Why are universities buying more UAV drones than police departments?

For all the attention given to U.S. law enforcement’s interest in adopting drones, the biggest users turn out to be not police departments, but universities. We learned this last week, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation forced the Federal Aviation Administration to reveal that it had approved 25 universities to fly drones in U.S. airspace. Not that universities were waiting on the FAA to begin working in the field: Last fall, Kansas State University created a degree in unmanned aviation. So far, 30 undergraduates have signed up.

The spreading drone curriculum is, for better and worse, a sign of the coming normalization of drones in American life. Interviews with university officials revealed widespread excitement about the possibilities of unmanned aviation technology, which has the potential to transform fields like agriculture and disaster response. The U.S. military, however, is funding parts of this academic research, and so are leading defense contractors. Whether their intentions are as pure as the universities’ is an open question.

While Congress’ Unmanned Vehicle caucus estimates that drone technology will create 23,000 new jobs in the next 10 years, Blanks says, “That figure may be too low.” Barnhart adds, “The skill set use for this technology is going to be pretty important in coming years.”

Not all these jobs will be, however, in agriculture and disaster recovery. Many jobs will be in law enforcement — where uncomfortable questions about privacy and civil liberties persist. In the view of Georgia Tech’s Weiss, recent drone coverage has overemphasized threats to privacy at the expense of civil and commercial possibilities. “Nobody wants to be spied on,” she said. “Is it possible that’s what unmanned aviation will be used for? Yes. What I’m skeptical about is the drama behind the headlines. I can say confidently very little, if any, research in the field is about spying.”

 No government agency interested in using drone technology for spying is likely to disclose its intentions. And no one disputes that drone technology originated as a way for the U.S. military to identify and track suspected enemies. The role of the Pentagon in funding drone technology on U.S. campuses is visible everywhere. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory funds micro-drone research at Georgia Tech. The Army has pledged to give three drones to Middle Tennessee State. The Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Labs in Dayton Ohio fund the work of four professors at the University of Michigan, according to Dan Inman, chairman of the school’s Aerospace Engineering Department.

http://www.alternet.org/education/155229/why_are_universities_buying_up_drones_faster_than_police_departments/

Drones invade campuses.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/drones_on_campus/singleton/

Drones: The nightmare scenario.

The ACLU takes a look at how police drone use could unfold:

1. The FAA’s new rules go into effect. Acting under orders from Congress, the FAA in coming months and years will significantly loosen the regulations that have been holding back broader deployment of drones. Starting later this year, for example, the FAA must allow any “government public safety agency” to operate any small drone (under 4.4 pounds) as long as certain conditions are met.

2. More and more police departments begin using them. The FAA’s new rules allow for the release of pent-up demand among police departments for cheap aerial surveillance. Ownership of drones quickly becomes common among departments large and small. Organizations are formed by police drone operators, who exchange tips and advice. We also begin to hear about their deployment by federal agencies, other than on the border.

3. We start to hear stories about how they’re being used. Most departments and agencies are relatively careful at first, and we begin to hear stories about drones being put to use in specific, mostly unobjectionable police operations such as raids, chases, and searches supported by warrants.

4. Drone use broadens. Fairly quickly, however, we begin to hear about a few departments deploying drones for broader, more general uses: drug surveillance, marches and rallies, and generalized monitoring of troubled neighborhoods.

5. Private use is banned. A terrorist like the pilot who crashed his plane into an IRS building in Texas uses an explosives-laden drone to try to attack a public facility. In response, the government clamps down on private use of the technology. The net result is that the government can use it for surveillance but individuals cannot use it to watch the government.

6. Drones become able to mutually coordinate. Multiple drones deployed over neighborhoods can be linked together, and communicate and coordinate with each other (see this video for an early taste of what that could look like). This allows a swarm of craft to form a single, distributed wide-area surveillance system such as that envisioned by the “Gorgon Stare” program.

