Military technology could find new market in America
While the transportation options for the country's finest continue to evolve with additions such as ATVs, mo-peds and Segways, the newest suggested addition to American police forces may not even carry a police officer.
A new bill passed by Congress and expected to be signed by President Barack Obama calls for unmanned surveillance drones to hit the skies domestically within the coming years.
Nine drones are used currently on the border between Mexico and the U.S.; however, this new bill is specifically designed to make drones available for police and private companies across America.
The Oval Office could still stop the bill, but with other recent bills concerning privacy infringement and military detention, anxiety about this bill isn't too far-fetched.
The Federal Aviation Administration projects that 30,000 drones could be in U.S. skies by 2020. The FAA Reauthorization Act isn't specifically meant to develop domestic drones; it encompasses a lot of other matters like a comprehensive set of airline passenger protections, codified in the nation's laws.
The bill involves other, less controversial measures, like demanding realistic scheduling to minimize departure delays, passenger awareness of insecticide spraying on international flights, informative delay reporting and consideration for active duty military members.
But every good politician or salesman knows how to mask the bad by advertising the things the people want first and foremost.
"There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities," said Steven Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, commenting on the drone portion of the Reauthorization Act.
This bill masks itself as a government issue, when in reality it functions to utilize a potentially lucrative technology in a new market. It, like SOPA, sacrifices civil and business rights for the promise of commercial gain.
The positive benefits of the drones would be hundreds of millions of dollars made from their production and whatever terrorist activity they would cut short. But what's to say they won't be exploited like other uses of the law? They could be put in place with the promise of catching dangerous crimes, and little by little start being used more for general surveillance — posing a serious threat to privacy and the limits of government intervention.
Science-fiction novels like "1984" and "Fahrenheit 451" seem laughable and implausible while reading them, but they really just take what problems we already have to an extreme degree. Bills like this one might just push America into the sci-fi reality of 24-hour surveillance, a possibility that — with digital age technologies on the rise — is ceasing to be a dystopian plot twist. It's coming home.
This type of technology should only be reserved for war fronts. Bringing drones into the domestic spheres poses more challenges and more risks than the potential benefits.
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