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Our Modern [Surveillance State] Addendum: Drone Edition
Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi everyone. It has been over two years since the last thread (http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/179579/we-became-a-surveillance-state-and-the-world-cried-out-so-what/p1) and I thought maybe we could fire it up again. This time though, I'd like us to focus on the Personal Surveillance State.
I'm including a few articles as jumping off points.
In The News
TW: The videos inside these articles feature confrontations and in one case violence. However, I think they are interesting because the acts themselves were recorded which brings a weird ouroboros to the whole thing.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/10/woman-faces-a-year-in-jail-for-beating-drone-operator-assault-caught-on-video/
http://petapixel.com/2015/09/03/drone-pilot-accused-of-being-a-pedophile-handles-it-like-a-pro/
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/14/tech/mobile/google-glass-attack/
In The Legal World
http://knowbeforeyoufly.org/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/drones-boom-raises-new-question-who-owns-your-airspace-1431535417
This thread is largely about drones, personal surveillance devices, and the way in which we now interact with technologies at the personal level.
Devices include: personal drones / RC, Google Glass et al., personal dash cams, and so forth.
This is not a thread for law enforcement body cam discussion.
How do these emerging technologies shape the way we interact with others?
Why are there still no FAA regulations on drone usage?
What are the boundaries that we need for those that wish to use these devices and those that wish not to use these devices?
How far do we carry the right to privacy not from the government but from individual strangers?
Why are there more accounts of violence regarding Google Glass and drone users than at statewide illegal/legalish surveillance of populations?
My Take:
I'm frequently taken aback by people I meet at cons who are wearing Google Glass. The sheer amount of stuff that they are recording and preserving permanently is staggering when you look at the sheer amount of things a person interacts with every day. Do I want to be a part of that? I didn't consent to it. Did our modern privacy laws really account for potentially constant surveillance? I'm really not sure. On an emotional level I would love to rip those glasses off but is it something that I would get used to if we all had them?
There's an interesting situation presented in The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. In his book, there is a society that uses gevulot to manage this very problem. The problem is framed as the exomemory.
I think a legally encoded version of Gevulot would suit us quite well. Except not in a Sci-Fi magical sort of way. Our Gevulot would be better laws and codifications of social etiquette regarding surveillance devices.
Also for laughs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGGnnp43uNM
I'm including a few articles as jumping off points.
In The News
TW: The videos inside these articles feature confrontations and in one case violence. However, I think they are interesting because the acts themselves were recorded which brings a weird ouroboros to the whole thing.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/10/woman-faces-a-year-in-jail-for-beating-drone-operator-assault-caught-on-video/
Flying drones for hobbyist purposes is mostly legal, but not everybody seems to understand that. Some say ridiculous things like “If a drone is flying over me, I’ll shoot it down.” Others get so worked up that they take the law into their own hands.
Take for example, Andrea Mears, a 23 year old woman in Connecticuit who allegedly didn’t like the fact that Austin Haughwout was flying his drone (also known as a remote controlled quadcopter) at the beach.
According to Haughwout, he went to Hammonasset State Park in Madison, Connecticuit to fly his remote control quadcopter. Soon after landing on his last of four flights, an angry woman, later identified as Mears approached him. Mears was on the phone with the police, attempting to get them to respond to the flight by claiming that Haughwout was “here taking pictures at the beach with a helicopter plane.”
That statement, and the subsequent assault were captured on video by Haughwout, who used his phone’s camera to document the alleged assault.
http://petapixel.com/2015/09/03/drone-pilot-accused-of-being-a-pedophile-handles-it-like-a-pro/
Jonathan Hair is a drone pilot and aerial photographer from Detroit, Michigan, who recently ran into a confrontation while flying his drone at a public field. Hair, who has been working with radio-controlled planes, helicopters, and multi-rotor aircraft for the last twenty years, was confronted by a man who suspected that Hair was recording a girl’s soccer game, suggesting that he was a pedophile. Hair stood his ground, responding in a professional manner and capturing the entire confrontation in the 5-minute video above.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/14/tech/mobile/google-glass-attack/
Glass, Google's high-profile entry into the world of wearable tech, may help launch a revolution if it's released later this year as expected. But test models already on the street have begun playing a more unlikely role -- as symbols in a simmering fight over Silicon Valley's impact on the city of San Francisco.
