As Texas already tests out unmanned aircraft drones over its controversial borders, New York City reaches out to allow for drones to fill its skies.
This is not science fiction, or 1984, this is reality, as Pix11’s Kerry Drew points out:
“In a recent email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, an NYPD Detective in the Counterterrorism Unit asks the Federal Aviation Administration about the use of drones as a way to protect the city.”
The advantages to drone planes are that they can be much smaller than pilot bearing ones and therefore, can easily be more maneuverable and spy worthy. If a drone is found out and shot down, as has happened in US drones that have accidentally traversed into Pakistan, no human beings are dead because of it. The only loss is the many millions of dollars that are literally burned up.
A fleet of drones could carry enough surveillance equipment, missiles, and tasers to singlehandedly collect video, audio, and pictorial evidence to theoretically bring down any extremist caught in the act of bomb making, so long as they are within site of a window (even if they are on the thirty-fifth floor of a midtown skyscraper).
Using drones in this manner sounds like a no-brainer, right?
But what do these adept James Bond-like spy machines have for flaws? For starters, human beings – at this point the US military – run them; that is a big responsibility for an organization that continually overrides individual rational thinking for orders from higher-ups.
Who makes the biggest decisions? The politicians in power atop the chain of command do.
Human beings in government positions often are corrupt and in pursuit of personal interests and not those of the people they are meant to serve.
A pilot feels something – a conscience, perhaps – and ultimately is close enough to the situation when flying a plane to make the right call as to whether or nor to shoot.
Drones eliminate any closeness to a given situation, because the human controlling the plane is many miles away. Pushing a button to wipe out an enemy or their place is fairly easy when a superior officer is in your ear bellowing to “Fire!”
Teams of unmanned aircraft can systemically scale buildings, bridges, parks, and streets alike, in the pursuit of information. Everyone, inside and outside in the open air, can be photographed, cataloged, and infringed upon. The freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of privacy in one’s private home could all be forfeited in the name of national security.
But it seems that if you want privacy, you must have something to hide, right? So says those who do the spying . . .
This is not science fiction, or 1984, this is reality, as Pix11’s Kerry Drew points out:
“In a recent email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, an NYPD Detective in the Counterterrorism Unit asks the Federal Aviation Administration about the use of drones as a way to protect the city.”
The advantages to drone planes are that they can be much smaller than pilot bearing ones and therefore, can easily be more maneuverable and spy worthy. If a drone is found out and shot down, as has happened in US drones that have accidentally traversed into Pakistan, no human beings are dead because of it. The only loss is the many millions of dollars that are literally burned up.
A fleet of drones could carry enough surveillance equipment, missiles, and tasers to singlehandedly collect video, audio, and pictorial evidence to theoretically bring down any extremist caught in the act of bomb making, so long as they are within site of a window (even if they are on the thirty-fifth floor of a midtown skyscraper).
Using drones in this manner sounds like a no-brainer, right?
But what do these adept James Bond-like spy machines have for flaws? For starters, human beings – at this point the US military – run them; that is a big responsibility for an organization that continually overrides individual rational thinking for orders from higher-ups.
Who makes the biggest decisions? The politicians in power atop the chain of command do.
Human beings in government positions often are corrupt and in pursuit of personal interests and not those of the people they are meant to serve.
A pilot feels something – a conscience, perhaps – and ultimately is close enough to the situation when flying a plane to make the right call as to whether or nor to shoot.
Drones eliminate any closeness to a given situation, because the human controlling the plane is many miles away. Pushing a button to wipe out an enemy or their place is fairly easy when a superior officer is in your ear bellowing to “Fire!”
Teams of unmanned aircraft can systemically scale buildings, bridges, parks, and streets alike, in the pursuit of information. Everyone, inside and outside in the open air, can be photographed, cataloged, and infringed upon. The freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of privacy in one’s private home could all be forfeited in the name of national security.
But it seems that if you want privacy, you must have something to hide, right? So says those who do the spying . . .
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