Mass Panic: It's Not Clear That Colorado's Mystery Drones Even Exist
So, just around Christmas, when anyone who was getting a drone for Christmas would have started playing with it, there were a number of claimed reports of mass drone activity over Colorado and Nebraska. No one who has set out to record and document the mass drone activity has been successful at doing so, but that didn't stop widespread concern over observations which, even if true, don't add up to anything illegal going on.
A recurring theme of modern life seems to be the urge to involve law enforcement into investigation of activity which is not even illegal in the first place. To be clear, if you want to argue for rules around flying drones over private property, that's one thing. In fact, there are a number of players in the agricultural, manufacturing and chemical industries who have been strong advocates for rules against the right to photograph things in plain view on private property. They do not want prying eyes into their compliance, or not, with regulations on the handling of toxic materials or animals, etc..
Oddly, while it is generally our side of the political spectrum which stands for things like not having the police pry into your lawful conduct, there are some who can't resist the desire to believe that everyone else has some right to know what some law-abiding person is up to. To be clear, if someone is flying a drone within the law, taking photographs while standing on public property, or otherwise minding their own business, then it is their business.
Absent a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity taking place, law enforcement does not have the right to detain you for questions, even briefly - and even if you are legally operating drones.
That's what I found curious about the "we gotta find out about these drones!" thing. Suppose that they found someone flying these drones in public airspace within FAA regulations for drones, who landed them in her own field and was packing them up. The police would be free to ask him what she was up to, and she would be free to say "Nunya business".
If it was, for example, a mining company doing a survey with some kind of sensing equipment, that would be entirely their own business and they would have no obligation to disclose their trade secret information to anyone without a warrant issued on probable cause that a crime was being committed.
In any event, this article brings home some of what bothers me about the reaction to the drone story.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkeb9k/mass-panic-its-not-clear-that-colorados-mystery-drones-even-exist
But the most popular theory is that the timing is just a little too coincidental with a recently proposed FAA rule that would require drones to be identified remotely using a unique identifier and GPS coordinates sent via cellular signal to a central database, which many enthusiasts worry will ruin their hobby. What a great way to drum up support for such a policy, these posters suggest, than a nationally covered drone mystery.
This FAA conspiracy is, like most conspiracy theories, less a genuine assertion of the version of events they think actually occurred and more an expression of a larger frustration with the way the world works. Lisberg—who for the record does not believe the FAA is running a secret campaign to fly drones over rural Colorado to scare people in order to pass a remote ID rule for drones—pointed out that the FAA has been working on its rule change for years in consultation with key players in the drone industry. But he did concede the specifics of the FAA’s remote ID rule are not popular in the drone community. For its part, DJI advocates for a different type of remote ID technology than the one the FAA is proposing. Motherboard reached out to the FAA about this particular theory but did not hear back.
If there is a worthy lesson from this whole affair, it is unlikely to be a product of finding out who is actually flying the drones. Instead, it has to do with our attitudes towards the unknown. In this sense, there is some semblance of agreement between the drone enthusiasts and local officials trying their best to navigate this new, strange world.
“The question is do authorities NEED to know what it is?” Sean Wendland, a drone enthusiast in Sacramento, Calif., asked Motherboard over Facebook Messenger. “Is it causing any harm? Has it created danger? Do Americans NEED to know what it is? I would argue no, not at the cost of freedom.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
They won't even see it coming.
