Drones Over America: What Can They See? 

This is fresh or injury gross drones are coming to the united states last month congress passed and president obama signed a bill that requires the federal aviation administration to integrate groans into our national airspace that were familiar with the predator drones that are used to track and kill terrorists drones can also be small and nonlethal public agencies such as police and fire departments and border control can use them for surveillance there will also be drones operated by private companies for commercial use drones can monitor cell phone and wi-fi signals raises many new privacy concerns are guest john villasenor has written about some of the privacy and safety issues we will face in this new era of domestic drones via signor is a senior fellow in governance studies at the center for technology innovation at the brookings institution and a professor of electrical engineering at ucla he spoke with fresher contributor dave davies while john villasenor welcome to pressure you think of of drones as being military aircraft in use in afghanistan and pakistan but they really have all kinds of uses don't know what are some of the uses that you might see in the united states.

Is a long list of uses for example there are obviously very useful for providing overhead surveillance for police departments for example if there's some sort of a criminal hostage situation going on the magic of eateries for that customs and border protection uses them to keep watch over the border they can be used to spot wildfires to inspect oil pipelines construction sites of who we are almost endless list of nonmilitary uses and is also my kind of responsible things that people would undertake to maintain security and the like him what about the simple commercial uses that might my garage are certainly that as well for simple one application that pc sometimes is real estate firms are for example wanted to get overhead images of of a property are just for advertising properties from the home sale often again for things like well pipelines and things like that operators were apartments commercial operators might use them for those purposes as well imagine being used for surveying for keeping an eye on traffic for the any any number of applications moviemaking on moving the absolutely absolutely that's exactly that and it happened to some extent in southern california and then paparazzi and if i want a flyover bread gets place them in the check out his party well that's that is going to be the one of certainly passing the tests of of what the limits are going to be provided by exactly that application because it's it's a sure bet that paparazzi will want to use drugs if they can hand them obviously that's can recent very significant questions give such a similar capabilities pictures video am intending to may focus in on sounds in a particular room so i think by far the most significant and of the capability most likely to be this is of course imaging and imaging meant to include both still pictures as well as video i think probably second on the list we would have wireless monitoring of radio signals signals from wi-fi access points you could monitor cell phone conversations you can intercept cell phone conversations in and redirect them somehow you could precisely monitor computers you could obviously perform surveillance by taking pictures into backyards in windows and so on and video to rent the video to guess the absolute is no is this anything you can do the smart phone you can put your smartphone run into it from the ground so and also of infrared imaging him drones could be used to monitor a when what rooms were certain temperature is and what how a house they could see when rights are being turned on and off they could follow cars they could do all sorts of things that would be much more difficult to do with doctrines subject before we get into what the new faa rules might be and all of the legal issues that this present talk a little bit more about what kind of drones there aren't to submit people are used to think of these as they have relatively big unmanned aircraft which can be used to unit take out terrorist targets in afghanistan but there's quite a diversity regulus a census of the book the range in size which they fly that in drawing the term drug has been used to cover what is was really an extraordinary array of different not only sizes but which shapes and forms and speeds and in the likes of citizen examples of there are drones better sense of the size of business jets are in fact our jet powered and that are used by the us military there are drones that are that are solar powered down or very large but extremely light and can fly for months and years at a time extremely high altitudes they're drunk that can fit literally in the trunk of a car or a backpack or even the palm of the hand some of these drugs can weigh