Drone use by the creep state is a serious problem...but Wired did a crap job of picking their opening vignette. Screaming altercations at bus stops are not just free-speech exercises, and the patrolman who followed the drone was quickly rifling through the pockets of one of the screamers.
What's the justification for rifling through someone's pockets because they were in a yelling match though? That seems like a 4th amendment violation. Not quite stop-and-frisk, but should any slightly abnormal behavior give justification for a search?
I guess that ship sailed a long time ago given that NYC is still doing stop and frisk, even after it was deemed unconstitutional
The guy was chronically homeless, probably used to being hassled by the cops, maybe consented to the search especially if he knew there was nothing to find.
Not that's it's right, but street people are targets of the cops. The involvement of the drone likely didn't have anything to do with it.
Officers have wide discretion to ensure their safety in an encounter. While this doesn't always result in a search, it could easily do so in cases where emotions are elevated.
Where would that be? Most states allow personal safety searches during investigations of other infractions. For example, police can ask you to step out of your car and search you for weapons if you're pulled over for a traffic infraction. They tend not to do it often, but they have the power to and the courts consistently support that (I most states).
Hi, I edited this story (I'm the security editor at WIRED). The goal of the opening anecdote wasn't intended to be about free speech, it was to show one of the ways the drones are used and what one of the people involved in the incident thought about it. The story as a whole is trying to convey what the reality is like living in a city policed in part through the use of drones.
Good article. It nicely illustrates the general lack of oversight and policy (and enforcement thereof) nationwide when adopting new tech by government. Police use of tech is very poorly and inconsistently regulated nationwide. Without better governance, abuse of such tech by cowboy cops will become routine. And without oversight and transparency, any constraints on that abuse become unenforceable. IMO, the story makes that case well.
Your comment is gray. Isn't that because someone downvoted it? I don't think they voted correctly. I think your comment is meaningful and helps further discussion. Maybe they just don't know the rules of voting.
I might not like two people screaming at each other in public, but me calling the police says a lot more about my over sensitivity and lack of understanding / exposure to life, than whether there is something needing police intervention in public.
I could write a very long blog post showing how over sensitivity in society has become toxic to well being and trust.
The UK has been doing speeding tickets for years without even needing mobile drones. Just 2 video feeds from fixed cameras, some distance apart. OCR identifies the licence plate. When a vehicle is matched on both, distance and time gives you the average speed between them.
They have the same system on Italian autostradas. I look at installing this very simple, fool-proof system as a sign that a police force is actually allowed to seriously, non-pretend-like enforce the speed limits and improve road safety.
So, we have these in Baltimore, where I live. And, for the most part, Baltimoreans would not agree that the "police force is actually allowed to seriously, non-pretend-like enforce the speed limits and improve road safety".
The reason for this is that a large fraction of Baltimore drivers are not driving legally-registered vehicles with authentic tags, and another subset of the fraction that is installs devices to obfuscate their plates from the speed cameras.
This enforcement strategy does have the upside of being somewhat progressive, in that I assume speeding fines are disproportionately collected from the well-off residents most likely to opt into the (regressive) legal requirements of registration, insurance, etc, and thereby subsidize through their premiums the city's many uninsured low-income drivers.
The downside, of course, is that the illegal vehicles are already "in for a pound" and so generally attempt to drive like bats out of hell at all times it is plausibly physically possible (BPD is prohibited from pursuing for sensible safety reasons, but there's no effective system for later impounding the vehicle).
Data from our city department of transportation suggest that speed cameras on the highway have been effective at reducing crashes - apparently there a critical mass of law-abiding drivers slows everyone to reasonable speeds. On surface streets, they, and red-light cameras, seem less effective, with traffic calming really the only successful intervention.
Edit: to the repliers-I am merely pointing out that there other possibilities than the dystopian doomer vision. I’m not speculating on probabilities. But, if I lived on the South side of Chicago, I would welcome this.
It might be a bit of both. Crime as a personal effect is a horrible thing to experience. Crime as a general statistic had the wonderful effect of keeping rent low.
