 Now we're getting down into the level of individuals with drones and smaller groups of people with drones, and we have a great panel Let me just introduce everyone here and then To my right first we have Joseph Hall who is the senior staff technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology And he writes frequently about security and surveillance and a lot of these issues Matthew Waite who's a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who founded the drone drone journalism lab To help students and faculty explore how drones are used in reporting And captain Don Roby from the Baltimore County Police Department It was a training program manager at the airborne law and airborne law enforcement Association A quick personal story on this I am not myself a drone flyer But I had a fun sort of encounter with this and the and the unique problems that maybe we encounter with trying to fly Drones for recreational use in DC But so friends of mine who run a very good blog called law fair Got it in their heads last year that they wanted to have a drone smackdown competition And the idea was that they were each going to build using a parrot drone that they were allowed to mod There's a parrot drone in some of these small four rotor things that you can get a brook stone on Amazon for a few hundred bucks You could modify it to within a few hundred dollars and essentially they were going to try and weaponize it No ballistic so it couldn't shoot anything You know people were putting like chainmail and dental floss hanging down to go into the rotors and like sticks on the outside and stuff And we got this bright idea that we were going to go do this in Fort Reno Park And I was going to be the referee and Fort Reno Park is you know up in Northwest Washington And they were advertising this on the blog to sort of get the readers excited about it And we got what effectively I think could count as a cease and desist order from the FAA Saying don't try it There had been an issue with another DC resident a couple weeks before who had flown a drone I think over in Adams Morgan and he maybe had lost track of it and he got a note about that So it was very interesting sort of encounter and what we realized that basically is like these things that I think could rightly be called Hobby aircraft were being so you can't fly them in DC because of the air restriction around Reagan National and the mall and all the rest of it So and there's the FAA looked at this parrot drone with dental floss on it as basically a flight risk So we had to go out to Manassas and do it anyway and MPR covered it and it was really fun So you can go listen that some night, but it was sort of an interesting introduction to like what happens when individuals get hold of this stuff and all of these sort of Potentially really fun and interesting uses and then the way that can sort of collide with policy and regulation and law on a very personal level So we're gonna get into a lot of this kind of stuff and what I want to do is actually Just to start with something very specific Don I want to ask you I mean you come from you're the law enforcement side We've been talking a lot of the public safety applications of this technology just give us a sense of how Baltimore County Police Department is using this stuff right now and how your colleagues and law enforcement are using it or want to well We don't use it in Baltimore County. We're a very traditional aviation unit with three large helicopters What law enforcement is using this for or they want to use it for is for search and rescue They want to use it for crime scene photographing, you know There could be protected areas on that too would require search and seizure warrant for traffic accidents Things of that nature. We also a lot of our aircraft and law enforcement gets used for other governmental Uses we assist the fire departments. We also do work with our environmental protection people for you know runoffs and things like that So that's what you're seeing. You also will see it for like tactical operations in which they would come up And they would just check the rear of a yard to make sure there's no suspect in there They move a SWAT team in or a tactical team in that that area to secure it and that's really what they're using it for Nothing about persistent surveillance. I haven't heard any talk about persistent surveillance in our circles Everything's been operationally necessary and a real quick up-flight check something out bring it back down I mean you can imagine if you have a missing child in a wooded area a small confined area How easy it would be to take one of these devices out of the trunk of a car Launch it check that small area then move on to start checking other areas And that's what we're saying very operationally mode, you know situations like that and that's where we're going with it And is it is it expensive? It is a large part of the budget to do that or is it you realize tremendous savings by very a lot of savings most of our Helicopters like we would operate in my where I work or a very expensive per hour to operate And if you start talking about a unmanned aircraft system a uas small uas You're talking pennies on the dollar to operate it for just a few minutes You could clear it in an area very quickly And so Matt you run a journal a drone journalism lab Tell us about that and then what you're seeing as the potential use for for people like me like you who do reporting I mean what where where is the technology going to take us? Weirdly the answers are a lot the same. It's the kind of uses that I see are Short go up in the air get us perspective on something come back down Maybe fly around an area, maybe not really depends on the kind of skill of the operator Things like natural disasters things environmental change Growth and development anything with like a large spatial extent is where where my mind has gone on a lot of this and the Economic argument actually is the the winning argument here