ten pounds five pounds less than one pound a few ounces and they can obviously fly in the much smaller spaces and are much more agile there are drones that are basically like balloons that didn't sit up there in the sky in one place and can observe for a long period of time enormous swaths of territory so there's really an enormous range of these things so some deleted one of your trunk or a backpack you launch it up and give you what a clear color picture night vision equipment all of the above and anything that that's exactly right and it depends on the type of camera that's that's mounted on the platform and in the not always airplanes in the sense of having your propellers or jet engines helicopter drones are in with expensive gifts and for rotors are our commons well in fact they were used by the libyan rebels last summer and in any event occurred over there so those are also the class of drugs that you said there also drones which line waiting up high like in the stratosphere and are incredibly light and did you say state can stay up for weeks months that's a really interesting piece of the hold of a whole drone a story yes so there is for example a company of an english company called kinetic harm that had built as has a drone that has in the past in arizona and i believe it was two thousand ten on state of over arizona continuously for about two weeks and that that drone despite having a wingspan of over a hundred feet and weighed roughly from proclaiming orders of summer between sixty seventy pounds who was very life given its size on boeing the aerospace and defense giant as has been awarded a contract from to developed something called the solar eagle which is designed to be a to fly for five continuous years at a time at stratospheric altitudes and so were talking your fifty sixty seventy thousand feet and these airplanes these these drones aren't flying at four hundred miles per hour these were going very slowly and they have wings which are paperthin which have solar panels mounted on the top and in this they also batteries to store energy collected during the days of the continue to turn the propellers in and fly at night until the sun comes up and what would they do at that height is sixty thousand yes so for example as at sixty thousand feet you can survey is absolutely enormous amount of territory and so of drones at that height would be a will to who would presumably have not one camera but probably a whole array of cameras mounted on the underside and would be able to then perform surveillance of of some enormous hundreds of square miles or even more for from the vantage point and of course they would send that all that information down through a wireless link to some some station ground you already have the satellites which which have enormous resolution cameras in them what what could the drums do that the satellites wouldn't give that's a really interesting question on satellites have high-resolution cameras but they're much farther away even the lowest of the low orbit satellites were or the satellites that dips down to low points number but that there never lower than roughly a hundred miles above the earth 's surface now that's low for satellite but now we compare that with the drone that said sixty thousand feet you're talking something is closer to eleven or twelve miles so to because these drones are basically about one tenth as far away as the satellites than an equivalent cameras of course can give you much higher resolution so being closer will make these drones in a position to to image in much more detail of course a satellite orbits the earth but a drone could conceivably hover over its target that's exactly right and the only time satellite can hover over one spot on earth is if it's in what is called a geostationary orbit which is over twenty thousand miles away that's great for communication satellites but not very good for surveillance and as you as you said that's exactly right that the low that the satellites that are in low orbits they move around and stay in one spot whereas one of these stratospheric drugs could turn slow circles in the sky and in effect be a stationary with respect to one area on the ground were speaking with john villasenor he is a senior fellow at the brookings institution and a professor of electrical engineering at ucla after a break this is fresher if you're just joining us were talking about drones and their potential uses and misuses in the united states with john villasenor he is a senior fellow at the brookings institution is also professor of electrical engineering at ucla but let's talk about what's happened with with the faa the federal aviation administration and a funding bill in february right there was new language which required the faa to address the issue of unmanned aerial vehicles right at the thread is a a not very longer a very important section that bill and what is a provide.