'Find My' is a thing for years, yet police unable to find your phone, nor mobile operator can disclose where is the SIM card now. We are going be tracked 24h but that won't affect crime rate.
If Q* can really combine mathematical logic with simple NLP, why not? Text Search has already automated a lot of what lawyers spent time doing, why wouldn't accountants be next?
Yes citizen. Please provide a copy of your last annual IRS statement. Hold steady with your raised hands while our drone scans it. You have 60 seconds to comply.
Unfortunately, government is not in possession of a magical barrier that prevents criminals from getting inside of it. In fact there's quite the incentive for smarter criminals to get inside of it, and they have been quite successful at times.
The world will never be crime free. It doesn't matter if you have 100% solved/captured/punished rate, because you'll always have someone who doesn't care about the consequences (including choosing suicide after the crime).
Don’t be so pessimistic, once everyone has their mandatory neuralink it should be trivial to punish or prevent any unapproved thoughts and actions. Or before that, AI and constant location, audio and possibly biometric monitoring should be pretty good at weeding out any “criminals”, false positives be damned.
It kind of reminds me of fear of nuclear power and GMOs. Are these things capable of causing problems without sufficient oversight? Sure. Does that justify the almost knee-jerk opposition to them, particularly when they could bring about vast improvements? Not at all. Too many people seem to dream of nightmare scenarios for new tech instead of thinking about more likely possibilities as well as the very real opportunity costs.
The problems on the Southside aren’t fixed by high tech cameras and drones- those just get smashed and or looted for parts. Or the numbers look really bad so law enforcement doesn’t even bother because embarrassing the mayor’s office makes things uncomfortable for everyone.
These sorts of measures are deployed against mostly law abiding citizens. They do not successfully combat lawlessness.
It's interesting how we saw the drone combat unit coming years before the invasion of Ukraine. I remember seeing drone police units at protests before the pandemic here in Sweden. So I should have been able to predict that any modern combat would follow suit, but I was still surprised by the revelation of a drone combat unit in the Ukrainian army.
Militarily Sweden is lagging behind in this area, in part due to regulations around aircraft.
Which leads to this situation where the state is mainly applying flying drones against it's own civilians, as a means of mass surveillance of innocents.
Well, it wasn't really a drone war as it was totally one-sided, with Azerbaijan dominating with Turkish-made drones.
In Ukraine, you can actually see drones trying to knock each other off kinetically. There is even a video of a Russian drone dropping a net over another one.
It wasn't only drones, it was the Hamza division flow from Syria by Turkey, it was Turkish drones, Israeli drones. This implies Georgian co-operation, since Turkey obviously didn't fly the Hamza division through Russia, Iran or India, and didn't take some kind of convoluted route through Pakistan.
The war against the Karabach-Armenians was truly multi-national project, with numerous co-belligerents, Turkey, Georgia, Russia (possibly in the later stages), even the US. Israel is not a co-belligerent since they didn't give any weapons, but sold them, but the weapons they sold were as far as I understand quite important. Georgia was a co-belligerent because of the Hamza division crossing through it. Russia was not a co-belligerent in the 2020 war, but I believe they might have been during the actual expulsion-- it's possible they just gave their approval, and then it'd be Turkey, Georgia and the US, but even if the Russians didn't do more than give that assent that assent still had worse consequences than the formal co-belligerency of the US, so one would still want to include them somehow.
I think the US tried to avoid being a formal co-belligerent by giving some military aid to Armenia, but the NKAO successor state was not Armenia, but separate, so that doesn't actually change anything with regard to co-belligerency.
>The city mostly flies above the people living west of Interstate 805. “There’s less crime out here and higher incomes, so that’s why there are fewer drone flights.” The manager at a golf course on the east side was even more explicit. “Right now we’re sneaking up on chaos in a lot of areas,” he says, “and if drones are what’s needed to take care of the criminals,” so be it. “Buzz that son of a gun all you want to,” he says.
Same as it ever was. Wealthy suburban voters imposing a police state on the poorer disenfranchised half of their city.
