Gadgetory

10 years ago drones a military industrial technology extremely expensive some of it classified and then what happened over the last 10 years that basically the revolution in your pocket has made that technology so cheap and easy and ubiquitous that regular people can do it you know with the right cable you can basically fly a plane with a smartphone the truth of the matter is is that for a long time now surveillance technology has outpaced privacy law but part of the issue is that it's really hard for Americans to picture what a privacy violation looks like maybe pieces of data are being correlated someplace in some server it's just it's hard to visualize but drones but we have this really visceral reaction to drum so we can really picture what it's like to be watched by these by these flying robots and as a consequence I think it's really sparked a conversation about surveillance that we haven't had in some time some of the uses are going to be scary there's a technology called Argus which can view an entire city at once and it automatically tracks when it sees a vehicle or a pedestrian moving it traces where it started and where it ends up and where it goes in between and save that data and so it has the potential to build up a real database of people's comings and goings and location and movement which is a very revealing thing about you a lot of the technologies to a pilot a drone used to be covered under what's called export control which is to say they're regulated as military technologies but there is a provision in the laws of export control laws that exempts public domain and you know no when I thought you public domain drone technology and yet and yet here it is because the stuff becomes City came so easy and so cheap it's suddenly regular people could do the stuff that only defense contractors to do before sky catch is a security company that uses drones to secure private property it's basically a rather than having multiple cameras going around in your backyard or your big private property do you spread out sensors around as soon as they're triggered the drugs deployed and they fly out to the location to start streaming video and sending pictures to your iPhone app or your Android or any endpoint people have been putting cameras on remote control helicopters for going on 20 years now I don't think that there are hundreds of thousands of would-be criminals that have just been waiting for the perfect technology to go spy on their neighbors I mean there's so many positive uses for these that I think we will see far outweigh the negative uses once you start seeing them being used for some function agriculture I think it's going to be the most likely and you and you drive down the road with farms on either side and you see the drones serving the crops or spring you're like oh that's a drone and then you start to associate it with farming rather than military use and that's how we change the narrative what we've learned is that a lot of people who are in government it's just a matter of Education a lot of them don't know with what these drums are capable of and they don't know much about our community and what we're planning on doing so part of it is working with them and letting them know what these guys are capable of what we don't want is really strict regulations that prevent us from automating and creating an opportunity for the drone market the fact that that you know drones are capable of doing a lot of aerial surveillance at low cost wouldn't be that big a deal but for the fact that you know privacy law isn't largely up to the task respondent for instance there's a famous case involving a helicopter that was flying over someone's property and in fact looked into not you know not even their yard but looked into some missing panels in a greenhouse and spotted the fact that they were growing marijuana right when the Supreme Court said that that wasn't even a search because you have no reasonable fiction of privacy of something viewable from a public Vantage people don't have to know that but that kind of doctrine is going to be plied likely to Jones as well with drones because of the very serious safety issues they raised the FAA's really been holding back the deployment of drones you know commercial uses band it's very difficult even for police agencies to get permission to fly drones and they can leaves in very limited ways I think the people in the industry have no problem with regulations we actually want regulations so that we don't just have anyone going out grabbing remote Joe helicopters and flying around you know we're using full scale helicopters you know to get a tight shot on the Santa Monica Pier for a movie and backing away we could easily have an unmanned system doing that same shot and is it backs away if the unmanned system fails and crashes and falls in the water who cares right but if I have three guys in a helicopter doing that same shot and they're hovering outside the velocity chart and their engine fails while they're hovering outside the chart chances are all three of those guys are dying so I think what's happening right now is just that the technology is far outpacing the regulatory process you