The Obama Administration Briefly Considers Developing 'Explicit Rules' For Killer Drones, Abandons Process After Romney Loses Election

from the unfettered-power:-good-for-me,-not-so-much-for-thee dept

The US government's "targeted strike" drone program has been around since George W. Bush's first presidential term. Despite being nearly a decade old, the program has largely operated in a gray area of legality, with no codified set of rules governing drone strikes. So, what does it take to get some guidelines applied to the executive branch-controlled remote-control merchants of death? The threat of having to turn control over to the "other side," apparently.

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

So, when the control is in your hands, it's ok to direct long distance killings without "clear standards and procedures." But, if the other guy is being handed the power, it's suddenly time to "develop explicit rules." This doesn't come across as genuine concern. It sounds more like a last-minute effort to hobble the program by throwing in a handful of cursory checks and balances. This quote from an anonymous administration official put its all in perspective:

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Again, this sounds nothing like genuine concern about "doing the right thing" by implementing strict guidelines and otherwise easing the transition between presidents. It sounds more like "Well, if we have to give up this power, let's make it as limited as possible."

Now, maybe that's just the way I'm hearing it. But those sentences aren't very comforting, either. Rules -- explicit rules -- should already be in place. Now that Obama's safely back in office, the team's just going to ease off the gas pedal?

This isn't very surprising, considering the wall of secrecy surrounding the targeted strike program -- and how far away the program has drifted from its original purpose.

Despite public remarks by Mr. Obama and his aides on the legal basis for targeted killing, the program remains officially classified. In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the government has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.

But by many accounts, there has been a significant shift in the nature of the targets. In the early years, most strikes were aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought to be plotting to attack the United States. That is the purpose Mr. Obama has emphasized, saying in a CNN interview in September that drones were used to prevent “an operational plot against the United States” and counter “terrorist networks that target the United States.”

No one's looking to declassify any information about this program anytime soon. The Defense Department and the CIA are pushing for "greater latitude" to carry out strikes. Other government officials have argued against the drone program, but to date, the administration seems willing to continue the program "as is," without returning it to its original focus. At this point, the targeted strike program has expanded to include strikes on militants not engaged directly with US forces. Acceptable targets also include individuals unknown to those requesting or clearing the strikes.

Then there's the matter of strikes against people whose identities are unknown. In an online video chat in January, Mr. Obama spoke of the strikes in Pakistan as “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” But for several years, first in Pakistan and later in Yemen, in addition to “personality strikes” against named terrorists, the C.I.A. and the military have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of suspected, unknown militants.

Originally that term was used to suggest the specific “signature” of a known high-level terrorist, such as his vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved to mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance, young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.

As the New York Times article points out, the US is setting the precedent for countries currently developing their own drone programs. And that precedent seems to be that these programs should be operated autonomously, secretly and unhampered by explicit rules and regulations. The same country that has decried targeted killings by other countries (namely, Israel) is now showing the rest of the world that all you really need to pull off long distance assassinations is the will and the way. 

Filed Under: drones, killing, obama, politics, rules

San Diego Refuses To Answer FOIA Requests About Drones Because 'There Is Very Little Public Benefit'

from the keeping-the-public-in-the-dark-for-their-own-benefit dept

A few months ago, MuckRock and the EFF teamed up to start a drone watch effort, in which they send Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) -- or the local equivalent -- requests to local governments and police departments, seeking to find out information on local law enforcement using drones. At last count, over 200 such requests have been made. You can track them here. As you might imagine, they're getting very varied responses, with some saying that there are no responsive documents. In many cases, it's likely that this is true.

However, the folks at MuckRock discovered something interesting in looking over some of the responses. While the San Diego County Sheriff's office initially stated that they had no responsive documents, reviewing the Seattle Police Department's response suggested that San Diego was lying. Why? Because the Seattle release shows an email from a manufacturer of drones, Datron World Communications, to Seattle police in which they share a sales quote that was sent to San Diego for a drone, the Scout UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle).

