A small provision in North Carolina’s budget will prevent law enforcement and other state government agencies from purchasing surveillance drones for the next two years, as the state’s legislature examines the balance between security and personal privacy.
Under the state’s budget law, no state or local government entity may buy or operate a drone “or disclose personal information about any person acquired through the operation of an unmanned aircraft system” prior to July 2015, unless the state’s chief information officer decides otherwise.
The intentional provision, called a “delay” by North Carolina lawmakers, was included in the budget to allow lawmakers time to study concerns from the public that police departments were going to purchase drones in order to have round-the-clock capabilities to track the public, said North Carolina State Rep. Jason Saine (R-Lincoln), a top House budget-writer on information technology matters.
“Knowing that it’s a hot-button issue, I just felt like it was best that we study the issue,” he said.
But there are exceptions to North Carolina’s two-year drone moratorium. It is expected the state’s Department of Transportation, who wants to use the technology to research drones and allow the state’s agriculture industry to examine the soil nutrient content by using thermal imaging technology, will ask for an exception.
Richard Walls, the DOT deputy secretary, said that obtaining an exception to the state’s drone ban shouldn’t be a problem. “I think we’ll get the exception granted and we’ll move forward with the program. I’m confident,” Walls said. “We’re still going forward with our range and figuring out how to make [remotely piloted vehicles] work for North Carolina.”
But not every agency is looking for an exception.
According to the Greensboro, NC, spokeswoman Susan Danielsen, the police department sees the potential value and usefulness of drones, but has not yet tried to buy one. Similarly, the Gaston County Police Department purchased a drone in 2006 but had to shelve the technology due to mechanical problems.
Currently, drones can only be used by law enforcement, universities and other public agencies that have been granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration. More than 1,000 drone use certificates have been issued since 2009, but as of February 2013, only 327 were considered active.
Unlike the drones used overseas to hunt and kill suspected terrorists, surveillance drones are smaller — resembling the size of oversized model planes — and fitted with cameras, thermal-imaging units and global positioning systems, and are launched by hand.
“The big concern about drones is they’re fairly cheap, they’re quiet, and they’re small. So if law enforcement has access to drones, there’s no telling what they could do, what kind of surveillance they could use the drones for,” said Sarah Preston, policy director of the ACLU of North Carolina. “What we’re trying to do is make sure that these drones aren’t being used to surveil innocent people without the use of a warrant.”
Surveillance drones are also very quiet. Not only can drones hover over a person’s yard without being detected, some can actually go into a person’s home and gather information without ever being discovered.
Concerning for Fourth Amendment advocates is that not only do they have to worry about law enforcement infringing upon their privacy rights, but that any person who owns and operates a drone has the capability to spy on them.
In addition to being cheaper than the use of helicopters, surveillance drones are used in situations where the FBI says obtaining critical information would have otherwise been difficult to obtain, especially without introducing serious risk to law enforcement.
The FBI gave an example of a six-day hostage standoff in Alabama earlier this year, when members of the FBI’s rescue team stormed an underground bunker and killed Jimmy Lee Dykes before he was able to harm his 5-year-old hostage.
In this case, the FBI did not obtain a warrant prior to using the drone, saying that the agency would only be required to obtain a warrant in cases where a person “would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, more than 30 states are considering some sort of restriction regarding the use of drones after there was public outrage that the technology would be used to spy on Americans.
In April, Virginia became the first state to pass a law that restricted the use of drones for two years, except in emergency situations. Idaho has since passed a law requiring law enforcement to obtain a probable cause warrant before they can use a surveillance drone, and have prohibited drone operators and owners from photographing private property without the owner’s written permission. Florida, Montana, Tennessee, Oregon and Texas have also passed laws that limit the use of drones or the evidence law enforcement can gather with the use of the controversial technology.
Despite all of these bans and limits on drone use, reports from the FAA estimate that by 2020, 15,000 civilian drones will be in use throughout the U.S. In order to test how to safely integrate that number of drones into the nation’s airspace, the FAA has six test ranges across the country where it plans to study the technology. North Carolina is reportedly being considered as one of the test sites.