I'm here for it. Drones don't lose their temper or confuse a flashlight for a gun. And maybe we'll finally have the surveillance power to enforce traffic safety rules for real.
Drones... may well make mistakes - I'm not sure that AI Vision is anyway 100% foolproof, but besides - Drone operators are human, and i'm under the impression they most certainly are fallible.
They're certainly fallible - but they can err on the side of civilian life rather than the drone's. That's a big improvement even if the errors are more common.
The fact that the drone doesn't require safety effectively means it shouldn't be armed to comply with typical use of force guidelines. Drones essentially are no different than the crime cameras in the UK, only they're mobile.
In what dream world is this true? Certainly not reality. Heck, the AI "vision" most taxis I take that show a machine view of reality -- Tesla, Toyota, etc. -- consistently mistake random objects for cars, a rock for a cat, and reflective water surfaces at early day for potential hazards, to name a few fun ones. Oh and a slightly large car was once a semi truck.
Mistaking a flashlight for a gun is almost a given.
I'm not talking about mistaken vision, I mean like an officer reaching for the wrong item in their belt and shooting someone. But even in terms of a suspect holding an object, a computer vision system may not be 100% accurate, but it also won't panic nor does it even need to react to having a gun pointed at it.
Hoping it wouldn't turn into a surveillance nightmare with swarms of drones doing who knows what bidding, I'd rather welcome the replacement of police helicopters with drones, they are cheaper resource, make less sound and so on.
While true, that decreased cost will come with increased use. The situation described in the article would not have used a helicopter. Mayne it makes less sound, but makes it more often (per the residents in the article it's still an annoyance).
That's what I'm afraid of and what I hope won't happen. Increased use may also increase incidents with operating these drones above cities which hopefully will tone them down a bit.
This makes me more and more hopeless. It's pretty much guaranteed that total surveillance by governments and private companies will come in the next decades. We'll also have police robots. Authoritarian governments will be super happy having these capabilities and probably be able to to survive much longer since they will be able to detect and monitor any kind of resistance early on.
Fight fire with fire. Those of us who oppose mechanical oppression will do everything we can to set your dogs against you.
"The Age of Drone Police" is not acceptable, at all. Red line, for complete destabilization. The fact people on this forum seem to be nonchalant over this only shows how detached from reality everyone is becoming, mostly due to massive waves of propaganda and political bullshit creating a never ending stream of "us versus them".
When clearly the US are those subject to drone police actions, while the THEM are foreigners and the 1% who somehow get to dictate the lives we all live without physical consequence or fear.
Anyone who thinks this is just "business as usual" or the never ending procession of progress is truly lost to the world of safety and possessions.
Many people hold values like this that are immediately dismissed once the technology in question can save something or someone they truly hold dear.
I very much understand and share the fears of a surveillance state. I would also throw those fears out the window if it meant a drone could find or track someone who kidnapped my child or loved one (and I can think of many even more horrifying examples).
I think the reality is far from the dystopic panopticon people imagine and also won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement that will likely be mitigated by citizen pushback and regulation. I think people who talk about it the way you do are being quite hyperbolic and don't actually do a good job of swaying people to their argument.
> won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement
Another way of saying this is that unacceptable tyranny will roll in on a tread of acceptable compromises.
> I very much understand and share the fears of a surveillance state.
I'm not convinced you do, as "over-enforcement" is a totally inadequate term for the extant systemic oppression even organic policing imposes. Have you read The End of Policing, yet, or The New Jim Crow, or even watched the documentary 13th?
> the technology in question can save something
Maybe it can, but maybe so can something else. Something less costly, less constricting. You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence. Well, that's one set of social relations, but can you think of any others?
> Another way of saying this is that unacceptable tyranny will roll in on a tread of acceptable compromises.
That's a very black and white way of looking at things. We have vastly more surveillance today by businesses, governments, AND private individuals on each other. There have been abuses that have been exposed and fought against, there have been exposes due to this surveillance of powerful people who otherwise would not have been discovered in their corruptions or misdeeds. Surveillance is a tool, not just something used by the powerful against the weak. It can and will be used for good and bad.