Attached is the quotation recently provided to the SD Sheriff's CID team. They visited Datron's facility and experienced the system with all three cameras and left with a flashdrive full of personal footage and a new found purpose for submitting their wish-list early. Use this quote as a reference point for configuring your system. With this we should be able to tailor an ideal system for your needs and gain marketing support for 'special pricing' specifically for Seattle PD.

Given this contradiction, MuckRock sent a followup request to San Diego, asking the Sheriff's office to explain this newly revealed information. In response, the sheriff's "legal advisor" sent a note saying that "we decline to comment on the sales quotation referenced in your September 4, 2012 letter." Well, isn't that nice? Of course, under freedom of information laws you can't just ignore such requests. As MuckRock notes:

As is true in most states, California's public records law provides that documents related to equipment purchases are matters of public record unless exempted by statute. Accordingly, the San Diego County Sheriff and other public agencies have the latitude to justify denial of public records requests, but not to "deny comment" when faced with such a request.

After continuing to press the San Diego Sheriff's office, MuckRock was first told that San Diego had not purchased such drones and then that it will not release the records because "there is very little public benefit in the release of such records," in part because the quote from the company had not resulted in a purchase. The office then notes that the request is denied "on the grounds that any information and/or records obtained by the Sheriff's Department are protected by the Deliberative Process privilege, as well as the Official Information privilege (Evidence Code 1040)."

Again, MuckRock notes that San Diego is misreading the law in question:

But public records law puts the burden of evidence not on those who seek disclosure, but on those who would keep them from public view. Evidence Code section 1040 of California's disclosure law, which the San Diego County Sheriff's office has invoked as a basis for its denial, provides that public agencies may refuse to disclose official information in the case that such disclosure "is against the public interest because there is a necessity for preserving the confidentiality of the information that outweighs the necessity for disclosure in the interest of justice."

The onus is on the Sheriff to demonstrate how releasing the documents sought by MuckRock would injure the public interest.

As they note, the public has a "right to know" when their government is using drones to surveil the public, and it's unfortunate that some governments seem to be stonewalling requests for information.

Filed Under: drones, foia, san diego, seattle
Companies: eff, muckrock

DailyDirt: Underwater Robots For Fooling Fish & Finding Foul Waters

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The term "drone" usually refers to a robotic plane, but some robot researchers are developing underwater drones for exploring the oceans and going to some hard-to-reach underwater destinations. A few of these robotic fish projects also mimic real fish locomotion and appearance, so that the robots blend into their environment. Maybe someday these fake fish will replace the real ones in aquariums, and no one will notice....

• Get your own open source underwater robot capable of diving down to 100 meter depths for just $775 on Kickstarter. OpenROV runs on eight C batteries and runs for about an hour at 1m/s. [url]
• A fish-like robot inspired by notemigonus crysoleucas (a species of the Golden shiner) has been accepted into schools of the real fish. The creators of this robot envision the possibility of using remote-controlled fish robots to steer real schools of fish away from pollution (or maybe directly into fishing nets). [url]
• An ocean-going drone could help clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Marine Drone is a concept design for an autonomous robot that can collect plastic debris and other garbage floating around in the oceans. [url]
• The SHOAL project has developed a robotic fish that can detect pollution and monitor water quality. These autonomous robots can work together to cover a square kilometer area to a depth of 30 meters, running on rechargeable batteries that last about 8 hours, and the prototype robots cost about $32,000 each. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: autonomous, biomimicry, drones, fish, great pacific garbage patch, locomotion, openrov, pollution, robots, underwater
Companies: kickstarter

Why You Can't Have A Tacocopter Drone Deliver You A Taco For Lunch Today

from the the-government....-and-a-bunch-of-other-factors dept

We've talked a bit about some more intriguing uses of drone technology lately, including personal individual surveillance as well as for building floating ad hoc networks. But I don't think I've ever seen as much attention given to the potential disruptive nature of drone technology as the story that's been bouncing around the internet the past few days concerning the miraculous concept of the TacoCopter.