In The Legal World
http://knowbeforeyoufly.org/
Know Before You Fly was founded by the three leading organizations with a stake in UAS safety – the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) and the Small UAV Coalition. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is partnering with the founding members to spread the word about safe and responsible flying.
On February 15, 2015, the FAA released its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for small, unmanned aircraft. An NPRM is a public notice issued by law when an independent agency, such as the FAA, wishes to add, remove or change a rule or regulation as part of the rulemaking process. It does not change any existing guidelines, rules, regulations or policy that may be in place. Instead, it opens the door for public comment and the beginning of the rulemaking process. Until the final rule is implemented, and to learn more, please continue to check out this website and the FAA’s Fact Sheet on UAS. You can also track further developments on the NPRM here. If you have additional questions, please email the FAA at UAS-rule@faa.gov.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/drones-boom-raises-new-question-who-owns-your-airspace-1431535417
Communities across the country are grappling with a surge in drone use that’s raising safety and privacy concerns—and thorny legal questions—about a slice of sky officials have largely disregarded.
State and local police say complaints are soaring about drones flying above homes, crowds and crime scenes. At least 17 states, meanwhile, have passed laws to restrict how law enforcement and private citizens use the devices—preemptive policies that many drone users say are heavy-handed. And despite federal regulators’ stance that they alone regulate U.S. skies, some cities and towns are banning the devices, from St. Bonifacius, Minn. (pop. 2,283), to Austin, Texas, which effectively barred them at the South by Southwest technology-and-music festival in March.
This thread is largely about drones, personal surveillance devices, and the way in which we now interact with technologies at the personal level.
Devices include: personal drones / RC, Google Glass et al., personal dash cams, and so forth.
This is not a thread for law enforcement body cam discussion.
How do these emerging technologies shape the way we interact with others?
Why are there still no FAA regulations on drone usage?
What are the boundaries that we need for those that wish to use these devices and those that wish not to use these devices?
How far do we carry the right to privacy not from the government but from individual strangers?
Why are there more accounts of violence regarding Google Glass and drone users than at statewide illegal/legalish surveillance of populations?
My Take:
I'm frequently taken aback by people I meet at cons who are wearing Google Glass. The sheer amount of stuff that they are recording and preserving permanently is staggering when you look at the sheer amount of things a person interacts with every day. Do I want to be a part of that? I didn't consent to it. Did our modern privacy laws really account for potentially constant surveillance? I'm really not sure. On an emotional level I would love to rip those glasses off but is it something that I would get used to if we all had them?
There's an interesting situation presented in The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. In his book, there is a society that uses gevulot to manage this very problem. The problem is framed as the exomemory.
Gevulot is a form of privacy practised in the Oubliette. It involved complex cryptography and the exchange of public and private keys, to ensure that individuals only shared that information or sensory data that they wished to. Gevulot was disabled in agoras.
Exomemory is a kind of collective consciousness for inhabitants and visitors to Mars. It is a combination of statistical recording, public archive, and library of facts. Accessing exomemory involves 'blinking. The use of exomemory is what allows the Voice to decide the best course of action for the Martian society.
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/08/10/total-privacy-societies-the-quantum-thief-by-hannu-rajaniemi/
There are basically two elements which allow citizens of Oubliette to control their privacy. One of them is exomemory – a ubiquitous cloud storage service accessible over the air from any point in the city. Exomemory records and logs everything that happens in the city via a deep sensory layer that covers every inch of the habitable space, as well as through wetware implants of it’s citizens. Every thought, every gesture, every twitch and bodily function is recorded, tagged, and placed in the cloud. I know, this sounds like the opposite of privacy, but bear with me. The interesting part is that every bit of information logged by the city is encrypted. External memories from public places are available to everyone upon request, and they are essentially a substitute of the internet and news services. Memories captured on a private property or by by implants of an individual are encrypted with their private key and thus inaccessible to anyone else.
