老澳门开奖结果

The conservative Heritage Foundation has issued a on 鈥淒rones in U.S. Airspace: Principles for Governance鈥� with proposals for how domestic drones ought to be regulated. The authors agree with much of what my co-author Catherine Crump and I said in our drones report last year. The Heritage Foundation tends to lean more towards national-security conservatism than libertarian conservatism, so when the 老澳门开奖结果 and the Heritage Foundation see more or less eye to eye on an issue like this, it鈥檚 a sure sign that a national consensus is emerging.

The authors of the Heritage report (Paul Rosenzweig, Steven Bucci, Charles Stimson, and James Jay Carafano) say:

鈥淏ecause of their surveillance capabilities, without proper legal guidelines and oversight, drones could threaten personal privacy and civil liberties.鈥�
鈥淐ongress should play an active role in establishing鈥� guidelines on drones.
鈥淎ny increased intrusion on American privacy interests must be justified through an understanding of the particular nature, significance, and severity of the threat addressed by the program. The less significant the threat, the less justified the intrusion.鈥�
鈥淣ot all intrusions are justified simply because they are effective. Strip searches at airports would certainly prevent people from boarding planes with weapons, but they would do so at too high a cost.鈥�
鈥淲hatever the justification for the intrusion, if there are less intrusive means of achieving the same end at a reasonably comparable cost, the less intrusive means ought to be preferred. There is no reason to erode Americans鈥� privacy when equivalent results can be achieved without doing so.鈥�
鈥淣o new system that materially affects citizens鈥� privacy should be developed without specific authorization by the American people鈥檚 representatives in Congress and without provisions for their oversight of the operation of the system.鈥�
鈥淣o new system should be implemented without the full panoply of protections against its abuse.鈥�

Moving beyond those general principles, the paper says that:

鈥淭he use of drones in a military capacity (while armed) should be severely restricted to situations of actual invasion or insurrection鈥�
鈥渢he use of drones for domestic surveillance of First Amendment activity is fundamentally at odds with U.S. constitutional principles鈥�
鈥渄rones equipped with novel sensor arrays ought not to be permitted absent a clearly demonstrated need and a careful consideration of countervailing privacy and civil liberties concerns鈥�
鈥渄rones should not be used as a platform for the collection of massive unstructured data sets that could form the basis for sophisticated tracking and behavioral analytics鈥�
鈥渄rones are unsuitable for use as a routine means of surveillance in non-threatening situations鈥�

The paper also includes a list of uses of drones that, the authors say, 鈥渙ught to have sensible and minimal restrictions.鈥� For many of the uses they list, such as personnel search and rescue and agricultural or environmental monitoring, we would agree. However, they also list 鈥渓ong-term surveillance of a specified area.鈥� We would not agree that there should only be minimal restrictions on, for example, the persistent monitoring of entire neighborhoods. Sensible would not mean minimal in that case.

They also endorse these 鈥渟ensible and minimal鈥� restrictions when it comes to 鈥渃riminal personnel search and/or pursuit.鈥� I can imagine situations in which we wouldn鈥檛 object to that (for example, pursuit of fleeing bank robbers), but others in which we would (for example, searching an entire city using face- or gait-recognition for a fugitive who was last seen days or weeks ago).

The paper is a bit vague on these points, however, and overall, the Heritage paper is quite good, which I think reflects the broad political consensus behind the need to preserve privacy in the face of drone technology.