for for journalism is that Those TV news helicopters are multi-million dollar aircraft and they cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to maintain And fuel and hire a pilot and all the things like that when you're talking about something you can buy for less than a thousand dollars and do Just about what you need it to do It's a really really powerful argument it opens up gigantic questions but I think the the kind of Basic use for photo and video is is is pretty obvious it doesn't involve a lot of imagination And are there journalists of organizations doing that now and there are TV stations that have them on newspapers? No because the FAA has said so We have a kind of a limited window that we can we can experiment with as a university, but I get calls pretty much weekly from General managers at news television news organizations editors at newspapers Website operators people like that saying okay. I've got my credit card out. I want to buy what do I get and I'm like hold on Let's let's talk for a moment. I Often tell people that I feel like the dream crusher I said, you know just hold your credit card for just a few more years and We'll be able to talk When you say the FAA says he says no to it I mean is it is it no in the way that they said no to me and my buddies flying in Fort Reno Park? Or is it it's the commercial restriction? Okay, because it's a good if it's a for-profit making journalism exact Yep, they considered journalism to be a commercial purpose End of story I've said all along that if if that were to go away But all the other restrictions would be in place at standard 400 feet have to be away from people have to be far away from an airport Can't fly over built-up areas, you know people's heads ending like that We'd be in business women their stories to be done out in the wide open spaces But that commercial restriction just that pretty much ends it okay, so Joe you're coming at this You know you write about this you're going at it from a policy perspective you're thinking about the social implications I mean one question I want to ask you is you realize this with the with missing with Michael Realistically how long do you think it is in your mind's eye before the technology is let's assume It's available legally and that it's cheap enough for people to get it How long until sort of everyone has a drum and I'm not saying it's ubiquitous is having a cell phone But where you or I could go get them and it's not a novelty anymore. I Think that's right now. I mean you can get pretty capable Drone platforms with various kinds of sensor packages right now The trick is is that you know, I think what you're seeing in terms of sort of the public reaction Sort of a visceral react visceral reaction is that you know We want to integrate these things not only into our airspace But in sort of the fabric of our society and do so in a responsible way in my PhD I hacked voting machines and one of the things we learned there was that we had introduced You know networked and computerized voting machines just Instantaneously after the 2000 election we hadn't taken the time to figure out. Hey, these things are actually pretty bad And and I think you know, we I see similar things here in the sense that we want to make sure this is done responsibly I don't think you know There are some voices that say no drones at all and there's some voices that say no regulation at all And I think it's it's somewhere in the middle. I don't know where it is You know, but when you start having these things co-occupy manned space manned airspace And when you start having Things like the thing that I always think about the thing that's sort of my litmus test And I still don't have a good answer for this is what if you know a major corporation starts flying Automated license plate reader drones and has sort of like a Search engine where you can put people's license plates in and see everywhere where they're driven I think that sort of brings a lot of things together in that sort of thought experiment in the sense that not a lot of people Would enjoy that existing There's not a lot that regulation could do to stop that kind of a thing But it's the kind of thing that it will happen eventually and Is it worth sort of the chill on our ability to freely assemble or to speak? And you know another sort of privacy related interest to do that or should we have a more sort of normative discussion? and you know people like the the AUV SI and the Don had mentioned in a in an email the International Association achieved So please have sort of these codes of conduct for doing these kinds of things responsibly but from a lot of other industry areas I've seen codes sort of slip over time as People realize they could sort of get away with more And so I just want to you know at our at CDTR interest is sort of balanced in balancing the innovation and the public interest in using these Technologies and so that's part of the conversation This is a topic of persistent surveillance has come up and on you mentioned this as well I mean this idea of having a Flying pla be essentially a flying camera over a large area and watching it all the time And you mentioned potentially even reading license plates What does the law say or what do we think it says about the ability of? Either a governmental agency or even just an individual to watch someone with a camera like this I mean that the Supreme Court has said if you're gonna put a GPS tracker on a car You need a warrant to do that, but do I have an expectation of privacy if I'm just walking down the street? There are security cameras probably 15 between here and the next block, but what does the law say about that sure? So I'm not a lawyer although. I may play a good one occasionally. I'm sort of half a lawyer half a computer scientist but It's clear that you know when the government is operating a surveillance platform and doing so In places where people might expect privacy might have a what we call a reasonable expectation