It provides a complex set of of overlapping stages to to bring drugs into the domestic airspace system but but the upshot is that of their some deadlines and brooklyn have increasing amount of drugs which you will need it to consider the endgame is the goal is to have by i believe it's time for her thirtieth two thousand fifteen to have with the faa terms the quote safe integration of civil unmanned systems unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system but but there's a whole set of steps that curves on the way to september thirtieth two thousand fifteen twenty one to happen but it is the intent to to essentially permit commercial use of drones in the united states provided it can be done safely ought that is part of the intent that the bill covers of the bill really addresses two classes of what ardent and formal terms unmanned aircraft systems are uis is which which we produce drugs there are civil unmanned aircraft systems and then there are public unmanned aircraft systems and public is is this good word for police department fire department state government agencies the national government and then civil manner systems would be drones operated for example by private companies in the bill provides in a separate language and separate terms bill provides for for both of those types of drugs etc. some of the issues that that is raised by you pop the presence of possibly hundreds or thousands of drones flying around the united states and in one question obviously is privacy if they have the ability to take pictures just about anywhere in the air that it can be intrusive and it can be that can be paparazzi could be people below shadowing or stalking out of girlfriend or a boyfriend what's the current law on the extent to which you're allowed to take pictures from the air there's a really interesting and highly relevant supreme court case from nineteen eighty six and what happened then was there was a police department which used a private airplane i want the small single engine airplanes to fly over a suspect 's house and observed that in the backyard the suspect was growing marijuana and the suspect then challenged the suspect was was arrested the suspect challenge that on the grounds that it was unreasonable search and violation of the fourth amendment and that would outwit the supreme court which in may of nineteen eighty six issued a ruling which said that that was not an unreasonable search and because that the police observations took place within what they called public navigable airspace in a physically nonintrusive manner that that was not permitted in within the scope of the fourth amendment now if you take that ruling in you apply it to the world in which there are hundreds or thousands drones then that obviously gives rise to some very significant concerns does it fit exactly what a drunk and the public at public navigable airspace in a physically nonintrusive manner that does that mean that the paparazzi have a free shot well this certainly get tested if you interpret that ruling all by itself that would certainly suggest that i'm at least as things stand today people will have a fair amount of latitude to make observations from for using drugs but there are other very interesting and relevant cases as well which relate not to drones but to the observation from outside of what is happening inside of one case that's really also a very interesting and perhaps relevant is it two thousand one ruling in a case called hila versus the united states again again by the supreme court in the case what happened was the police had used an infrared detector about from an airplane which is just from the ground and had used that to observe that the walls of the house were warmer than they should be and the inferred from that that there were marijuana plants growing inside and that was challenged in the supreme court in that case fact ruled against the government and the and in that case the government he was was was found to have violated the fourth amendment am so and with is a very interesting piece of language in that ruling which which we map it to drones is is is really interesting harboring single sentence from the ruling and that supreme court case where as here the government uses a device that is not in general public use to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion the surveillance is a search seven and then went on to say that's what i'm doing unreasonable search without without a warrant and so one of the interesting pieces of one interesting phrases in that language is not in general public use and so that if we fast-forward for two or three or four years from now when drones are in public use him does that change the legal foundation for what you can and can't observe from the outside of the home that would've been previously unknowable without physical intrusion so we have this new interesting language and federal law which requires the faa the federal administration to permit the safe integration of drones into american airspace by the fall of twenty fifteen and as you give explained there are many intermediate steps but what what kind of the world could we be living in five years and will you go outside and see drives.

I don't think that in five years when you step outside the grocery store and look up into the sky you will see dozens of drones swarming above you but i do think that you if you look carefully from certain vantage point you will see drums more and more so for example of one of the things that i'm sure many people seen is when there's a traffic problem tieups on an interstate highway or freeway very often you you know there's a tie up because you can see three or four traffic helicopters hovering over what's what must be some sort of the incident so five years from now you can probably imagine that in addition to helicopters with people and then you might have drones flying around a few hundred feet above the ground taking pictures of those things in five years we also may have some of these stratospheric drugs which would be very hard to see if you're not looking for them but if you look carefully you probably see them as well and then for teeple who live in areas where there are increased drone operations of for example as i mentioned earlier the customs and border protection of folks have been using drones to help patrol the border those drugs would be visible from quite a long distance away inside the united states and one can assume that those drugs will probably use more for the future and will be seen more as well i remember reading the figure thirty thousand rounds in the air as a possible the united states of sure it's possible if it's possible and again it is part of the answer to that depends on what what we really mean by drugs will we have thirty thousand predator style large drums doing surveillance i doubt that very much but if you include these smaller backpack size or trunk sized surveillance drones that in fact could happen when of the danger of midair collisions and immunity faa has to carefully monitor where jets are flying to to maintain safe airspace if we had a lot of drums how much of the challenges that.

