Drones over US to get weaponized – so far, non-lethally

From RT.com 24 May, 2012 – Amer­i­can police offi­cers may soon be able to use unmanned air­craft not only for sur­veil­lance, but also for offen­sive action. The drones may be equipped to fire rub­ber rounds and tear gas.

“Those are things that law enforce­ment uti­lizes day in and day out, and in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions it might be advan­ta­geous to have this type of sys­tem on the UAV (unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle),” Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Mont­gomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas told The Daily news app as he out­lined the pos­si­ble development.

The US mil­i­tary and CIA have used drones armed with lethal weapons to tar­get mil­i­tants over­seas for years. The prospect of hav­ing “lite” ver­sions of those remotely con­trolled killer-machines cir­cling over Amer­ica gave some sec­ond thoughts to rights groups.

“It’s sim­ply not appro­pri­ate to use any force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” Cather­ine Crump, staff attor­ney for the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU), told CBSDC.

She explained that an offi­cer oper­at­ing an armed drone from afar would sim­ply not have the same under­stand­ing of a sit­u­a­tion that an offi­cer on loca­tion would have. So judg­ment on the use of force would be lim­ited by this nar­row­ness of observation.

“An offi­cer at a remote loca­tion far away does not have the same level of access,” she explained.

ACLU is also wor­ried about the gen­eral atmos­phere of per­va­sive sur­veil­lance that may engulf Amer­ica as the use of drone tech­nol­ogy becomes wider.

“We don’t need a sit­u­a­tion where Amer­i­cans feel there is an invis­i­ble eye in the sky,” said Jay Stan­ley, senior pol­icy ana­lyst at ACLU.

“The prospect of peo­ple out in pub­lic being Tased or tar­geted by force by fly­ing drones where no offi­cer is phys­i­cally present on the scene,” Crump added, “raises the prospect of uncon­sti­tu­tional force being used on individuals.”

There are other poten­tial threats of a wide fleet of armed drones oper­at­ing in a coun­try. For instance, their com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not tamper-proof, as the recent down­ing of an Amer­i­can spy drone by Iran showed. So malig­nant hack­ers may take over con­trol of a police UAV and use it for nefar­i­ous ends.

The US Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion allowed sev­eral pub­lic safety agen­cies to use drones domes­ti­cally with fewer restric­tions last week. UAVs weight­ing up to 11.3 kilos can now be oper­ated by police, fire and sim­i­lar depart­ments with­out spe­cial approval.

The step moves for­ward a cam­paign for broader use of drones in Amer­ica, which was launched by Con­gress in mid-February.

Posted by Randa Wagner on May 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.