Clone Wars category archive

A private drone trying to film a wildfire that has charred nearly six square miles in Northern California briefly disrupted firefighting efforts, although workers had gained the upper hand against the blaze, officials said on Monday.

Fire officials spotted the drone over the so-called Sand Fire on Sunday and immediately called police to find the drone’s owner and have the toy grounded to avoid a possible mid-air collision, a California fire official said.

Drones are not the problem. It’s the droners.

What happens when remote-controlled robotic death rains from the skies?

An upstate New York man was arrested last night for flying a drone outside the examination room windows of a medical facility where patients were being treated, police report.

David Beesmer, 49, was charged with a felony unlawful surveillance count for piloting the drone about 10 to 15 feet from the facility in Ulster, a town 90 miles north of New York City. Beesmer’s drone was recording video, which was seized as evidence by New York State Police troopers.

The “pilot” claims it was an accident, he didn’t see anything, and that he was just droning around to pass the time while his mother saw the doctor.

And this surprises you how?

Afterthought:

Death is easier to administer when it happens off stage.

Shaun Mullen has doubts about the legality of raining remote-controlled death from the sky, “targeted” or not. He considers the knotty case of the droning of Anwar al-Awlaki. A nugget:

The justifications in the Awlaki memo are not the leaps of logic in the reverse-engineered opinions written by John Yoo for the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to provide legal backfill and ass covering for torture regime policies already well in place.

Those leaps of logic included Yoo’s disingenuous commingling of World War II prisoners of war with post-9/11 enemy combatants, as well as the assertion of Michael Mukasey, who was easily the most dangerous of the three Bush administration attorneys general, that Yoo and his brethren cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of the president and the president cannot commit crimes when he acts under the advice of his lawyers.

But that is small comfort. No president should be able to pick and choose when to uphold and defend the Constitution, let alone Obama, who was once a constitutional scholar. His legal eagles need to craft a redo on the Awlaki memo. The alternative is to acknowledge that despite the fact Awlaki was a very bad man, a strong legal case wasn’t made to take him out.

I don’t have a strong opinion about this case; my objection to drone wars is similar to my objection against the death penalty: We get it wrong too damned often–we take out too many weddings and childrens’ birthday parties and bystanders. Nevertheless, please do read the rest.

(Emphasis added.)

The National Park Service announced Friday it is prohibiting drones — properly called unmanned aircraft — from all NPS-controlled lands and waters. That includes 84 million acres in every state and territory, including monuments, battlefields, historic sites, seashores, rivers and trails.

(snip)

But hobbyists have been relatively free to operate drones in public areas, provided they stay below 400 feet and are flown away from populated areas and full-scale aircraft.

A lawyer who represents drone enthusiasts called the NPS’ temporary ban “overly broad” and said he expects it will be greatly narrowed when it goes through the federal rule-making process.

. . . because their right to self-gratification (and drone-mounted spycams) outweighs everyone else’s right to peace and quiet and privacy in the wilderness.

And, in other drone-related news, the sky is indeed falling.

By the numbers.

H/T to cassandra_m at Delaware Liberal.

Coming soon to a crash site near you . . . .

“The airline pilot said that the UAS was so close to his jet that he was sure he had collided with it,” Williams said. “Thankfully, inspection of the airliner after landing found no damage.”

The pilot of the 50-seat Canadair Regional Jet CRJ-200 airliner said the camouflage-colored drone was at an altitude of about 2,300 feet, five miles northeast of the airport. FAA rules state that the aircraft should be kept below 400 feet above ground level and should be flown a sufficient distance from full-scale aircraft.

I rest my case.

It’s the wave of the future, folks.

A competitor in the Endure Batavia Triathlon in western Australia was injured today when an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), otherwise known as a drone, suddenly fell from the sky and struck her on the head.

The injuries are minor. The drone’s operator, a photography company, is insinuating that the drone was hacked. I suspect it’s just as likely that the operators were hacks.

Warning: Language.

Oh, no, it doesn’t.

One more time, “because you can” is not a sufficient reason for doing something.

J. M. Ashby is quite correct:

. . . to be truly outraged at the NSA you must have virtually no perspective or inkling of what the private sector does with your data. Data that is far more detailed than what the NSA would ever dream of collecting. And the private sector markets your data.

Google (just to pick one) knows more about you than the NSA ever will.

Addendum:

Case in point.