LibriumArcana.Games

popularmechanics.com wrote:It was bound to happen. This week, for the first time ever, a person was sentenced to jail in a case where law enforcement used an unmanned aerial vehicle. Judging by the reaction, plenty of journalists see this as a watershed event—especially as the man, cattle rancher Rodney Brossart, argued that the drone was "dispatched without judicial approval or a warrant."

Here's the case in a nutshell: Brossart refused to return another rancher's cows, which had wandered into his property, instigating a 16-hour armed standoff with police and SWAT teams. The local cops asked the Department of Homeland Security if they could borrow a Predator drone to locate the man and his sons. After that happened, Brossart surrendered. He was acquitted of the theft of the cows, but the jury found him guilty of terrorizing the police.

Here's the thing: This case is already overrated as far as its important for the future of drones and law enforcement.

For starters, the drone in this case performed just as a helicopter would. It flew over a crime scene and provided images to the police below. There is nothing inherent to the use of a UAV that made any material difference in the outcome.

Now, if the drone had conducted surveillance over the home to find those cows, that'd be an interesting court case. States are passing and proposing laws that limit the use of drones without warrants, and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has proposed a federal law requiring public agencies to get a warrant before using a drone for surveillance. That makes sense, and Markey's law also makes exceptions for emergency circumstances: It would throw out the warrant provision "When (A) there is imminent danger of death or serious physical injury; (B) there is a high risk of a terrorist attack by a specific individual or organization, when the Secretary of Homeland Security has determined that credible intelligence indicates there is such a risk; or (C) a search and rescue mission is appropriate."

The Brossart case feels more like one of those in which the drone is a stand-in for government intrusion; the legal questions at hand are more about what police and SWAT teams can and can't do rather than the use of the drone itself. That's a debate that is larger than the future of unmanned aircraft.

What really matters are the things drones can do that other aircraft cannot—that's where UAVs will lead to new debates about what is legal and how the American public is policed. Most important is a drone's ability to spend a long amount of time in the air. Drones are cheaper than helicopters, and don't need to land to refuel or switch pilots, opening up a major surveillance opportunity for law enforcement.

So let's do a mental exercise. Imagine a government official from a cash-strapped county buys a drone for the sheriff's department. The drone has day/night cameras that can read license plates. It also has algorithms that can determine the speed of vehicles below. The drone captures information on every single vehicle that breaks the speed limit and meshes that evidence with an address to send a ticket to.

If you thought red-light cameras posted at intersections were bad, imagine not being able to go 2 or 3 miles per hour above the speed limit without a flying machine writing you a ticket that gets mailed to your house. That's the endurance and signal processing of drones at work. After all, most drivers speed; we just don't expect to get caught, or to get a ticket from a drone.