The second part of equation is Gevulot (from the yiddish word for borders) which is a hardware/software layer that allows you to generate, share or obtain keys for memories, as well as preserve your privacy while in public. It includes special wetware circuits, and artificial privacy organs that allow citizens to instinctively feel how much they are sharing, and with whom. Each memory or thought gets it’s own unique key so an individual’s gevulot will on average handle thousands if not millions of them – but thanks to powerful abstraction managing and sharing the keys is extremely easy.
Yes, people can share their memories just like we share notes. Since all of them are stored in the cloud, gifting someone a piece of your memories is just a matter of key exchange.
But that’s only one of gevulot’s functions. So for example, if you wanted to take a leisurely stroll through the park without being seen or disturbed you could completely shroud yourself from both the city sensory layer as well as well as praying eyes of strangers. Your walk would still be on the record but your identity would be encrypted and locked with your keys.
When two citizens randomly meet on the street their gevulot automatically exchanges privacy preferences and negotiates specific concessions. If someone does not want to be seen by you, then your gevulot will automatically blur/mute them out by interfacing with your visual cortex. If they wish to talk to you, then you will have to negotiate a gevulot contract which specifies whether this is going to be a public or private conversation, whether or not it’s contents can be shared with others, how much of it will be remembered by both parties, whether emotional reactions should be shared or if facial expressions and voice inflections should be algorithmically normalized.
How does such society hold up? Quite well apparently. Rajaniemi portrays Oubliette as a rather peaceful backwater populated by idealists and artists. It does not even have a regular police force. One would think that for some people the complete privacy offered by gevulot would be like finding the Ring of Gyges. You would expect this sort of place to attract all sort of deviants – thieves, serial killers, sociopaths, con artists. But there is almost none of that. While there is crime, it is mostly perpetrated by outsiders – mind thieves who siphon out talented individuals to be later used as virtual slave workers. Those are kept in check by a rag-tag group of idealistic vigilantes using smuggled-in advanced nano-technology and wearing colorful masks, and amateur part time detectives who use Sherlock Holmes school of deduction to skirt around gevulot barriers.
I think a legally encoded version of Gevulot would suit us quite well. Except not in a Sci-Fi magical sort of way. Our Gevulot would be better laws and codifications of social etiquette regarding surveillance devices.
Also for laughs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGGnnp43uNMFuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud on
+1
Posts
I'll see if I can find some videos from the conference website when I get home.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Sarcasm aside, if you walk around recording others you're a dick. It doesn't matter if it's a 90s camcorder or Google Glass, people have a right to privacy (although Silicon Valley and the data-miners don't think so) and they're going to get mad when it's breached.
This came up also with the Amazon Echo. A device you personally buy that acts like a home based Siri or Ok Google. I remember reading several articles/comments on people who brought privacy rights towards the "always on mic" that even has a mute button.
That is the kind of trust we are working with these days isnt it?
People very clearly do not have a Right to Privacy in the United States except while inside buildings or other structures on property that they own. Anyone can take your photo at any time, and as lon gas they aren't profiting from the use of your image, you can't stop them at all. Most states have one-party consent laws for recording audio or video, and you have no expectation of privacy while in public.
Whether it's rude is one thing, but it's almost always legal and you definitely, absolutely do not have any Constitutional or statutory Right to Privacy.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Actually here is a reason why I made the thread.
http://www.outdoorhub.com/news/2015/08/03/kentucky-man-arrested-shooting-drone-hovering-property/
That guy got felony counts for shooting a drone down over his house.
Flying a drone over property intentionally is actually a lot more likely to be illegal. Depending on the height of flight it may be considered your airspace, and taking pictures of you on your own property could be considered harassment.
It's certainly a lot more of a grey area than recording a wide variety of people in public; specifically flying a drone low over somebody's property has issues of private property, airspace rights, and harassment.
E: Of course, many of the current cases have been losses, primarily because shooting a gun into the air in a residential neighborhood is dangerous as fuck and endangering others for the sake of privacy is not reasonable home defense. If somebody were to shoot down a drone with rock salt, it might be another story.
Edit: getting felony charges for shooting at a trespassing non-govt drone.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
To be fair, he was arrested for endangering others (in theory), which is slightly different than being arrested for the act of destroying the drone. Unfortunately, destroying drones really doesn't work without guns, seeing as they fly.