I think it's a challenge you especially when you dislike about the large numbers and if we do have of you thousands and thousands of these things in the concern is that and there's always somebody who who who who doesn't breaks the rules of them either by accident or on purpose on such think just the sheer numbers of it does does raise does raise a concern and what the danger of crashes that i can imagine getting a will nervous if i looked at and six saw two or three drones over the freeway of it it's actually already happened on of and the city was the late two thousand ten there is a adrenaline operated by the mexican national police force that actually crashed into an el paso texas backyard am so we've already had an instance of this was a small drums was we didn't hurt anybody didn't do this for wearing property damage and on so if if if you have thousands of the drones flying then yes they will crash and let's hope that when they do they don't do any damage to to hurt anybody to do any damage but but again the law of large numbers service adjusted sooner or later on there will be some crashes of more significance and that is also a concern john villasenor will continue his conversation with fresh air contributor dave davies in the second half of michelle villaseñor is a senior fellow at the center for technology innovation at the brookings institution and terry gross and this is fresh air this is fresh air and terry gross last month president obama signed a new funding bill for the federal aviation administration the faa and included a new provision requiring the faa to integrate groans into our national airspace public agencies will be able to start using drones in may private commercial drones will hit the skies in twenty fifteen are guests john villaseñor is a senior fellow in governance studies at the center for technology innovation at the brookings institution and is a professor of electrical engineering at ucla he's been writing about drones for scientific american let's continue the conversation he recorded with fresher contributor dave davies you as drones are more compact and easier to use you have to wonder about the possibility of a terrorist attack using a drone against a target in the united states how much of a concern is that i am unfortunately i i think that's a very legitimate concern and something that honestly keeps me up at night i worried that puts the scenario while having it doesn't take too much imagination to understand that a drone is very hard to stop and it flies low and it isn't stopped by most all of the infrastructure that we got in place to make sure that people don't go to places do not supposed to go to fences and walls and gates and barriers in so i could simply does read over this and this is a well-recognized concern is a publicly available government report from it must at least six or seven years ago that if that in a expressively identified this concern and so as these drones get cheaper more prevalent easier to get more common and they attract less attention it certainly raises i think the risks that they will fall into the wrong hands can be used inappropriately other any particular defenses or manufacturing requirements that would help.

Him well i'm not in a position where i would necessarily know all the defenses that people might be thinking about for for these things but that i would hope that there are some steps that that could be taken to to try to minimize the chances of something that these things would be inappropriately used but it's it's a very significant challenge the degree to require manufacturers to put a tracking software for example or or or kill switches so that if you determine that a particular drum with a particular serial number will fell into suspicious hands that you could immobilize it is that that's one possibility but of course the risk with things like that as they could end up being in hell of being exley hurting more than me that's a survey possibility can also imagine that a hacker for example hacked into a drunk and a drum that was doing nothing at all wrong and use the kill switch to drop an e-mail on and then causing some damage or injuries then that i would always been a security measure that backfired another thing that we might think about doing is having some server licensing procedure or some method to to have a better accounting records who's actually using these drugs on a need to want to go fishing in the state of montana that you need to get a fishing license extra tickets to fishing licenses and you don't see anglers protesting at the state capitol montana that's unfair intrusion of governments i think if you want to fly around the palace airplane it might not be unreasonable that the government has a right to know who you are and where you use it is there any evidence that no terrorist which are trying to use drones are developed on there is plenty of evidence that terrorist troops have considered these drones in the past of for example it's been reported that the omission riccio a sect of who carried out these tokyo subway chemical attacks it was quite a while ago now that they had next week 's pyramid with drones and unfortunately the year the terrorists or the would-be terrorists have access to the same news media that the rest of us do and so they are as aware as the rest of us of the proliferation of drones and so on will clearly be thinking about veterans as well eat it in one of the pieces that you wrote you painted a scenario of a dozen drones on a mission to survey about suspected terrorist villager and camera you were just describe the various uses you saw