From Pine View Farm

Droning On 2

No place to hide:

Meanwhile, the widespread domestic use of drones is on the horizon. In January, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the US aviation regulator for information about the deployment of drones by law enforcement and other public agencies in the US. Drone Wars UK published the results of their Freedom of Information request to the CAA on the same issue at the end of 2011.

While we might get excited by the potential for the use of commercial drones by citizen journalists to live-stream powerful footage from protests, we are likely to be less thrilled once drones are in the hands of the paparazzi.

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2 comments

  1. George

    January 24, 2012 at 12:31 pm

    “Does their [drone] cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon?” No idea what this means. I suspect the person who wrote it doesn’t either. It’s gobble. “This haunting idea – that autonomous robots, deaf to the fog of war or the need for self-defence, can behave more ethically than human beings – was recently repeated in a briefing on drone ethics to In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, by CalTech’s Director of Ethics and Emerging Sciences, Dr Patrick Lin. The current debate appears to neglect Hannah Arendt’s 1969 argument that only robot soldiers have the potential to reverse the ascendency of power over violence in the nuclear age, that is, that they “permit one man with a pushbutton at his disposal to destroy whomever he pleases”. Jeezus H. Christ. Yeah, Caltech is chock full of CIA venture capital and such money buys whatever pseudo-scholarly rationalization for drone-cheerleading the agency needs. 

     
  2. Frank

    January 24, 2012 at 1:10 pm

    Does their [drone] cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon?

    I think it’s bait to try to turn droidism into a war crime.  I’m more interested in what happens when droids go mainstream in the hands of “market researchers.”