Here's your Patriot Act Oversight.. RE: Drones/FBI

[flacaltenn]

“If people are concerned about privacy, I think the greatest threat to the privacy of Americans is the drone … and the very few regulations that are on it today and the booming industry of commercial drones,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.

Read more: Drone surveillance ?limited,? FBI boss says in wake of NSA snooping scandal - NY Daily News

That's right Diane.. It aint the MASSIVE new NSA complex in Utah. Or unaccountable, irreversable secret judges and warrants. OR CLEAR violations of the law and the Constitution..

It's an airplane that the FBI might fly over a crime scene...

Can we recruit maybe some women's basketball team from Connecticut to replace the Congress committees on National Security?? Couldn't do worse....

 

[flacaltenn]

She's is the Senate Intelligience Committee CHAIR and no one sees a problem here with
her knowledge, judgement, and honesty? How out of touch does a CongressCritter have to be
before her constituency turns on her??

 

[waltky]

For civilian purposes, why don't they just put cameras on existing aircraft to get the aerial reconn they want?

Drones in the USA: The Battle for the Civilian Market
September 20, 2013 — Speak to civil libertarians and the Wikileaks crowd, and the nightmare scenario you get about drones is how we are in impending danger of being transformed into a police state, with Big Brother watching over us with these flying robots.

Speak to members of the drone industry, however, and you get a totally different nightmare scenario—that the U.S. is falling behind on the huge business opportunity in the civilian applications of drones and losing out on thousands of jobs and revenues as a consequence.

While military drones occupy much of the public consciousness and media attention, what has gone by largely unnoticed is the major change about to happen in the skies above people in the U.S. This stems from a decision by the federal government in 2012 to ask the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS). Devoid of the three-letter acronym soup, it simply means getting civilian drones to fly around U.S. skies along with an American Airlines, United or Southwest.

Deadline 2015

In response, the FAA has set out a roadmap for integration by 2015 and has taken steps—critics say baby steps—toward granting certification for limited flying in civilian airspace as it tries to sort out the safety issues and implications of drones flying alongside their manned counterparts. Commercial drone manufacturers can currently only get certifications for experimental purposes. Even if they were to sell their products to operators, the latter are not authorized to fly them on a commercial basis.

MORE