Drones are on the rise. Shell Oil is using them for exploration in the Arctic. News Corp's The Daily has one that it used to gather news footage from disaster areas (perhaps violating FAA regulations). And now a Canadian dronemaker has revealed that it supplied Libyan rebels with one after they spotted it on the Internet and realized it would help them fight Gaddafi's forces.
Aeryon provided the rebels with one of the small, unmanned flying devices in July. "They had a problem of guys on the ground fighting blind," says Aeryon CEO David Kroetsch. Rebel representatives in Canada approached the company about purchasing a Scout Micro UAV (list price: $120,000) -- small enough to fit in a backpack and electric so that it's noiseless when it flies, making it almost undetectable at night. It's easy to fly, operated not with a joystick but with the touchscreen on a rugged Xplore tablet.
Start-up Aeryon is mainly focused on the consumer uses of drones, such as replacing satellite mapping with drone mapping. Their drones are dual-purpose products -- intended for commercial use, but also usable for military operations as demonstrated below. Canadian law only prohibits them from selling drones to North Korea or Iran. "Because it's a dual-purpose product, rather than just intended for military use, we face fewer restrictions when sending them to other countries," says Kroetsch
Aeryon has released some of the surveillance video and photos gathered by the Libyan rebels. The Scout buzzed by buildings under the control of Gaddafi's soldiers, as well as taking night vision footage of explosions:
So easy to use! And so small and convenient. Is it any wonder that companies and law enforcement are pushing hard for the FAA to relax their restrictions on drone airspace use in the U.S. to make it easier to incorporate drones into their activities? "We see the U.S. as a big potential market," says Kroetsch. The FAA are expected to issue new rules regarding the use of drones in 2012.
Ryan Calo, the research director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, thinks drones are going to raise serious privacy law questions when they inevitably come into heavier use in the U.S.:
Neither constitutional nor common law, for instance, recognizes a right to privacy in public or from a public vantage. In one famous Fourth Amendment case, the Supreme Court found no search where local police flew over the defendant’s backyard with a private plane. In another, the Court admitted evidence spotted by an officer in a helicopter looking through two missing roof panels in a greenhouse. There are practical hurdles to the use of planes and helicopters. You would not use them to look for unlicensed swimming pools, for instance, because they are expensive to own, maintain, and operate. A single drone could find every pool in a town in one day, flagging the ones with no municipal license on file as it went...
The proliferation of drones in our skies could lead to a new, Warren and Brandeis moment—all of our amorphous fears about new technology watching us suddenly reified and immediate.
As Notorious B.I.G. might have said, 'Mo' technology, mo' privacy problems.'