of privacy You need a warrant you know premised on probable cause to collect that information And you have to do things like minimization to make sure you only collect Data that's relevant to the investigation For for private use. It's much it's much more broad There are some things that are clearly no-nose like voyeurism, you know using It's a little tiny drone to view in someone's bedroom is gonna get you in a lot of trouble I think Weaponizing drones. I don't understand the fascination with that because it's just it's kind of maybe it's just that's the extreme or whatever but clearly Shooting drones or having drone shoot things is probably you know that that's a totally different thing entirely But they're sort of like these voyeurism Aspects peeping Tom aspects video surveillance, you know these things that you know have been that Over the years policy law has said okay You can photograph pretty much anything in public, but when you get up to that point where People have an expectation of privacy. That's when we're gonna feel the need to come in and stop you Expectation of privacy in my home. Don maybe you want to speak to this But this is not necessarily walking down the street, right exactly a minute You have no expectation of privacy for your tag number. That's why you have license plate readers Where the problem comes in to what do you do with the data that you capture who has access to it? Now long do you keep it? That's the same thing with UAS is what are you doing the data the images? How long are you keeping it and what are audit controls and controls that you have in place to make sure it's properly viewed and then It's taken out of the system and it's purged out there. That becomes the problem Let's face it most of us in here. We've advocated a lot of our privacy away We have with our phones. They track everywhere you go. It's horrible. It really is it's absolutely horrible And you're shaking your head. It's it's what's that Okay, but you have in a way I mean mapple can tell you where you are with your iPhone at any time We have to get that we have to get a quarter order to get that if we need that and that should be the same thing If it's an expectation of privacy, we should have us need a search warrant or a quarter to access that That's how we do it and we don't know bones of battered are the IACP the International Association to choose the police guidelines We say that no no case law No one to says and if you had this the cartilage of a house or there's an expectation of privacy You have to get a search and seizure one for it. That's why there's no cartilage. You're using these on a crime scene There's crime scenes in a back of a yard. That's the courtesy of a house You need a search and seizure one to process that and you would have to do the same thing to take the photos from the air You have to include that in there. So we look at it like that Probably the furthest from being a lawyer on sure here who say I'm not a lawyer, but I follow a lot of them on Twitter There was a there's an interesting argument actually in that drone Jones GPS case about it was in one of the ascending opinions about how That kind of persistent surveillance of the government knowing Where you assemble when you assemble and who you assemble with as being anathema to your first amendment right to free assembly so there's Hintings of some constitutional problems with this kind of persistent surveillance idea even in public places so It's not totally foreign landscape here Even you're necessarily dealing with you're on a lawyer, but you you're operating within an ethical sphere as a journalist So when you talk to Students or to editors and news organizations I mean have you started developing kind of a code of conduct for how to ethically as a reporter use a drone We are in the process of doing that now. We have been Trying to develop our own platforms and actually get them in the air and kind of see what Capabilities they have and what what journalists could do with them Well, which I'll tell you right now if you're worried about journalists getting UAVs and flying them I'm here to tell you you can relax journalists are horrible pilots So We actually had a funny funny revelation that we were really scared when we tried just simple waypoint navigation And we realized that the when we turned it on it was actually flying it better than we were so Which probably shouldn't have been that surprising, but yes We're we're we're attempting to do that and when I talked to my students just about ethics and about journalism in general What I tell them that is that what journalists the power that journalists have is attention we can draw attention to a thing and that attention can have positive effects and it can have negative effects and so this technology enters into that fray and For the foreseeable future with journalists using UAVs, they're going to draw attention to themselves and Not in a whole lot of positive ways at least so far. I think there are a number of Attorneys who are interested in the rather novel legal avenues that this will present in terms of libel and false light and Things like that. There's a number of interesting laws being passed Like California's anti-stalker laws There are a number of ag-gag bills being passed in farm states that make it illegal to photograph a farm Well, you put a UAV you put a camera on a UAV in Nebraska You're photographing a farm you don't have to get more than 20 feet off the ground and you're photographing a farm somewhere So that's going to be a real problem for somebody like me So yeah, there's there's a significant amount of work to be done in terms of developing kind of rules for the road for journalists that go Beyond the law like what you know the FAA says you can do this Local law say you can do that There's a third layer and it's that ethical layer of just because you can doesn't mean you should Sure, go ahead. So I'm not sure if it's your university But I think a University of North