Drones on the Home Front. It started as a relatively routine cattle rustling investigation. But things quickly deteriorated when six of the missing cows wandered onto the 3,000-acre Brossart property in Nelson County in northeastern North Dakota. County Sheriff Kelly Janke was on the rustlers’ trail. But he knew that the Brossart family had a worrying reputation.
They were affiliated with the Sovereign Citizens Movement, a reputed extremist group. So no one was surprised when three family members pulled weapons on Janke’s deputies as they approached the ranch. No one wanted a gunfight. So Janke also called in the drones. He formally requested deployment of the Predator B drone, commonly used in Iraq and Afghanistan, which flies out of Grand Forks Air Force Base, and is under the control of U.S. The June 23, 2011 operation represented the first time civilians had been arrested in connection with a use of a drone. It triggered a political and media backlash. Civilian Use Drones for Sale Threat to Privacy? How I Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom | Danger Room. At last year’s Paris Air Show , some of the hottest aircraft were the autonomous unmanned helicopters—a few of them small enough to carry in one hand—that would allow military buyers to put a camera in the sky anywhere, anytime.
Manufactured by major defense contractors, and ranging in design from a single-bladed camcopter to four-bladed multicopters, these drones were being sold as the future of warfare at prices in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In May, at a different trade show, similar aircraft were once again the most buzzed-about items on display. But this wasn’t another exhibition of military hardware; instead, it was the Hobby Expo China in Beijing, where Chinese manufacturers demo their newest and coolest toys. Companies like Shenzhen-based DJI Innovations are selling drones with the same capability as the military ones, sometimes for less than $1,000.
What are all these amateurs doing with their drones? Why? What exactly do we mean by drone? Go Back to Top. FAA To Ease Rules For Police Agencies To Fly Unmanned Drones. LOS ANGELES (CBS) — Surveillance aircraft used by the U.S. military overseas could soon be coming to the skies above Los Angeles County. KNX 1070′s Charles Feldman reports the Federal Aviation Administration is making it easier for local law enforcement agencies to fly unmanned drones.
The FAA has streamlined the process that would allow agencies to fly smaller, unarmed versions of the drones that hunt down terrorists in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. While the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has not yet applied for an application to fly drones over our skies, its Homeland Security chief Bob Osborne said drones could be in the department’s future — with some caveats. “We have so much congestion in the skies that I would anticipate that there would be some pretty rigid safety standards,” said Osborne. “Mountain rescue, where you have a car over the side that’s a thousand feet down the cliff, oftentimes our aircraft can’t fly that low,” he said. Drones for "urban warfare" - drones. In November 2010, a police lieutenant from Parma, Ohio, asked Vanguard Defense Industries if the Texas-based drone manufacturer could mount a “grenade launcher and/or 12-gauge shotgun” on its ShadowHawk drone for U.S. law enforcement agencies.
The answer was yes. Last month, police officers from 10 public safety departments around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area gathered at an airfield in southern Maryland to view a demonstration of a camera-equipped aerial drone — first developed for military use — that flies at speeds up to 20 knots or hovers for as long as an hour. In short, the business of marketing drones to law enforcement is booming. Now that Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to open up U.S. airspace to unmanned vehicles, the aerial surveillance technology first developed in the battle space of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is fueling a burgeoning market in North America. Groups Concerned Over Arming Of Domestic Drones. Get Breaking News First Receive News, Politics, and Entertainment Headlines Each Morning.
Sign Up WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – With the use of domestic drones increasing, concern has not just come up over privacy issues, but also over the potential use of lethal force by the unmanned aircraft. Drones have been used overseas to target and kill high-level terror leaders and are also being used along the U.S. The Federal Aviation Administration has allowed several police departments to use drones across the U.S. Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas told The Daily that his department is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone. “Those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system on the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle),” McDaniel told The Daily. The use of potential force from drones has raised the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union. Drones invade campus - drones. For all the attention given to U.S. law enforcement’s interest in adopting drones, the biggest users turn out to be not police departments, but universities.