you envision their yet that was a description of how i think drones might be using a military context of a few years from now and of course today in the military drones are typically used one at a time or if there are multiple vendor flown independently but when i was envisioning was a world when us military forces might be able to launch a hold of drugs say twelve sixteen twenty four something that and all of those drugs could be controlled by one or two pilots would fly them in the swarm towards for example a village where there was some suspected terrorist activity and upon arriving at the village of the drones could split up and perform highly specialized tasks you could have some drones and again he's these might be drums there is an answer to a cross not twenty feet across some of these tiny drones could be sniffing the air to identify chemical residues are some of the drones could be monitoring corrector magnetic wireless transmissions some of the drones could hide themselves in the scrub outside the village and provide imagery on an ongoing basis c can imagine these very complex chaining operations carried out by swarms of drones and those are things i think have very very important application in the military context i don't see that happening as much domestically for obvious reasons that if we have these drawings of the year which have enormous capability to take pictures to shoot video to gather information which then can be integrated with other data in all other databases social networking whatever what were some concerns that that resents from you about the privacy that would crush ice presents some concerns but less because the data is so much more than we are a have put in more because it's from is such a different vantage point on we already are recorded and tracked to the extent that would've been absently shocking even ten or fifteen years ago i think it's it's practically impossible to walk into a retail store commercial building almost any public space these days without being filmed on video surveillance systems course our mobile devices tracker location throughout the day everything we we read electronically or ernest send by e-mail or look at online all that is stored so on top of that already enormous databases of digital footprints that all of us are leaving the additional overhead surveillance that we might get from drones in most cases is and can be dramatically different of course if you're a movie star you've got thirty drones over your house is different but prefer for the average person it's not going to be different in terms of the amount of data was different and doesn't like obvious he raised privacy concerns is the faintest point of that data and the ability to collect these views that in the past were always are almost always private that it's if it's the faa this could be developing regulations that permit the use of commercial drones of the united states at its that's not an agency that typically deals with the subtle issues of privacy in the past is are concerned that they're not quite equipped to handle that side of the equation while the faa certainly i would assume has more aviation lawyers they may have fourth amendment constitutional lawyers and to be fair to the faa their primary mission in fact if you go to the to the website the faa website they state that very clearly that the primary mission is to provide what they call the safest most efficient aerospace system in the world for i think they've done an extremely good job of that so their concern as they go through the steps that are mandated in this aviation bill that was just enacted on february fourteenth two thousand of is i think first and foremost going to be to integrate drones into the airspace in a safe manner and i think that is the right priority and then in addition of course there are the privacy concerns but i think it's going to be left to the broader government and to the obvious with the input of nongovernmental groups to to address those juicing by the fall of twenty fifteen they're supposed to be integration of commercial drug use into airspace what are some of the more immediate impacts of the new language in the faa funding for one of the first things it provides for is that ninety days after enactment which turns out to be may fourteenth two thousand twelve will be ninety days after president obama signed a law that is when there is a provision that allows the use of public drones will or will again this is police forces and the like and as long as those drums are four four pounds or lasts a property to be operated within line of sight of the operator of less than four hundred feet above the ground and during daylight and there are few other conditions so as over after may fourteenth two thousand twelve we can expect that there will be an increasing number of of police agencies and the like operating drums according to those constraints in addition by november tenth of this year that's the date when the fda's post to come up with a plan that will talk in detail about how drones in particular of civil troops unmanned aircraft systems in other words chosen aren't operated by police agencies and the like will be integrated into the national airspace system no later than september thirtieth two thousand fifteen so there will certainly be a lot of interest november of this year and is in the details of that plan will john via sonorous really interesting thanks so much for speaking with us extra much john villaseñor is a senior fellow at the center for technology innovation at the brookings institution he spoke with fresher contributor dave davies