Yes, the TacoCopter, one of those ideas that once you hear about it, it sticks with you. It's pretty straightforward. You order (and pay for) a taco via a smartphone app, indicating your location, and a short while later, a drone hums into view and drops a taco at your feet. The folks behind it are targeting San Francisco first (of course), with an expansion plan that includes "TacoLobster" "LobsterCopter" on the east coast. While some have insisted it's a joke, the folks behind it insist that it's real... except for the fact that it isn't really real. It's not a joke, it's just not quite feasible. Or legal. The legal part is the the one that's getting the most attention. As the founders explained to Jason Gilbert at the Huffington Post, you can't actually use drones for commercial purposes these days:

"Current U.S. FAA regulations prevent ... using UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, like drones] for commercial purposes at the moment," Simpson said over Gchat. "Honestly I think it's not totally unreasonable to regulate something as potentially dangerous as having flying robots slinging tacos over people's heads ... [O]n the other hand, it's a little bit ironic that that's the case in a country where you can be killed by drone with no judicial review."

Of course, that's not the only problem. There's also... well, everything else. Which turns out to be a pretty long list.

Simpson told HuffPost that because of the FAA's regulations -- as well as other minor problems, like navigating the treacherous terrain of an urban environment, keeping the food warm, finding a city map precise enough to avoid crashes 100 percent of the time, avoiding birds, balconies and telephone wires, delivering food to people indoors, delivering food to the right person, dealing with greedy humans who would just steal the Tacocopter as soon as it got to them, etc.

Not surprisingly, the team behind it isn't actively working on the project right now, though they still seem to insist they're serious about doing it for real at some point in the future.

That said, it's not hard to realize that most of these problems can and will be solved at some point in the future, and such a commercial use of drones could actually create quite disruptive business models in a lot of sectors. Obviously, just delivering tacos isn't that big of a deal, but once you begin to realize that these things can deliver almost anything (within reasonable weight limits) then it starts to open up a huge world of interesting possibilities. For that reason, it wouldn't surprise me to see that the regulations that now limit such uses of drone technology will almost certainly remain in effect much longer than the technological limitations remain a hurdle. Those who are disrupted by such uses will continue to insist that such things are dangerous, rather than learning to adapt and embrace the technology.

Filed Under: drones, regulations, tacocopter

File Sharing Drones Proof Of Concept Already Built

from the fly-drone-fly dept

There was a fair bit of discussion recently about the story of The Pirate Bay exploring using drones to build a flying file sharing system -- with many insisting that such a thing was a completely ridiculous-to-impossible notion. They might want to think again. It seems that a proof of concept had already been built by a different group, who had no idea that TPB was considering this idea. Liam Young from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today already built what's basically an implementation of the what the Pirate Bay described, which you can see below: Of course, the key here is that these are just setting up a drone-based local-area network, rather than one connected to the wider internet, but that's easy enough to add at some point (especially as wireless technology improves). There's still a long way to go towards a full-scale system such as what the Pirate Bay guys envision, but the technology itself isn't that far fetched.

Filed Under: drones, file sharing, international waters
Companies: the pirate bay

The Pirate Bay Claims It's Going To Host The Site Via Drones Flying Over International Waters

from the the-pirate-ships-continue-to-go dept

One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don't realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every "victory" the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past.

Even so, the folks involved in TPB are still trying to go further. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, the latest plan from TPB is to see if it can serve the site from GPS-controlled drones flying over international waters:

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.

Whether or not they can actually pull it off is a totally different question, but as we've been discussing recently, drone technology is getting cheaper, and the potential disruption of the Raspberry Pi should not be underestimated. While such things might not really be ready yet to do what TPB hopes to do, it's not difficult to project these trends out just a little ways to see that not only will it be possible in the not-too-distant future, but it would be a surprise if we didn't see setups that go way beyond what TPB is currently proposing before too long.