We learned this last week, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation forced the Federal Aviation Administration to reveal that it had approved 25 universities to fly drones in U.S. airspace. Not that universities were waiting on the FAA to begin working in the field: Last fall, Kansas State University created a degree in unmanned aviation. So far, 30 undergraduates have signed up. The spreading drone curriculum is, for better and worse, a sign of the coming normalization of drones in American life. Interviews with university officials revealed widespread excitement about the possibilities of unmanned aviation technology, which has the potential to transform fields like agriculture and disaster response. The U.S. military, however, is funding parts of this academic research, and so are leading defense contractors. High-Altitude Surveillance Drones: Coming to a Sky Near You | Guest Blog. Last week President Obama signed a sweeping aviation bill that, among other things, will open the skies to “unmanned aircraft systems,” more commonly known as drones.
Much of the discussion regarding the coming era of domestic drones has been focused on the many important questions regarding their use at low altitudes. To what extent will it be legal, for example, for drones to hover 300 feet above residential neighborhoods snapping pictures into backyards and windows? What level of human-in-the-loop control is needed to ensure safety in a crowded airspace? And how can we stop terrorists from piloting drones at treetop level towards a target? But there is another portion of the airspace—the stratosphere—that while mostly empty today, will in the coming years will become increasingly populated by gossamer-like, solar-powered drones turning silent, lazy circles in the sky. The stratosphere lies roughly between 40,000 and 150,000 feet in altitude.
Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S. Drones - Joshua Foust - International. Officials often portray the global expansion of deadly drone strikes as an unequivocal success. But are we really accounting for all the consequences? Reuters A series of articles have been published recently about the extent and, in some cases, failures of the drone program so famously expanded under President Obama's watch. The first, a blockbuster article by the Washington Post's Greg Miller, brings to light some truly worrying aspects of a policy that seems to have taken on a life of its own (emphasis mine): In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command pursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft.
In other words, Jaffe is describing a system in which a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we're assured are bad and who are sometimes U.S. citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process. It is an absolute scandal. Washington's Phantom War. One hot summer evening in 2009, in a small village in the remote Pakistani tribal agency of South Waziristan, a pair of Hellfire missiles fired from an unmanned Predator drone slammed into a house, killing the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, along with his wife.
About a year later, in May 2010, down a dirt road from Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, a missile from another Predator killed Mustafa Abu al-Yazid (known as Saeed al-Masri), a founding member of al Qaeda, along with his wife and several of their children. These drone strikes were successful in killing high-level leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda. But few are. On average, only one out of every seven U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan kills a militant leader. The U.S. drone program has its roots in the late 1990s, when unmanned -- and unarmed -- aircraft tracked and spied on al Qaeda in Afghanistan. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Have an account? David Bell: In Defense Of Drones: A Historical Argument. Singer and the other critics tend to present this new frontier of warfare as something largely novel—a sinister science fiction fantasy come to life, and one that has the power to radically change the political dynamics of warfare.
But if our current technology is new, the desire to take out one’s enemies from a safe distance is anything but. There is nothing new about military leaders exploiting technology for this purpose. And, for that matter, there is nothing new about criticizing such technology as potentially immoral or dishonorable. In fact, both remote control warfare, and the queasy feelings it arouses in many observers, are best seen as parts of a classic, and very old history. IT IS A COMMONPLACE that, from the very beginnings of warfare, combatants have sought technological advantages that allow them to kill their enemies with minimum risk to themselves. The Political Consequences of a Drones-First Policy - Joshua Foust - International. The global counterterrorism mission imposes substantial political costs to the U.S. Yet policymakers are rushing ahead anyway.
Why we should start thinking more about politics, and less about killing bad guys. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta speaks to the media from the Pentagon Briefing Room in Washington, DC / Reuters If you talk to any security or intelligence professional, they'll tell you that the consequences of the Arab Spring -- it turned one this week -- have been devastating to U.S. security interests in the region. Information gathering, operations, intelligence, and general context about the Middle East and North Africa had become so lopsided -- utterly reliant on the security services of the unpopular dictatorships in the region -- that their overthrow more of less crippled U.S. efforts.
