It's been a big week for drones. Jon Stewart had this drone feature on The Daily Show. Bill Moyers warned about drones here. Live Science says drones are going to watch over our highways. Niger has agreed to U.S. drones on its territory. And apparently Germany is getting into the armed drone business.
And then there's this. The Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya is buying drones from an American firm, Unmanned Innovation Inc. , to keep watch on potential poachers of endangered species like black and white rhinos, elephants, leopards, lions and chimpanzees. According to CNN:
Each aerial mission is expected to cover an area of 50 square miles over a 90-minute flight. It will fly three or four times a day, monitoring the locations of the endangered species and transmitting a live stream to a laptop on the ground, providing key information that will enable rangers to reach vulnerable areas and fend off any potential poaching dangers.
http://www.indianapoliszoo.com/
Reports Treehugger.com
The conservancy will use the drones to track the movements of all of its 110 rhinos each day and hope to expand the drone program as well as start using even more technology like unique radio frequency ID tags for each of the rhinos and other endangered animals in the park in the near future.
So, drones: good for the rhinos? Good for the humans? Good for both? Good for neither?
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Bad for privacy
Whose privacy? The rhinos? The poachers? This use of drones seems to be a good idea to me.
This is the Silence of the Drones: the creeping ubiquity is on a massive scale.
It's not just the Government gobbling them up like jellybeans as this story intimates. Within a decade they will be ubiquitous for not just governmental tasks, but commercial uses.
Kent, you neglected to mention the recent Nova show "Rise of the Drones". (Entire show here)
I Want a Few of those Drones ! Where can they be purchased ? Walmart/Home Depot ? LOL .........
You can build your own, relying on cell or wifi signal for long distance remote operation. (diydrones)
Hmmmmmm , perhaps the ones that are already up there can be taken over with such devices ! LOL
There are drones for sale for anyone. for less than a $1000 you can get one out of the box and mount a camera and video to it.
You can put it in automatic hover mode and it will hold position right outside your neighbors bedroom window.
They are funner to shoot outa the sky than a skeet-disc. Not like anyone is gonna come to your door and complain either.
These are all better uses of them than to execute an American Citizen teenager. Of course, that won't get much play here, especially with Robert Gibbs explaining it away.
So, fire: good for forests? Good for humans? Good for both? Good for neither?
Smile,you're on candid camera!
I worry a lot about the loss of privacy but I worry more about cops using infrared devices to look into houses without warrants or camera totting busy bodies trying to catch somebody off guard than expensive toys like these.
I do see where using this for anti-poaching or hunting down terrorist camps would be extremely useful. I guess it boils down to a question of trust. Just how much trust should we be willing to put in the people who use these drones? We know from the Bush years that trust can be misplaced and end up costing us lives and freedoms.We also know however that cameras have exposed police brutality,Romney's 47% remark and so on.
Once again technology has outpaced our growth and we have machines that we know can and will be misused. Once more we must decide if we cherish convenience over individual freedom and liberty.
Ah for the good old hunter gatherer days. Such is life.
Perhaps these Drones need to have Limited photographic capacity , lets say 10 Only ! Also , keep them Out of camera-free zones !
If you had a gun you could shoot them down...
Guys,
The most profitable sales office for binoculars and telescopes are in Manhattan and other highly built up areas. People have been spying on each other for a looooong time.
Close your (explicative deleted) drapes if you want privacy.
seems to me we have an NRA member with an itchy trigger finger in the mix here... that makes me more nervous. gun loonies with concealed weapons and a chip on their shoulder are much scarier than an unmanned aircraft... ain't no show in here... i've got nothing to fear except the guy down the street with the leather strap across his chest and a molestache...