7. The analytics gets better. At the same time, drones and the computers behind them become more intelligent and capable of analyzing the video feeds they are generating. They gain the ability to automatically track multiple vehicles and bodies as they move around a city or town, with different drones handing off the tracking to each other just as a mobile phone network passes a signal from one cell to another as a user rides down the highway.

8. Flight durations grow. Technology improvements (involving blimps, perhaps, or solar-power innovations) allow for drones to stay aloft for longer periods more cheaply, which becomes key in permitting their use for persistent surveillance.

9. The cycle accelerates. The advancing technology incentivizes agencies to buy even more drones, which in turn spurs more technology development, and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating.

10. Laws are further loosened. As drones get smarter and more reliable and very good at sensing and avoiding other aircraft, FAA restrictions are further loosened, permitting even autonomous flight.

11. Pervasive tracking becomes common. Despite opposition, a few police departments begin deploying drones 24/7 over certain areas. The media covers the controversy but Congress takes no action, and eventually it becomes old news, and the practice spreads until many or most American towns and cities are subject to the practice.

12. Technologies are combined. Drone video cameras and tracking analytics are combined or synched up with other technologies such as face recognition, gait recognition, license-plate scanners, and cell phone location data.

13. The data is mined. With individuals’ comings and goings routinely monitored, databases are able build up records of where people live, work, and play—what friends they visit, bars they drink at, doctors they visit, what houses of worship, or political events, or sexually oriented establishments they go to—and who else is at those places at the same time. Computers comb through this data looking for “suspicious patterns,” and when the algorithms kick up an alarm, the person involved becomes the subject of much more extensive surveillance.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/drones-nightmare-scenario

ACLU drones report:
https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/protectingprivacyfromaerialsurveillance.pdf

Aerial drones are law-enforcement tools that need formal oversight.

Anyone out in the open does not get much protection from privacy laws. Step outside, and airborne law enforcement trolling for lawbreakers does not need warrants, the courts have said. Start piling on zoom lens, night vision, see-through imaging and video analytics, and the imperatives for defining privacy, requiring warrants and oversight climb as high as the drones.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorials/2018143433_edit07drone.html?syndication=rss

Seattle police dept. demonstrates new drone, to help allay concerns.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018090173_drones28m.html

Alabama police dept. owns 2 UAVs for surveillance, but chief claims they haven’t been used.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/alabama-police-dept-owns-2-uavs-for-surveillance-but-chief-says-they-havent-been-used/2012/04/30/gIQADPKWrT_story.html

US companies are selling drones to anonymous foreign govt's.

U.S. corporations are selling drones to undisclosed foreign governments for anti-narcotics and anti-terrorism operations, according to Teddy Wilson at The American Independent.

The global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e. drones) is growing rapidly as the use of drones expands from military to domestic law enforcement.

The U.S. government sells drones to other countries through Foreign Military Sales, and U.S. corporations can sell drones and other defense technologies directly to foreign governments after going through a screening process run by the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Vanguard Defense Industries, a Texas-based defense contractor, is predicting that next year its domestic sales will increase 25 percent to between $35 million and $40 million, but the majority of its sales will be overseas.
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-companies-selling-drones-to-undisclosed-foreign-governments-2012-5

http://americanindependent.com/215750/u-s-companies-selling-drones-to-undisclosed-foreign-governments

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_8812.shtml

Oops! Air Force drones can now (accidentally) spy on American citizens.
As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn’t mean to, its drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.

The Air Force, like the rest of the military and the CIA, isn’t supposed to conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans domestically, according to an Apr. 23 instruction from the flying service. But should the drones taking off over American soil accidentally keep their cameras rolling and their sensors engaged, well … that’s a different story.

“Collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent,” reads the instruction (.pdf), unearthed by the secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That kind of “incidental” spying won’t be immediately purged, however. The Air Force has “a period not to exceed 90 days” to get rid of it — while it determines “whether that information may be collected under the provisions” of a Pentagon directive that authorizes limited domestic spying.

In other words, if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/air-force-drones-domestic-spy/

DHS wants to spy on 4 square miles at once.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/homeland-security-surveillance/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous