U.S. skies to be full of drones

[sad sally]

18. Here's an US media source (which of course we can always believe, for your 90 sarcasms)

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/05/the-coming-drone-revolution-what-you-should-know

The Coming Drone Revolution: What You Should Know - April 5, 2012

In a couple years there could be as many as 30,000 drones swooping through American skies doing everything from taking aerial photos, monitoring natural disasters, and maybe even delivering tacos. While drones can certainly help law enforcement and bolster the economy, America needs to think long and hard about the implications of unmanned aircraft use, a panel of experts said at the Brookings Institution Thursday.

(snip)

Kenneth Anderson, a law professor and senior fellow at Brookings, says the government needs to anticipate there will be bumps in the road when drones are eventually implemented. Someone will weaponize them, creeps will use them to spy on their neighbors—but that doesn't mean drones are bad, he says.

"The worst thing we can do is allow the law to be driven by really ugly cases," he says. Peeping tom and stalking laws should be updated now, not after drones are already in the air. "There will be cases—something horrific is going to happen, it'll be drones combined with cyber stalking and someone throws themselves off a roof in despair. If we enacted a criminal set of sanctions in response to this, it'd be a bad approach. We can already anticipate these situations."

(snip)

The cost of flying a surveillance airplane or helicopter is several magnitudes above that of a battery-powered drone. The UAVs can stay aloft for long periods of time, and unlike helicopters, they can't be easily detected. "People behave differently when they know they're under surveillance," says Catherine Crump, of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We are not opposed to the domestic use of drones, but we're concerned that they could become tools of general or pervasive surveillance."

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/05/the-coming-drone-revolution-what-you-should-know