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from UN Panel After B’nai B’rith Request
Tuesday, June 12 2012 - 02:42 PM
Find Out How Your Local Police Agency
Find Out How Your Local Police Agency is Using Drones
Parker Higgins and Trevor Timm
EFF
June 12, 2012
Since last month, when EFF released a list of the sixty-odd public agencies that have already received from the FAA approval to fly domestic drones, the issue of drone surveillance has reached front and center in many Americans’ mind. Yet barely any information is known about what law enforcement agencies plan to do with these unmanned flying vehicles. So we want your help to gather this information into one place.
The groups listed by the FAA included about two dozen local police agencies, but we expect this number to grow rapidly in the coming weeks and months. In February Congress passed a bill mandating the FAA authorize drones to public agencies if they can prove they can fly them safely. And recently, the Department of Homeland Security, which was already handing out grants to local police agencies, announced a program to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption” of drones by local police agencies. And last month the FAA announced it had established new (though undisclosed) procedures to allow more law enforcement agencies quicker access to fly drones.
As the Huffington Post reported:
The $4 million Air-based Technologies Program, which will test and evaluate small, unmanned aircraft systems, is designed to be a ‘middleman’ between drone manufacturers and first-responder agencies ‘before they jump into the pool,’ said John Appleby, a manager in the DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s division of borders and maritime security.
This is, or will become, a controversy all over the United States. From Seattle, to Miami, Tennessee to Atlanta, and everywhere in between, local towns will soon grapple over the privacy dangers drones will create.
As we have explained before, the capabilities of drones are almost unimaginable:
Drones are capable of highly advanced and almost constant surveillance, and they can amass large amounts of data. They carry various types of equipment includinglive-feed video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. Some newer drones carry super high resolution ‘gigapixel’ cameras that can ‘track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet[,] . . . [can] monitor up to 65 enemies of the State simultaneously[, and] . . . can see targets from almost 25 miles down range.’ Predator drones can eavesdrop on electronic transmissions, and one drone unveiled at DEFCON last year can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations—without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer. Drones are also designed to carry weapons, and some have suggested that drones carrying weapons such as tasers and bean bag guns could be used domestically.
Given Congress’ inaction on privacy issues, and the fact that the FAA has never regulated privacy issues, we believe activism at the local level is the best way to stop drone surveillance.
What you can do
The FAA has so far not released any information on which model of drone or how many drones each public entity flies. We also don’t have much information on the type of data these drones will collect. So we need to find this information out.
We’ve made a simple form for the questions we want these police agencies to answer. We need you to call your local police department and ask them these questions.
Questions at this link:
https://www.eff.org/node/70936
Check your local police department’s website for the “Public Inquiries” or “Community Relations” contact, and call or e-mail them these questions.
Our list of drone certificates includes police departments that we already know have a drone authorization from the FAA.
This is just the first step. Once we’ve collected the data, we will release it and tell you how you can contact your local municipal government to demand that they ban law enforcement drones or install robust privacy safeguards that will protect citizens from unwanted—and unconstitutional—surveillance.
CMGINAV says...
Funny how people will sit around and talk about the methods used by Hitler and Stalin as if it is all so foreign to them. Yet everyday they pay no attention to the cameras on all the traffic signals scanning license plates and faces, or to stories in the news about the police raiding natural dairies or tasering pregnant women. They watch the police go from regular blue uniforms to a more militaristic and threatening black uniform. Slowly each day the police are twisted against the people in the morning briefings. They are told stories about the guy pulled over and pulls a gun. Soon, the police get the mentality it is them vs. us when in reality, they are us and we are them. They are used to protect the real crooks in society and to attack anyone threatening the criminals network.
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Sovereignty Soldier says...
All I can say is that if I had a clear shot and the opportunity, that sucker would be toast. Then it’s all about reverse engineering it for the republic.
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Sovereignty Soldier says...
Platos Allegory of the Cave
a globalists favorite.
Plato realizes that the general run of humankind can think, and speak, etc., without (so far as they acknowledge) any awareness of his realm of Forms.
The allegory of the cave is supposed to explain this.
In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see.
From Great Dialogues of Plato (Warmington and Rouse, eds.) New York, Signet Classics: 1999. p. 316.
Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.
So when the prisoners talk, what are they talking about? If an object (a book, let us say) is carried past behind them, and it casts a shadow on the wall, and a prisoner says “I see a book,” what is he talking about?
He thinks he is talking about a book, but he is really talking about a shadow. But he uses the word “book.” What does that refer to?
Plato gives his answer at line (515b2). The text here has puzzled many editors, and it has been frequently emended. The translation in Grube/Reeve gets the point correctly:
“And if they could talk to one another, don’t you think they’d suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?”
Plato’s point is that the prisoners would be mistaken. For they would be taking the terms in their language to refer to the shadows that pass before their eyes, rather than (as is correct, in Plato’s view) to the real things that cast the shadows.
If a prisoner says “That’s a book” he thinks that the word “book” refers to the very thing he is looking at. But he would be wrong. He’s only looking at a shadow. The real referent of the word “book” he cannot see. To see it, he would have to turn his head around.
Plato’s point: the general terms of our language are not “names” of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.
When the prisoners are released, they can turn their heads and see the real objects. Then they realize their error. What can we do that is analogous to turning our heads and seeing the causes of the shadows? We can come to grasp the Forms with our minds.
Plato’s aim in the Republic is to describe what is necessary for us to achieve this reflective understanding. But even without it, it remains true that our very ability to think and to speak depends on the Forms. For the terms of the language we use get their meaning by “naming” the Forms that the objects we perceive participate in.
The prisoners may learn what a book is by their experience with shadows of books. But they would be mistaken if they thought that the word “book” refers to something that any of them has ever seen.
Likewise, we may acquire concepts by our perceptual experience of physical objects. But we would be mistaken if we thought that the concepts that we grasp were on the same level as the things we perceive.
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Sovereignty Soldier says...
Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.
This is how they manipulate you with the help of media.
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AV Town Crier says...
Oh, I can’t wait to see what kind of bs is going to occur. We are becoming more and more like a police state. The gestapo is coming and the sheeple will let it happen because it’s for our own good. Let’s just admit it, “we’re fucked” (to quote Axl Rose.)
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