I hope this gets through. Yesterday you ,Rachael, featured a young man who is here illegally from Philipines. It was a successful story etc. But, in the same session you said that 2 million people had been deported. This left the impression that all of those deportations were like the young man you featured. These deportations were for reasons usually law breaking. I have been going to court for 5 years trying to see the drunk driver from India who killed my son be deported for Moral Terpitude. Because he has a lot of money he has bonded out of ICE holdings and hired a high priced lawyer to fight this. Meanwhile, he does not work or pay taxes. This I know because he is supposed to pay restitution to me which he has not done. He is free to enjoy the American way. I am left with funeral bills and a broken heart.
Franny- you come through loud and clear. I am very sorry for your loss. You have a very valid point and it will be ignored.
Let's be real.
Whose to say that poachers won't gain access to these same drones to not only hack the signals indicating where these animals live, but could potentially arm these drones into Poacher Drones, farfetched you say? I could see that being a lucrative business opportunity for those in the market for a newer cheaper less connected way to solving problems.
If we can't create and enforce policies that change things in the real world, how does this bandaid on a bullet hole wound "change the game"? We've already seen what drones have done to American born citizens living abroad haven't we? Or maybe we'll trust in the quick "fix" and go the way of the rhino.
Yep, and these cheap DIY-type products are just the platform for that type of hacking. The first corners cut in low-budget projects are security and redundancy.
The drones will be good for the rhinos if they're bad for the humans (i.e., the poachers). I would have no trouble whatsoever using Hellfires on poachers. What's 50 dead poachers? A good start.
Raul,
Since when do you get to determine what is properly 'Liberal'?
In many African countries, anyone not a ranger or guard carrying weapons in a game preserve may be shot on sight. Using a drone is just a change in weaponry.
If endangered species are to be protected from heavily armed criminal gangs then encounters between the law and the poachers will be violent and often deadly. I have no problem with the law shooting first.
I think in the case of the Rhinos you have crimes that have been and will be committed and a pretty good idea how to go after the perpetrators, so I am not opposed to that use. But using it just as surveillance in case some unknown crime might happen under the watch of the drone is definitely too far. The issue is how do you know they won't use them for nefarious and illegal schemes, given that half the world's police and military are on the take already?
I agree with using the drones...........
Save the rhinos, fry the poachers. I'm in. One thing ... we do sell our technology to only the civilized and U.S. friendly nations, right????
Drones are not that hard to make. Any reasonably large and moderately developed country can figure them out and make them on their own, given a bit of time.
Gotcha.
So the anti-drone market is just taking off. How little can it be to carry a hand-grenade or molotov on one.
Yes sir, I'm gonna shoot that sucker out of the sky, from 5 miles out and coming in with the sun at it's back, yes sir.
I think using drones rather than highway patrolmen in speed traps is a much better way to monitor speeding on the highway. Speed kills a lot of innocent travelers each year (not just the speeders). I assume a drone could recognize a vehicle going too fast, calculate its speed, swoop in and get a picture of the license plate.
Drones that save lives are good.
Drones in the sky beats boots on the ground. Anybody can make a drone just go to any RC website and look at what's already out there.
Watched Rise of the Drones on NOVA the other day. That show is one of the best reasons I have seen for keeping Big Bird on the public payroll.
The advanced combat drones now being tested by the Navy render the F22 and F35 obsolete. You can deploy a dozen of them for the cost of a single manned aircraft and they are much more manuverable. They can hang around a battlefield for hours undetected. Best of all sitting in a trailer 1/2 a world a way the pilot isn't at risk.
The drones we have seen so far are the very first generation. They are sort of like WWI biplanes. Remember how the airplane evolved in the 20 years between the end of WWI and the start of WWII.
Whether we like it or not, drones are the future, both in warfare and surveillance. Right now, even fighter planes developed 40 years ago could make turns that would cause the pilot to black out. The missiles used to shoot down planes can make even more drastic turns. A drone combat aircraft would be freed from the physical restrictions place on a fighter by its pilot, and in theory be much harder to shoot down. The downside is the risk that it could be hacked or have its communications disrupted, as we saw with the drone that Iran got ahold of.