I am familiar with the arguments made against policing, and agree it needs significant reforms, but don't agree with the approach the defund the police, abolish prisons, and ACAB groups take even if I understand where they are coming from. They are very effective however at making the average person dismiss progressive thinking instead of actually consider their otherwise valid points.
> You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence.
It's not just about violence, and surveillance is only one of many tools a society uses to regulate itself. Can you suggest to me what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper faster than having a few more available cameras would? Nothing after the fact is going to be more effective than knowing where the person was when it happened and where they went.
We can discuss and likely agree on all sorts of policies that can help mitigate violence and social problems BEFORE they happen, but that won't make you feel better when your kid is gone already. What if drones ARE the safe way to improve policing? You get eyes on the scene without a fallible and scared human trained to shoot before thinking.
> It's not just about violence... to track down a kidnapper
I hate to be pedantic, but I don't understand by what definition kidnapping is not violence.
> what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper[?]
How about some preventative measures? For context, I believe the gross bulk of kidnappings are by family members, especially estranged parents. This could be remedied by addressing the irrational fears, anxieties, insecurities, and resentments that lead to acts of domestic violence. Such remedies might take the form of mental health courses in schools, or themese incorporated into media. Imagine if, instead of quoting dumb jokes from The Office, we quoted CBT-informed triggers for coping mechanisms that could de-escalate our central nervous arousal and re-target our attention to more productive efforts such as applying for the job which might win us back legal custody.
Edit: I checked. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention estimates that approximately 203,000 children a year are abducted by a family member, which accounts for 78% of all child kidnappings in the U.S.
> Many people hold values like this that are immediately dismissed once the technology in question can save something or someone they truly hold dear.
Has any of this law enforcement and surveillance significantly disrupted the rise of mass/school shootings? If technology is fixing the problem, why are Unsolved Murders at record highs [0]?
> I would also throw those fears out the window if it meant a drone could find or track someone who kidnapped my child or loved one
Won't save them from a school shooter when the cops stand outside for an hour. What's ironic is how many times these mass shooters were "on our radar" before the event, indicating the existing surveillance system worked well enough already. How is more surveillance going to fix this problem, when we already are the most surveilled people in the history of this planet? A better question: Would you even bother to check?
> I think the reality is far from the dystopic panopticon people imagine and also won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement that will likely be mitigated by citizen pushback and regulation.
At the very least, you implicitly assume every person, institution, and all technology behind those efforts work as advertised every time. Even your cop-out disclaimer assumes the natural state is perfection, and anything wrong will eventually balanced back to perfection. Specifically, you assume its brought back into balance by somebody else. Your whole argument is based on this premise. I wonder what regulation came up after Edward Snowden's relevations? Again, better question: Have you checked?
Why yes, your kidnapped loved one will be located when all these stars align! Hopefully they won't shoot the victim (and bystanders) along with the kidnapper [1].
IF it can be used for its intended purpose - reduce unnecessary police contact, give more information to officers so they understand the situation and don't panic from bad information and come in guns blazing - it's a good idea. However, since police organizations in this country have shockingly little oversight, of course this will be used in nefarious ways, thus it is a bad idea.
> The department says that its drones provide officers with critical intelligence about incidents they are responding to ahead of initiating in-person contact—which the CVPD says has reduced unnecessary police contacts, decreased response times, and saved lives.
> Interesting. I didn't see any examples to support that. The example given in the article seems like unnecessary police contact.
I'm unsure where the confusion lies - the entire point of the original post is about the intent of the technology not aligning with its usage. Clearly the intent is clearly stated and aligns with what the original comment said. That's just one example as well? I'm not really sure what your point is here.
My original comment was saying it seems it's not used for it's intended purpose based on contact still being made. Then you replied with an article quote from the police about their stated intention. Why, I'm not sure.
It seems we're in agreement that the actual usage and intended usage differ.
Only a matter of time before a police drone falls out of the sky and injures or kills someone. If they need intel, why not use a tiny drone deployed on the scene by the responding officer? Seems less intrusive, cheaper, and safer.
It's more likely someone gets killed by a police car rushing to the scene or in a car chase than a drone falling on someone. These arguments aren't very effective.
Yes, and people are more used to watching for cars or hearing tires/engines/sirens. It's completely different to be in your back yard and have something fall out of the sky, probably almost silently.
I'm sorry but this is just not a reasonable thing to be worried about. Drones are going to be more prevalent across numerous industries and professions, planes and helicopters fly over your head all the time already, and most people are not listening for tire or engine sounds to prepare them to dodge an out of control car.
I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place.
"planes and helicopters fly over your head all the time already,"
Yes, there are some incidents related to these. Keep in mind maintenance requirements, training, and restrictions are much stricter for real aircraft and thus should have a much lower mishap rate.
"and most people are not listening for tire or engine sounds to prepare them to dodge an out of control car."
This is simply untrue. The nature of the loud and unusual sound causes most people to look even if they weren't intentionally looking for it.
"I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place."
This is only true because the adoption of the drones are so low. If we had similar deployment rates it's likely we would see similar risk levels.
Of course you could mitigate a lot of this by having other restrictions similar to other aircraft, automated parachute and strobe/alarm for failures, designated low risk/disruption flight paths, etc.
I don't see the issue here--and don't feel the need to read past the opening story right now--but what is the issue? Police receive 911 call on domestic dispute and, instead of responding by sending a squad car, they send a drone to investigate and find the guy.
Wired has a problem with that?
EDIT: Now quickly scrolled down and it seems residences see a drone in the sky and think it's spying on them.
It's not but Wired wants to make a big deal of it.
> EDIT: Now quickly scrolled down and it seems residences see a drone in the sky and think it's spying on them.
>
> It's not but Wired wants to make a big deal of it.
When most of these drones are owned and operated by private corporations and the government, is it really safe to say they're not? It's been well established they're performing mass-surveillance on every other aspect of our lives, why wouldn't they do it here?
>It's been well established they're performing mass-surveillance on every other aspect of our lives
You have a credible source for that? I have never noticed a drone fly anywhere near me in my lifetime except one by a television news crew several years ago.
If anything, if I lived in a crime-ridden area, I would appreciate surveillance by the police.
87 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadI guess that ship sailed a long time ago given that NYC is still doing stop and frisk, even after it was deemed unconstitutional
Not that's it's right, but street people are targets of the cops. The involvement of the drone likely didn't have anything to do with it.
Where would that be? Most states allow personal safety searches during investigations of other infractions. For example, police can ask you to step out of your car and search you for weapons if you're pulled over for a traffic infraction. They tend not to do it often, but they have the power to and the courts consistently support that (I most states).
I might not like two people screaming at each other in public, but me calling the police says a lot more about my over sensitivity and lack of understanding / exposure to life, than whether there is something needing police intervention in public.
I could write a very long blog post showing how over sensitivity in society has become toxic to well being and trust.
https://www.webuyanycar.com/guides/car-ownership/average-spe...
While encouraging pro-social behaviour, of course.
So, we have these in Baltimore, where I live. And, for the most part, Baltimoreans would not agree that the "police force is actually allowed to seriously, non-pretend-like enforce the speed limits and improve road safety".
The reason for this is that a large fraction of Baltimore drivers are not driving legally-registered vehicles with authentic tags, and another subset of the fraction that is installs devices to obfuscate their plates from the speed cameras.
This enforcement strategy does have the upside of being somewhat progressive, in that I assume speeding fines are disproportionately collected from the well-off residents most likely to opt into the (regressive) legal requirements of registration, insurance, etc, and thereby subsidize through their premiums the city's many uninsured low-income drivers.
The downside, of course, is that the illegal vehicles are already "in for a pound" and so generally attempt to drive like bats out of hell at all times it is plausibly physically possible (BPD is prohibited from pursuing for sensible safety reasons, but there's no effective system for later impounding the vehicle).
Data from our city department of transportation suggest that speed cameras on the highway have been effective at reducing crashes - apparently there a critical mass of law-abiding drivers slows everyone to reasonable speeds. On surface streets, they, and red-light cameras, seem less effective, with traffic calming really the only successful intervention.
Edit: to the repliers-I am merely pointing out that there other possibilities than the dystopian doomer vision. I’m not speculating on probabilities. But, if I lived on the South side of Chicago, I would welcome this.
These sorts of measures are deployed against mostly law abiding citizens. They do not successfully combat lawlessness.
Which leads to this situation where the state is mainly applying flying drones against it's own civilians, as a means of mass surveillance of innocents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_X_9oWLmfU
In Ukraine, you can actually see drones trying to knock each other off kinetically. There is even a video of a Russian drone dropping a net over another one.
The war against the Karabach-Armenians was truly multi-national project, with numerous co-belligerents, Turkey, Georgia, Russia (possibly in the later stages), even the US. Israel is not a co-belligerent since they didn't give any weapons, but sold them, but the weapons they sold were as far as I understand quite important. Georgia was a co-belligerent because of the Hamza division crossing through it. Russia was not a co-belligerent in the 2020 war, but I believe they might have been during the actual expulsion-- it's possible they just gave their approval, and then it'd be Turkey, Georgia and the US, but even if the Russians didn't do more than give that assent that assent still had worse consequences than the formal co-belligerency of the US, so one would still want to include them somehow.
I think the US tried to avoid being a formal co-belligerent by giving some military aid to Armenia, but the NKAO successor state was not Armenia, but separate, so that doesn't actually change anything with regard to co-belligerency.
Same as it ever was. Wealthy suburban voters imposing a police state on the poorer disenfranchised half of their city.
Mistaking a flashlight for a gun is almost a given.
"The Age of Drone Police" is not acceptable, at all. Red line, for complete destabilization. The fact people on this forum seem to be nonchalant over this only shows how detached from reality everyone is becoming, mostly due to massive waves of propaganda and political bullshit creating a never ending stream of "us versus them".
When clearly the US are those subject to drone police actions, while the THEM are foreigners and the 1% who somehow get to dictate the lives we all live without physical consequence or fear.
Anyone who thinks this is just "business as usual" or the never ending procession of progress is truly lost to the world of safety and possessions.
I very much understand and share the fears of a surveillance state. I would also throw those fears out the window if it meant a drone could find or track someone who kidnapped my child or loved one (and I can think of many even more horrifying examples).
I think the reality is far from the dystopic panopticon people imagine and also won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement that will likely be mitigated by citizen pushback and regulation. I think people who talk about it the way you do are being quite hyperbolic and don't actually do a good job of swaying people to their argument.
Another way of saying this is that unacceptable tyranny will roll in on a tread of acceptable compromises.
> I very much understand and share the fears of a surveillance state.
I'm not convinced you do, as "over-enforcement" is a totally inadequate term for the extant systemic oppression even organic policing imposes. Have you read The End of Policing, yet, or The New Jim Crow, or even watched the documentary 13th?
> the technology in question can save something
Maybe it can, but maybe so can something else. Something less costly, less constricting. You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence. Well, that's one set of social relations, but can you think of any others?
That's a very black and white way of looking at things. We have vastly more surveillance today by businesses, governments, AND private individuals on each other. There have been abuses that have been exposed and fought against, there have been exposes due to this surveillance of powerful people who otherwise would not have been discovered in their corruptions or misdeeds. Surveillance is a tool, not just something used by the powerful against the weak. It can and will be used for good and bad.
I am familiar with the arguments made against policing, and agree it needs significant reforms, but don't agree with the approach the defund the police, abolish prisons, and ACAB groups take even if I understand where they are coming from. They are very effective however at making the average person dismiss progressive thinking instead of actually consider their otherwise valid points.
> You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence.
It's not just about violence, and surveillance is only one of many tools a society uses to regulate itself. Can you suggest to me what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper faster than having a few more available cameras would? Nothing after the fact is going to be more effective than knowing where the person was when it happened and where they went.