Dakota has a what's essentially an institutional review board for research-based uses UAS and UAV platforms. I'm wondering is you know, essentially for those of you have haven't had to deal with that You put your proposal in front of a board and they make sure you're ethically operating a research instrument like a drone I'm wondering if you is that appropriate is that is that may be very unfamiliar to journalists But you know it doesn't allow you to act very quickly, but maybe for longer investigative pieces You could sort of have a community policing function It's it's an interesting idea. I know that The journalists in me is like But We've talked here today about how you know the kind of responsible uses in the next few years are going to be really key in that Abuses over the next few years will be will be magnified because they will be the first and I have said to my students to my Faculty to my dean that I am not going to be the one on the on the front page of the paper screwing this up So that that may be we have not gone that route yet I'm not certain you're going to you would probably ever see that in terms of the professional sphere sphere but There are codes of ethics that have Some what been adopted that are somewhat followed and we think that's certainly a direction that we're going to pursue Honestly, my feeling about this all is that even after we get we get Aviation policy in place everybody and their brother is going to get sued and it's going to be a few years before courts work through a lot of these things And that's when the real work will start is that kind of three to five years after we actually get aviation law in place So you've talked about you have a professional kind of ethical obligation that keeps that in check Obviously with law enforcement. There are rules. There are laws. There is oversight You know, I've always thought though that you know if you're talking about this sort of mass proliferation of these drones And everybody get one gets one, you know, the real kind of risk I guess comes from you know, somebody putting you know a Drone the size of a spider in their ex-wife's Apartment in spying on her private detective type stuff spying on your neighbors Maybe it's you know theft. It's a little drone with a grappling hook that goes over and steals something Is that realistic? I mean you think that is this technology proliferates It sort of brings out people's bad instincts and then how do you even realistically counter that? I mean that that that gets down to the level of almost such low level kind of petty bad behavior That can you really stop that absent any kind of just Shaming of it, I guess but we're going So Margo Kaminski from Yale has a great paper called drone federalism and the idea being that We may need to allow the states and local localities develop Specific types of rules for the road for these kinds of things because there's typically sort of that kind of law and regulation that sort of bounds the federal sort of you know wiretapping type of stuff and and and sort of free speech, you know free for all And I think that's a good way to think about this I mean you definitely hit the nail in the head There's going to be things we can't even think of like I think of some of my researcher friends making You know sensor networks of moats that they sort of drip over, you know a household or a bunch of them or something like that But you know, I think what Matt said really resonates is that We can we can only predict so much and then when it comes down to it We're going to have to really work this out as sort of a social and policy and you know commercial negotiation of as to what's right and The bad actors are the ones that are going to get a lot of the press Um, let me ask you I want to take sort of a recent real-world events and ask us to sort of reimagine them If drones were sort of on the case And don't want you to answer this question first just from a pure law enforcement perspective If there had been drones doing persistent surveillance over the Boston Marathon Would it have made any difference in spotting The alleged bombers or would have made any difference in the immediate Aftermath of the of the rescue I think what had a very really Dramatic impact on on the response because you had that eye in the sky You're looking down to reallocate your resources Clearing areas and and so forth what it prevented it. Who knows I don't know. I don't think any of us, you know could really answer that But I think it gives that incident commander the uh that you know Situational awareness to move the resources where he or she Needs them and get medical help in their rescue crews and law enforcement in there And as people are taken out at what assist them in clearing areas, there's a suspicious package here there or whatever But I mean fixed surveillance did a pretty darn good job finding out who did it So we we had you know, we had we had it so now to take a phase two of this question if We're five years in the future and this has happened and many of the residents of water town have a drone And there's a manhunt on and the residents of water town put their drones up And started trying to look around the neighborhood and almost crowd sourcing crowd sourcing the search Does that change something? Is that what does that look like? chaos I mean do you all think though that there is there I mean is that is that too far out to imagine that individuals with Drones in moments of crisis would say, you know, I'm going to put the I'll find the guy I'm going to put this to you. So I'll do it all canvass my block Well, keep in mind. They shut down the airspace Over over the city of Boston. So I've had a number of people call me up and say, well, you know How could we have covered the the manhunt with with these could we could we have been flying around? Could we have found them? I'm like, no, they shut the airspace down. You'd have been in big trouble You probably would have been in the back of a squad car getting