Over the last year the U.S. bureaucracy has worked feverishly to reestablish itself in the MENA region. In Yemen, too, the situation continues to deteriorate. U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners. On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone. As I noted at the time, the report contained this extraordinary passage buried in the middle: What made that sentence so amazing was that it basically amounts to a report that the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.
In a just-released, richly documented report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on behalf of the Sunday Times, documents that this is exactly what the U.S. is doing — and worse: As I indicated, there have been scattered, mostly buried indications in the American media that drones have been targeting and killing rescuers. Other tactics are also raising concerns. In a war situation no one is allowed to attack the Red Cross. Or perhaps it came from here: President's Top Terrorism Aid Calls Drone Killings "Legal," "Ethical," "Wise" President Obama's senior anti-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, on Monday gave the administration's most detailed explanation of the policy and considerations behind using unmanned drones to target and kill terrorists abroad, saying the process was "legal," "ethical," and "conformed to the principle of necessity" and "proportionality," in a speech at a Washington, D.C. foreign policy think tank.
"In the course of the war in Afghanistan and the fight against al-Qq'ida, I think the American people expects to use advanced technologies, for example, to prevent attacks on U.S. forces and to remove terrorists from the battlefield," said Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. "We do and it has saved the lives of our men and women in uniform. " The speech showed the administration's "continuing commitment to greater transparency," Brennan said.
The speech is bound to provoke strong reactions. The Drone Blowback Fallacy. Signature Strikes in Yemen | Waq al-Waq. Yesterday I teased an upcoming post about the US approach to disrupting and defeating AQAP. Shortly after that Greg Miller - a smart and well connected journalist at the Washington Post - released this piece on the CIA seeking to use "signature strikes" in Yemen. There are several things to say about this, but my first reaction was: isn't the US already doing this in Yemen? After Ali Abdullah Salih signed the GCC deal in November 2011 the US strategy for defeating AQAP in Yemen was described to me as seeking to kill the group's top leaders in the hopes that these "decapitation strikes" would weaken AQAP to the point that it couldn't launch attacks at the US.
This is the two-pronged strategy that Eric Schmitt of the NY Times writes about here. However, in recent weeks - at least from the outside - the US appears to have abandoned this approach or, at the very least, incorporated it with something looking very much like "signature strikes. " There are several reasons for this. US drone air strike kills al-Qaida terrorist wanted for USS Cole bombing | World news. Al-Qaida leader Fahd al-Quso seen during his trial over the USS Cole bombing. He has been killed by a US air strike. Photograph: Khaled Fazaa/AFP/Getty Images Yemeni officials say a US air strike has killed a top al-Qaida leader on the FBI's most-wanted list for his role in the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole. Fahd al-Quso was hit by a missile on Sunday as he stepped out of his vehicle, along with another al-Qaida operative, in the southern Shabwa province, Yemeni military officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with military regulations.
The drone strike that killed Quso was carried out by the CIA after an extended joint surveillance operation with the US military, two American officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media. The air strike came as the US and Yemen co-operate against al-Qaida in southern Yemen. Terrorist Fishing in the Yemen - By James Traub. US drone targeted al-Qaida deputy | World news. Where the Drones Are - By Micah Zenko and Emma Welch. Secret ‘Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles. 10 Things You Didn't Know About Drones - By Micah Zenko. When the US Government Can Kill You, Explained. An Executive Power to Kill? by David Cole. I Met a 16-Year-Old Kid. 3 Days Later Obama Killed Him | World. Border agency overextended on drone program. Drone Documents: Why The Government Won’t Release Them. My Drone War - By Pir Zubair Shah. Our immoral drone war. The face of collateral damage. Hatred: What drones sow. In defense of Obama’s drones.
Fire When Ready - By Jack Goldsmith. The drones are coming — to America. What is a Drone, Anyway? | Guest Blog. Drones' new weapon: P.R. - drones. Orwells and Oppenheimers: Drone Opponents’ Marriage of Convenience » Gunpowder & Lead. Israel’s drone dominance. One Per Cent: GPS loss kicked off fatal drone crash.
Drones, the Empty Aerial Assault.