04/26/12 – Jefferson Morley – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is Jefferson Morley, staff writer for salon.com in Washington, author of the forthcoming book, Snowstorm in August, Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.
Boy, that sounds interesting.
He's also written for everything, the Post, the New Republic, Harper's, the Center for Independent Media, the Nation, et cetera, et cetera.
Taught at Boston University, Georgetown, and District of Columbia Public Schools too.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm good.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I really enjoyed this article.
I'm glad you wrote it.
I like knowing that other people read it.
Makes me feel good to think that these kinds of ideas are at least, you know, even if it is too little, too late or something, at least people are going to be a little bit more aware of what's happening to us.
Not too little, too late.
There's a lot of interest in this.
And, you know, there's time to do something about this, but the prevalence of the drones is going to be a coming story in the United States airspace in the coming years.
So people need to educate themselves and figure out how we can regulate them.
It's very important.
You know, people, I guess, have asked for a long time, as long as I've been alive or understanding words in English anyway, people have been asking, well, what will the American people not put up with?
There's got to be a line with what if they like came to write 666 on our foreheads?
We'd rebel against that, right?
Like there's got to be something that they can't do.
They can take our kids and put them in wars that are no good, obviously, spend their lives for nothing.
They're already using drones.
They put cameras up on every street corner in America without ever holding a single referendum in a single city or county or municipal utility district a single time.
They just did it.
And nobody ever- Well, that's why I say there's time to act.
Right now, only about in terms of drones in the U.S. airspace, which I wrote about and continue to write about for salon.com, there's only about 10 public safety departments 10 to 20 public safety and law enforcement departments nationwide that have adapted this technology.
And there's only a couple that actually have it in the air right now.
So there is time to act.
This isn't a fait accompli by any means, but people need to understand what this technology is capable of, what law enforcement and government agencies want to use it for.
They need to understand that the very legitimate and very valuable uses that this technology can have for public safety.
And they also need to understand the threats that it poses to privacy and civil liberty.
Yeah, well, I mean, come on, you can always come up with a million reasons to, you know, we could, you could come up with arguments to have just robot cops, because after all, you don't want to ever have to risk the life of a deputy or something.
You can come up with always, especially officer safety reasons to use a drone.
You can use a drone on every, every warrant from now on.
And I mean, I think if necessity is the only argument, that's what I'm trying to say.
That's all for real, real, real, real possibilities for helping people for search and rescue mission.
So that, you know, that's not, I don't dismiss this technology out of hand.
It can have useful things that would, that could be very good for all of us.
But it also poses some big threats and people need to understand what those are.
And the problem that we have right now is because this legislation was rushed through by Congress.
The opening of the US airspace to drones, it was rushed through by Congress and marked without hearing.
We really don't have any protections in place.
The privacy laws that are in place, the existing case law around privacy is going to be very quickly outdated by drone technology.
That's what people need to understand.
There is time to fix this problem, but it's a big problem and it needs to be fixed soon.
Well, all right.
Again, it's Jefferson Morley and the piece at salon.com is called Drones for Urban Warfare.
Congress has legalized it.
And as you said, they haven't really gotten started yet.
Do you know, is there any kind of organized political push?
I don't know if there's, you know, maybe candidates who are running on this issue of, let's be careful of what we do here, or maybe groups organized to try to limit police uses of these things.
There's a couple of things underway that I think are worth noting.
People are waking up to this threat.
There's going to be a drone summit in Washington this weekend, co-sponsored by Code Pink and Center for Constitutional Rights, which is looking at both the drone warfare going on overseas, which is an important dimension of this phenomenon, and the importation of drone technology into the U.S. airspace.
So Code Pink and Center for Constitutional Rights are on the case here.
A couple of congressmen, Congressman Markey from Massachusetts and Joe Barton from Texas have sent a letter to the FAA pressing them for explanations about privacy protections.
What's the FAA going to do?
That should have been done a long time ago, but it's useful that some congressmen are paying attention.
We're starting to see some action around this, but the most important thing that happened is for people to educate themselves because until people educate themselves and read my article on Salon.com, take a look at some of the material that's been discovered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation here in Washington and is on their website, until people educate themselves, the industry and law enforcement are going to have pre-reign and this technology is going to be completely unregulated.
So people need to educate themselves and they need to start taking organized action.
All right.
And again, the article is Drones for Urban Warfare at Salon.com and it's full of links to a lot of great source material as well.
And now the Austin Police Department, that's where I'm from, I think early last year, I guess it could have been late 2010 or something, used a drone on a drug raid here in town because the way they said, the guy's house was on a hill and it was hard to have access and he would be able to see us coming and whatever.
So we had to send in the drone first and that was, I think, the first time that a police department had used one in a real raid, not just in some kind of training exercise or whatever.
And we could see how, not just as you, and you do a great job of outlining in here, the industry and the lobbying groups and whatever, but you could see how just, you know, the police unions and whatever, they always just put officer safety first and you could see how they're gonna come up with the excuse that why should we ever risk a deputy's life when we can send in a drone instead?
And who's gonna be able to argue, no, tough, sometimes you deputies have to risk your life, you know?
No one ever will say that.
They'll always err on the safety of the cop.
Yeah, and look, if a cop is up against a bad guy, you know, somebody who's taken hostages, that can be a legitimate use of the drone.
But what we don't have any control over is police departments weaponizing these drones.
What do police departments do with the data that they gather via a drone?
That's where there's no protection and that's why we need some regulation of this technology and we don't have any at all right now.
Right.
Yeah, you know, Neil Postman wrote in Technopoly that any gadget in our society that can be invented will be invented and as soon as it's cheap enough anyway, it will be implemented and there's just no stopping it.
And yet we have really bad policies that really push really bad technologies.
I mean, after all, there's a lot of different gadgets that could be being invented instead, but the stuff that we invent in order to, you know, wage war against the people of Fallujah, this is the technology that gets pushed.
This is the technology that the Pentagon now has a surplus of.
And so why not pass them out to the sheriff's departments or whatever?
We end up, you know, with our bad policies, we end up bringing on worse consequences a lot sooner than we might have ended up with a sky full of drones anyway one day.
But did it have to be, you know, in this decade?
Yeah, this is a technology that was developed in the war zones in the Middle East.
And this is the people who developed it there are the entrepreneurs who are bringing it home.
Now, that said, there is one regulation in force now, which is in the short term, if law enforcement agencies want to deploy a drone in the U.S. airspace right now, it has to be under 4.4 pounds, which that precludes the kind of weaponization that some police departments have taught and some drone manufacturers have talked about.
But that protection is not going to be in effect long.
Police departments will be able to get larger drones soon, which could be weaponized.
So that's why I say, you know, we do have time if people educate themselves and pressure and the political system responds to an educated citizenry.
But that's what we need is people need to understand what this technology is capable of and demand that we get some control over it.
Great.
And again, there's the CCR and Copink and Reprieve are holding this drone summit this weekend.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, Jefferson.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Jefferson Morley, everybody, author of Drones for Urban Warfare at Salon.com.
Thanks.