liberties consequences are enormous as well.”

His advice for privacy-minded citizens:

— Educate yourself about how both technology and government work.

–Know that every time you swipe your credit card or turn on your cell phone, your personal data is being recorded and stored somewhere.

Those pointers hark back to Harper’s first brush with libertarian principles as sirens flashed in his rearview mirror almost two decades ago.

“We need government for some things, but the power of government can be readily abused,” he said. “If I was a victim of a small abuse, the other people in my society could be living with huge abuses.”

Story by Patrick Svitek
Video by Ed Demaria, Rebecca Nelson and David Uberti

Twitter has contracted with two research firms that are analyzing user information – such as geographic location – and tweets up to two years old.

Gnip and DataSift, Inc. – based in Colorado and the U.K., respectively – have been licensed by the micro-blogging service to categorize and bundle tweets. Within a month, the two firms will start selling the data to companies and marketing firms.

The latest monetization of the platform drew the ire of privacy advocates last week, as marketers will have a growing ability to gauge consumer opinion and trends in real time.

The data bundles can amount to real-time focus groups broken up by product and even geography. Chevrolet could examine 140-character reactions to its Volt in Detroit, for example, while McDonald’s might do the same for its McRib in Houston.

The sheer amount of information produced by Twitter users has made it difficult to analyze the data to this point. Twitter averages around a quarter billion tweets per day, its CEO told TechCrunch in October.

The free social network allows users few privacy options, and open accounts – which are used by most of its 100 million users – publish information straight to the public domain.

“People may consider tweets to be personal property, but this deal makes clear they are not,” Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch Campaign Group, told the Daily Mail. “It’s clear that if you’re not paying for a service, you are not the customer – you’re the product.”

Twitter has refused to comment on resulting privacy concerns thus far. But Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift, told Reuters that no personal conversations or deleted tweets can be accessed.

“The only information that we make available is what’s public,” Bailey said. “We do not sell data for targeted advertising. I don’t even know how that would work.”

DataSift will launch a cloud-based service next month from which companies can analyze tweets dating back to January 2010. The service will allow firms to “unlock trends from public tweets” and help harness the “Twitter Firehose,” according to its website.

More than 700 companies are already on a waiting list to try DataSift’s service, Reuters reported.

“Twitter has really become an incredibly valuable information source,” said Bailey told CNN. “There are a flood of companies wanting to get more use from it.”

The privacy concerns resulting from Twitter’s monetization come as Google and Facebook face mounting criticism regarding their respective policies. The former has begun tracking users’ search queries, while the latter’s “Timeline” feature makes it easier than ever to view users’ online histories.

The move by Twitter is emblematic of a larger trend in marketing. As Internet users put increasingly more information online, their conversations, interests and locations will become easier to monitor.  Information that was previously inaccessible is now at marketing firms’ fingertips.

As a result, companies will have a leg up in monitoring consumer trends – perhaps even before consumers themselves understand the sheer amount of information they’re putting online.

Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for British-based Internet security company Sophos Ltd., told Reuters that this issue will continue to grow as Twitter and other social media evolve.

“Online companies know which websites we click on, which adverts catch our eye, and what we buy,” Cluley said. “Increasingly, they’re also learning what we’re thinking. And that’s quite a spooky thought.”