DIY drones

If you built your own drone, what would you do with it?  Here's are some suggestions -- and warnings -- from the masked narrator at Danger Info, a YouTube subscription channel, in a video titled, "Citizen Drone Warfare."

According to the TIME Magazine (February 11, 2013 issue) cover story, "Drone Home," by staff writer Lev Grossman,

Businesswise, the Parrot [a drone] is still a product looking for a market beyond well-heeled dronophiles. Unless you find aerial photography extremely personally gratifying (which, granted, a lot of people do), the Parrot doesn't have a lot of immediate practical applications. Which raises the question: What are drones good for, aside from hunting people? The answer, it turns out, is a lot, and more all the time.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been using Predators to monitor the Mexican border since 2005. It currently fields a fleet of 10 and has put in for 14 more. Last fall, NASA used a Global Hawk to study Hurricane Nadine. But flying a drone for purposes other than recreation requires a certificate from the FAA, and those certificates are hard to come by. The government is working to correct that: last Valentine's Day Obama signed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which among other things ordered the FAA to establish six drone-testing ranges, fast-track requests for permission to use drones and figure out a scheme for their integration into U.S. airspace by 2015.

With respect to aerial photography it's a valid question to ask what a drone can see.  It turns out a lot:

The GAO report also mentioned "privacy concerns over the collection and use of UAS-acquired data." A lot of people share those concerns. Drones are the most powerful surveillance tool ever devised, on- or offline. A Reaper drone equipped with the Air Force's appropriately named Gorgon Stare sensor package, for example, can surveil an area 2½ miles across from 12 angles at once. Its field of view swallows entire cities. The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has produced an imaging system called ARGUS that can pick out an object 6 in. long from 20,000 ft. in the air. In a story worthy of the Onion, USA Today reported in December that Air Force officials were so swamped with the 327,384 hours of drone footage taken last year, they consulted with ESPN about how to edit it down to the highlights, à la SportsCenter. (Grossman, Drone Home)

And what about personal privacy (if such a thing still exists)?  Here's one last quote from Grossman's fine article:

Until actual legislation is passed, it won't be completely clear what information the government can and cannot gather using drones. There are certainly precedents: the Supreme Court has ruled that the police can, under the Fourth Amendment, fly an airplane over your fenced backyard and check out whether you're growing pot back there. It's not a giant leap to imagine them flying a drone instead. But where does it stop? The framers didn't anticipate technology that could hover for days, keeping an eye on exposed backyards and porches, that could work in networked swarms, see through walls with thermal imaging, recognize faces and gaits and track license plates. "If we have a bad guy named Waldo," Singer says, "and we have to find Waldo somewhere in that city, we will naturally gather information about all the people around Waldo, not out of malice but just because that's the way it is. What happens to that information? Who owns it? Who stores it? Who shares it? Big questions."

I guess what I'm trying to say is -- if you're going to build your own drone, be aware of the ramifications.  And don't fly it anywhere near my backyard.

Also, please take a look at this TIME article -- it also talks about what can go wrong when flying a drone, the psychological toll of being surveilled, and how drones are, even now, being made semi-autonomous (shade of SkyNet!).

-- Marge