Still, some states are definitely considering regulations on drones, and technically destroying them might fall under some laws designed to prevent filming of farms (mostly to make farming chicken factories illegal, but *shrug*).
And model aircraft of any flavor must have an on board camera. It's all but impossible to otherwise fly them (and certainly impossible to fly them safely).
I mean in theory your own property is fine, and public parks are widely available. Looking at it from both sides, I can see why people would want to shoot down drones intentionally filming their property, but can also see how shooting down drones is likely hasty and endangers people to a significant extent.
I think I'd be okay with just raising the private property distance.
Presumably they wouldn't be recording on their way to their destination.
Presumably.
I'm assuming they would.
Auditing, checking in, troubleshooting etc.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I was talking about video. None of that requires pictures unless something immediately goes wrong.
As well.
A video log of the entire journey of the delivery drone seems like an incredibly useful thing to have.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I mean I did say raise the distance for taking pictures so...
edit: except in the two-party consent states, which are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington. Even then, recording while in a public space confers no expectation of privacy (and that includes outside your house, though inside a fenced backyard seems to have this expectation attached, i.e. it's not OK to take photos of your neighbor sunbathing nude by the backyard pool).
I can't. In fact, that sounds downright crazy to me.
The guy in Kentucky that shot it down has a 16 yr old daughter who lies out by their pool. The drone was hovering over her and it was also 10 feet off the ground looking into their neighbor's house through the back window. I'd be angry too.
Yeah. None of that is true.
Read the ars follow-up article.
ehhh, not to me. It ought not be possible to fly a drone over my farm just to watch me do shit, but it is. I see it as a pretty natural over-reaction to the lack of privacy rights that we always assumed we just had, but it turns out we don't at all.
We're powerless to protect ourselves from intrusion in ways that we didn't imagine could be possible, and we react with violence to declare NO, THIS PLACE IS MINE, YOU CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF because we literally have no other recourse whatsoever.
I did! It looks like the drone pilot edited his video. Given how many people are being assholes with the things, I'm more inclined to trust the homeowner than the pilot.
RC planes and such?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I'm not inclined to be trusting the guy who discharged a firearm into the air in city limits when the drone is well in the air. Especially not when the drone video was uploaded. You're projecting your personal bias.
They are.
Where do you think such areas exist?
People aren't generally flying their RC planes in neighborhoods, and it's not just because of the maneuverability issue. So why can't drone owners act like decent human beings and stay out of neighborhoods? Or stay out of the way of emergency aircraft trying to stop the wildfire that Mr. drone just has to take pictures of right effing now?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Anyways the sooner the FAA finishes their rules the better. I'm not terribly sympathetic to drone users after they interfered with firefighting efforts and fly in airports and restricted airspace.
It doesn't sound too crazy
I mean, inanimate flying object remotely operated from afar by someone you don't know taking pictures of your home and any friends and family there and visible to its camera.
Sounds like a reasonable motivation to me, and given its an inanimate object, well, it's just a tool getting broken.
EDIT: Assuming, well, you don't think you have any chance of missing it or the bullet not stopping with the drone. But just generally speaking the motivation of "this stranger is using his remote control camera to look at me, get it away, get it the fuck away" is pretty reasonable.
I don't think it's at all a good idea to turn to firearms & violence to protect rights you believe you ought to have.
Your farm is 'yours' only insofar as the system that supports private property & law enforcement is willing to take your side. If you want more out of that deal, or you feel you're being cheated by the system, you should have to earn more legislative territory the same way other disenfranchised groups do. I don't see what entitles you to seize extra privileges by force.
What? I would!
That equipment is expensive, and you're not entitled to just go destroy someone's stuff just because in your ideal world it doesn't exist (or doesn't exist in it's current state).
EDIT: In the examples given, I'm thinking you could probably contact the police if nothing else. Tampering with your fence to install a minicam probably isn't legal, and buzzing a drone around at eye level is a dangerous activity that you're probably legally protected from even if the surveillance part of the equation has no weight in court.
I dunno, I'd certainly be fine with destroying expensive equipment illegally placed on my property for the purposes of spying on me.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades