The use of such deadly force through the use of
remotely piloted aircraft by the U.S. military certainly deserves scrutiny – as
does the news media’s role in keeping citizens up to date on such overseas
programs, secret or not.
But First Amendment and related privacy issues back
home in the United States are also raised by the rapid growth and future use of
such drones by local government authorities, regulatory agencies or even our
fellow citizens.
The Associated Press, New York Times and the
Washington Post are all reported to have agreed at differing times since 2011
to withhold the location of a secret drone base established in Saudi Arabia. An
Associated Press spokesman said that the wire service agreed to keep silent
after U.S. officials made a case that revealing the location would make the
base a target of extremists, endangering U.S. personnel directly, and would
endanger counter-terror efforts.
AP has noted that it did report on “secret drone
operations operating from the region.”
And there are reports that in 2011, FoxNews.com and the Times of London
both reported the creation of U.S. bases in the Horn of Africa region, and in
Saudi Arabia.
Some press critics and those opposed to lethal drone
strikes have criticized the decisions not to publish the base information as
soon as it was known and confirmed. But others have responded with a blunt
axiom that has guided such decisions for many journalists through the years: Do
you want to risk causing the death of even one American by printing what you
know?
There are no easy answers to balancing this concern
with the role of a free press as a “watchdog on government.”
But beyond that conundrum are a host of other
constitutional issues by the rapidly developing technology of drones and
pilotless aircraft – some the size of small airliners and others literally as
small as a hummingbird – that as citizens we need (pardon the expression) “to
keep an eye on.”
Even as the “unmanned vehicle systems” industry
gather for a conference in suburban Washington, D.C., federal lawmakers and a
variety of states are considering legislation to regulate where, when and how
much such devices are allowed to gather, record and report.
Potential uses by local police and fire departments
include the use of drone aircraft in hostage rescue or lost-child searches, to
replace expensive piloted helicopters in daily duty such as traffic and
accident reporting, and to track forest fires without endangering human crews.
And beyond law enforcement, drones are being touted as easy, inexpensive
devices for everything from surveying remote locations to keeping track of crop
growth or the spread of agricultural diseases.
But balancing the benefits are concerns ranging from
high-tech “peeping Toms” to threats to Constitutional rights.
“Our founders had no conception of things that would
fly over them at night and peer into their backyards and send signals back to a
home base,” said State Sen. Donald McEachin, D-Va., and a sponsor of a bill
setting out a two-year moratorium on police and official agency drone use in
the state, according to report by Fox News.
Legislation requiring court-issued search warrants
in the police use of drones has been introduced in states including Montana,
Maine, Oklahoma, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Florida, Oregon and
California, according to various news reports.
It isn’t science fiction any longer to consider the
Orwellian impact on public demonstrations where a government “eye-in-the-sky”
linked to facial-recognition software now used in land-based cameras could
enable police to identify each person in a march or picket line – and perhaps
in the process also “tag” bystanders or journalists. And what should we make of
private companies or private investigators someday using airborne devices to
monitor workers or to gather evidence on errant spouses?
Privacy concerns about new technology have been
around since long before drones entered the headlines. In 1890, future U.S.
Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis co-authored a law journal article on the
“right to be let alone” in the face of new inventions of the era: photography
and mass circulation newspapers.
Brandeis and colleague Samuel Warren warned more
than 120 years ago that “numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the
prediction that “what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the
house-tops.”
We can only wonder what they would have made of a
small camera-and-radio equipped device hovering over those very same rooftops.
About the author: Gene Policinski, senior vice
president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, is a veteran
journalist whose career has included work in newspapers, radio, television and
online.
This article was published by the First Amendment
Center.
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