American Civil Liberties Union

State legislatures around the country are gearing up to take action on domestic surveillance drones. Maine has a bill introduced, as do Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas. In Virginia a hearing has already been held on a bill, while Montana has three bills, and hearings have already been held there as well.

One of the questions I’ve been asked about my post last week on Milo Danger and his DIY paintball-armed drone is: what does that mean for privacy?

Part of the answer is that the paintball drone is a reminder that drones are a generative technology—not a closed system, but an open platform where the full flower of human ingenuity and creativity will be able to express itself. We clever humans are likely to think of 1,001 surprising new uses for drones. Some of those uses will be very beneficial—and sometimes just cool. That is one of the reasons why, despite the looming threat of pervasive drone-based surveillance, we at the ACLU have not taken the position, urged by some, that all drones should just be banned in domestic airspace.

In September I wrote about how policymakers often act on privacy issues only when they themselves feel their privacy personally threatened—for example when Robert Bork’s video rental records were obtained by a reporter. Now Peter Maass, writing in the New Yorker and ProPublica, is raising a key question about the Petraeus scandal: will lawmakers sit up and take notice of how easily the CIA Director’s private emails were discovered? Will they “start worrying a bit more about becoming the next Petraeus or Bork”? It may well be true that the discovery of an affair by an FBI agent would not have led to anything had the subject been an ordinary person, but because Petraeus was in such an important role, the finding kept getting passed around because nobody dared to take the responsibility of doing nothing about it. And inevitably, it eventually leaked. As Maass astutely observes, “the Petraeus case shows that among the people who have the most to lose from unchecked surveillance are the people who thought they would benefit from it—government elites.”

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a drone armed with an arsenal of video surveillance technology!