Judge Andrew Napolitano on law enforcement agencies using drones with weapons

I love this man. Shame he was canned. Here he is saying that a police agency using an armed drone without a warrant is attempted murder under THE LAW. Montgomery county Texas Sheriff's office just got an armed drone.

I can not believe what this country has become. I'm all for technology, but my god, if it's not used in a responsible manner, it will always be used in the pursuit of tyranny by powerful men.

video.foxnews.com...

Wow, forget the aliens. We need to watch out for the drones. I can just see it now, people walking about, and drones just spitting ammunition at everybody without a trial. That's just sad.

reply to post by Drew99GT

Like you, I'm all for technology and I even support the use of drones by cops. It beats the heck out of the non-stop whap-whap-whap 24/hrs a day in a major city with a large police air unit overhead. At least the drones shouldn't be waking the whole neighborhood in the middle of the night. lol...

At the same time....armed drones?? I'm still not sure I like MILITARY drones being armed. Especially after we may have lost one to a controlled hack in Iran. Oh... Dandy...so one of these days a drone takes off and comes back to bomb our own base.

What happens when Wyatt Earp here launches his gun toting drone and a local American hacker decides to play. These don't have anything close to the protection of the military ones and we DID lose one of them. Whats to prevent the law enforcement version from being taken over and used to shoot up the cops themselves?? Or worse...a shooting spree in some populated location near where the cops let it fly. TOO many ways this is a bad bad idea.

By the way, I find it interesting that the good Judge's website has been hacked.

hacked

reply to post by Drew99GT


Build yourself a Drone NOW (before they become illegal)

Francis Fukuyama isn't your standard tech guy. He's a policy guy at Stanford that writes hefty books on very philosophical topics. That's why his detailed blog post blogs.the-american-interest.com... on his efforts to build a surveillance drone are so cool. Here's a little video of the test of his drone outside of his office at Stanford. youtu.be...

Francis makes two simple observations that are worth repeating. Here's the first one:

"I don’t have to spell out the implications of this. I want to have my drone before the government makes them illegal."

The Inevitable Ban on Drone Tech

I agree with Francis, it's pretty clear that drones will become illegal sooner than later. Let me run through a scenario for you. I'm going to have some fun with it:

The ban will likely start by closing down the drone flight amateur loophole -- under 400ft, line of site, away from built up areas (which Francis obviously violated with his test flight). You will need a license to fly even small drones. Commercial licenses will be very restrictive (right now it's illegal to take pictures from a drone for commercial purposes).

However, that's not going to last. There will be too many violations as people build and use drones without regard to the legal restrictions. It will then be made illegal to own a drone w/o a very restrictive license.

Of course, that won't last long either. People will continue to build and use them using generic parts. This technology will prove way to useful and too easy to access. At that point, like we have seen recently with efforts to put limits on general purpose computing (ACTA, SOPA, etc.), we are going to see the following:

Bans on general purpose robotic technology from hardware to software.
Controls on general purpose fabrication technology (since parts can be made with these technologies). There will be lots of support from commercial patent and copyright holders for government bans on 3D fabrication.
Controls on people that know how to build drones. Dangerous people must be tracked and monitored (I had a physics teacher once who designed nuclear bombs, he couldn't travel more than 50 miles w/o government authorization -- it would be much easier to do that for many more people now using modern tech).

Now, all of these steps will accelerate to the end point if a single terrorist incident is based on drone tech.

So, what should you do?

Build yourself a drone. Before they are made illegal.

Why?

One big reason is that drones/bots make the emergence of police states (as my tech thriller post on this topic shows) globalguerrillas.typepad.com... more likely since they allow a very small number of people to automate their control over a great many people. So, in order to ensure the future doesn't careen in that direction, we should democratize the technology as a counter-weight.

reply to post by Drew99GT

Here he is saying that a police agency using an armed drone without a warrant is attempted murder under THE LAW.

No, that is not what was being said. Not at all.

You are combining the two main arguments and making it into one HUGELY misguided, fear mongering, misconception.

First of all, there is no warrant that would authorize murder or executing someone with or without a drone.

Second, the TWO arguments they were making is that, under certain circumstances, the police would need a search warrant to use a drone to look in certain areas AND killing someone with a drone would still be homicide.

Montgomery county Texas Sheriff's office just got an armed drone.

Again, no they didnt. Not at all.

Sure the drone COULD be armed but the way it is being reported is that it is NOT armed in its current form. It sounds like all that was being said was that the Sheriff was NOT RULING OUT arming it with NON-LETHAL or LESS THAN LETHAL armaments like tear gas or rubber bullets. Not once was anything stated about arming it with a machine gun or missle.

I can not believe what this country has become. I'm all for technology, but my god, if it's not used in a responsible manner, it will always be used in the pursuit of tyranny by powerful men.

Please explain to me how the use of a drone is changing the country or a "pursuit of tyranny." Please explain to me how the use of a drone is ANY different then using a police helicopter.

The use of an unmanned drone is appealing to law enforcement because it is probably more cost effective than a police helicopter and you dont have to worry about a gigantic, expensive, deadly helicopter crashing and killing the pilot or citizens on the ground.

reply to post by Manhater

Wow, forget the aliens. We need to watch out for the drones. I can just see it now, people walking about, and drones just spitting ammunition at everybody without a trial. That's just sad.

While I agree that your dystopian imagination of the future is sad, no one is arguing that drones should be armed with deadly weapons and allowed to fly around executing people.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

What happens when Wyatt Earp here launches his gun toting drone and a local American hacker decides to play. These don't have anything close to the protection of the military ones and we DID lose one of them. Whats to prevent the law enforcement version from being taken over and used to shoot up the cops themselves?? Or worse...a shooting spree in some populated location near where the cops let it fly. TOO many ways this is a bad bad idea.

This...is the best argument against arming drones used by the police. If anyone even started to make that argument, which they havent, this would pretty much kill the idea with the majority of the population.

Good point among the many, many misconceptions that are being tossed around here.