We can discuss and likely agree on all sorts of policies that can help mitigate violence and social problems BEFORE they happen, but that won't make you feel better when your kid is gone already. What if drones ARE the safe way to improve policing? You get eyes on the scene without a fallible and scared human trained to shoot before thinking.
I remain unconvinced.
> It's not just about violence... to track down a kidnapper
I hate to be pedantic, but I don't understand by what definition kidnapping is not violence.
> what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper[?]
How about some preventative measures? For context, I believe the gross bulk of kidnappings are by family members, especially estranged parents. This could be remedied by addressing the irrational fears, anxieties, insecurities, and resentments that lead to acts of domestic violence. Such remedies might take the form of mental health courses in schools, or themese incorporated into media. Imagine if, instead of quoting dumb jokes from The Office, we quoted CBT-informed triggers for coping mechanisms that could de-escalate our central nervous arousal and re-target our attention to more productive efforts such as applying for the job which might win us back legal custody.
Edit: I checked. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention estimates that approximately 203,000 children a year are abducted by a family member, which accounts for 78% of all child kidnappings in the U.S.
Has any of this law enforcement and surveillance significantly disrupted the rise of mass/school shootings? If technology is fixing the problem, why are Unsolved Murders at record highs [0]?
> I would also throw those fears out the window if it meant a drone could find or track someone who kidnapped my child or loved one
Won't save them from a school shooter when the cops stand outside for an hour. What's ironic is how many times these mass shooters were "on our radar" before the event, indicating the existing surveillance system worked well enough already. How is more surveillance going to fix this problem, when we already are the most surveilled people in the history of this planet? A better question: Would you even bother to check?
> I think the reality is far from the dystopic panopticon people imagine and also won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement that will likely be mitigated by citizen pushback and regulation.
At the very least, you implicitly assume every person, institution, and all technology behind those efforts work as advertised every time. Even your cop-out disclaimer assumes the natural state is perfection, and anything wrong will eventually balanced back to perfection. Specifically, you assume its brought back into balance by somebody else. Your whole argument is based on this premise. I wonder what regulation came up after Edward Snowden's relevations? Again, better question: Have you checked?
Why yes, your kidnapped loved one will be located when all these stars align! Hopefully they won't shoot the victim (and bystanders) along with the kidnapper [1].
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Miramar_shootout
from the article
I'm unsure where the confusion lies - the entire point of the original post is about the intent of the technology not aligning with its usage. Clearly the intent is clearly stated and aligns with what the original comment said. That's just one example as well? I'm not really sure what your point is here.
My original comment was saying it seems it's not used for it's intended purpose based on contact still being made. Then you replied with an article quote from the police about their stated intention. Why, I'm not sure.
It seems we're in agreement that the actual usage and intended usage differ.
I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place.
Yes, there are some incidents related to these. Keep in mind maintenance requirements, training, and restrictions are much stricter for real aircraft and thus should have a much lower mishap rate.
"and most people are not listening for tire or engine sounds to prepare them to dodge an out of control car."
This is simply untrue. The nature of the loud and unusual sound causes most people to look even if they weren't intentionally looking for it.
"I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place."
This is only true because the adoption of the drones are so low. If we had similar deployment rates it's likely we would see similar risk levels.
Of course you could mitigate a lot of this by having other restrictions similar to other aircraft, automated parachute and strobe/alarm for failures, designated low risk/disruption flight paths, etc.
Wired has a problem with that?
EDIT: Now quickly scrolled down and it seems residences see a drone in the sky and think it's spying on them.
It's not but Wired wants to make a big deal of it.
When most of these drones are owned and operated by private corporations and the government, is it really safe to say they're not? It's been well established they're performing mass-surveillance on every other aspect of our lives, why wouldn't they do it here?
You have a credible source for that? I have never noticed a drone fly anywhere near me in my lifetime except one by a television news crew several years ago.
If anything, if I lived in a crime-ridden area, I would appreciate surveillance by the police.
Add; no room for abuse there.
Being in the EU at least i will be able to GDPR any footage - and it will have to be provided. Your FOIA may vary.