Filed Under: drones, file sharing, international waters
Companies: the pirate bay

Drone Attack: How We Might Willingly Embrace The Surveillance Society

from the poisoned-chalice dept

It's striking how drones have passed from a mysterious weapon used to wreak destruction in distant lands to something that could well become a familiar sight in the skies of the US and Europe. Meanwhile, the technology is progressing rapidly, allowing drones to fly in synchronized swarms and even to be printed out by the sheet. But what might some of the effects on our daily lives be -- for example in the sphere of privacy?

That's what an interesting post by David Eaves begins to explore. As he points out, some uses of drones seem so sensible that it would be almost irresponsible not to adopt them:

it is entirely conceivable that, in 5-7 years, there could be drones that would follow your child as he walks to school. You can of course, already choose to monitor your child by giving them a cell phone and tracking the GPS device within it, but a drone would have several advantages. It would be harder for someone to destroy or "disconnect" from your child. It could also record and save remotely everything that is going on - in order to prevent anyone from harassing or bullying them. It might even remind them to look both ways before crossing the street, in case they forget. Or, because of its high vantage point, it could pick out and warn your child of cyclists and cars they failed to observe. Once your kid is safely at school the drone could whiz home and recharge in time to walk them home at the end of the day. This may all seem creepy to you, but if such a drone cost $100 dollars, how many parents do you think would feel like it was "the responsible thing to do." I suspect a great deal.

There are plenty of other obvious applications:

Protestors might want a drone observing them, just so that any police brutality could be carefully recorded for later. Cautious adults may want one however over them, especially when going into an unfamiliar or unsafe neighborhoods. Or maybe you'll want one for your elderly parents... just in case something happens to them? It's be good to be able to pull them up on a live feed, from anywhere.

But as Eaves points out, something important is happening here on the privacy front:

My larger point is that the pressure to create the surveillance society isn't going to come exclusively from the state. Indeed, we may find ourselves in a surveillance society not because the state demands it, but because we want the tools for our own useful and/or selfish ends.

It's the Facebook effect: people know that by using the service they are giving up lots of personal information, but that's a price they seem willing to pay in order to gain the benefits of social networking. Similarly, as drones continue to fall in price and become smaller with longer ranges, people may be willing to start monitoring themselves, even though there is always the risk of information leaking to third parties -- or being demanded by the authorities, just as information is obtained from Internet service providers today.

Given the continuing success of Facebook despite the well-publicized issues around privacy, there's probably not much we can do to stop people adopting drones in these ways -- and why should we, when they obviously offer clear benefits in many situations? The best we can do is to encourage people to think through the consequences of taking this road before we set off down it, accompanied by our swarm of personal drones.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: drones, privacy, surveillance society

DailyDirt: Defend Yourself! (Or Give Peace A Chance...)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War is over)" song used to be routinely played on the radio towards the end of the year, but it seems that folks either "like" or "really hate" holiday songs (and that Baby Boomers are still in control of popular holiday music). In any case, if you received a shiny new "Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle" last weekend, here are some other advanced weapons that you might shoot your eye out with.

• Automated attack drones might sound like science fiction, but lethal autonomy is becoming more practical as technology provide better sensors and recognition software. Landmines already kill indiscriminately, so "smarter landmines" are better, right? [url]
• Build your own laser pistol at home, you scruffy-looking nerf-herder! Remember: Do not look at laser with remaining eye. [url]
• If you think Tasers are effective non-lethal weapons for police officers, then check out Photonic Security Systems' SMU 100 laser rifle which is designed to (temporarily) blind people from up to 500m away. Just watch out for rioters carrying around big mirrors.... [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: autonomous, diy, drones, lasers, non-lethal weapons
Companies: photonic security systems