The drones are coming home to roost
Nevertheless, what Jeffersonians are among us today? When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes, and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. The folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government.
Don't believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the "recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function" in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel inside the United States and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them "to collect information about U.S. persons."
It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or "military commander" for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. And, any "incidentally acquired information" can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What's next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?
The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama's Secretary of the Air Force on April 23, 2012. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as "balancing ... obtaining intelligence information ... and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution..." Note the primacy of intelligence gathering over freedom protection, and note the peculiar use of the word "balancing."
Reader Comments
Not at first. The PR machines will crank out stories of lost hikers, trapped in an unseasonable blizzard, miraculously rescued, after having been located by drones.
Then one day, an escaping bank robber will be spotted by a drone, and he will manage to get away. "If only the drone had been fitted with missiles, then that wouldn't have happened!"
The above scenarios are, of course, hypothetical in their details. The future escalation sequence, though, is certain.
The Vietnam War gave us SWAT teams, used now for mundane tasks, such as serving an arrest warrant for failure to appear in court for a moving traffic violation. The Iraq War honed urban warfare tactics. Now the drone attacks against Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and who knows where else, are being brought home, too.
There's a reason that the drone is named "Predator." We are the prey.