a talking to Which is not where you want to be on a big story like that So, you know for me, that's an easy question, you know, it's like could you have covered it differently? Nope I also, you know, I tend to think about, you know, journalism is the kind of thing. It's such a protected type of speech that, you know I want to see us figure out a way to do these kinds of things and you know You think of there's been a number of collisions of news helicopters covering the same event And you get arbitrary drones in that mix too It gets kind of crazy and something that that we sort of have been thinking a lot about and it sounds like It resonates with some folks is this idea of a of a license plate and Dr. Cummings probably is gonna laugh at me for being so so lowbrow, but the idea being that Drones that are going to co-occupy man space need to broadcast a signal saying where they are How fast they're going and an identifier so that we can look up, you know, what that drone's doing and And that could also be useful from by other manned aircraft knowing sort of what's around them And you know, you know where they can maneuver and maybe even having Cordon's where you say look this is specifically You know cordoned off area where UAV platforms can operate and and and you're gonna have a lot of them running into each other or whatever Maybe not. Maybe they can avoid each other But you know, there's you know, that's what I think about when I think of emergency situations and having Either citizens or or small Low resource response, you know covering those kinds of things we there's gonna have to be both policy and technical solutions to make that Work without having, you know fire and brimstone And to be clear too when we when you all are talking about the applications of this technology and your respective fields of work You're talking about relatively low flying Localized you're not talking about drones going up and flying in the jet stream with you know, delta jets or anything like this So does that seem like a fairly workable system to let Communities figure out how they want to allow drones to fly in the neighborhood? Uh personally, no Because it would just create it. I mean it's There are 39 states that are considering their own limitations on UAVs In their own air spaces, which is going to create a kind of a nightmare scenario of Hey, I work for cnn and oh, there was a tornado in x state. I'm now on the car Well, I've got to figure out what the rules are there if it's every city and every county and every state It's it would just be the will-during trying to figure it out Is there a one-size-fits-all policy? No, but my my immediate gut instinct is like well, that's just chaos That would be impossible to to work with Unless there was some kind of national resource that explain what the rules were in every jurisdiction and and to be you know part of this kind of Drone federalism idea you had to submit whatever it is the rules were in your community and how they differed in everything else And there was some kind of structured way, but that'll never happen I guess I don't worry so much about that in the sense that um You know, there's been a a lot of there's a lot of good resources for FOIA for you know the party laws of you Know associated with recording stuff But I guess when you get down to You know, I know like there's certain midwestern states don't even have counties They have townships and it gets into the tens of thousands per for a thing that we have counties of 500 people Now what are your thoughts on how it works at a local level I think at a local level you have to engage your communities with the policy aspect I think the regulatory will be done by the feds and by You know powers to be there, but we we have to engage our communities and what what will the community accept? That's the most important thing that look at seattle the community will not accept UASs in seattle They're not flying them, right? The police they specifically prohibited the police. Exactly. So you have to engage them You have to educate them. I mean right now we see a story about a law enforcement UAS and it's a predator drone That's the photo when the magazine's credit every time It's a predator drone And now we're talking things under the five pounds very small small devices Well, how do you go about it? I mean in bolton or how do you do that? How do you tell people? You know look, we're not going to be using this thing to Peer in your window or if you if you are ready to them when it's okay to do that I mean, how do you actually physically? You know communicate to them and and are they concerned about that? I think you have to let them see your policy You have to post the policy has to be transparent policy They have to be able to look at it and say whoa time out We're not going to allow you to do this. We'll allow you to go out and search for rescues We'll allow you to look, you know to go out on traffic accident scenes We'll allow you to clear a yard for you know tactical operation of fire scenes You know those types of things what we're not going to allow you to do criminal intelligence gathering or whatever And each community may be different. You saw the surveys out how you know the variety of responses there But if we don't engage the communities we're going to have them against us on this They already are to some extent against us on this in a lot of areas across the country Yeah, it does seem like there are pockets. I mean Charlottesville, Seattle There are other examples where there seems to be almost a Community resistance kind of welling up and creating little models for how to do that In other jurisdictions. It's about education. We had to educate educate the citizens I mean if if if if Baltimore County suddenly had a prohibition on this I mean it wouldn't I mean how negatively would that affect your ability to do search and rescue? I mean I take it it doesn't it wouldn't because you're not really doing much of it right Well, we do it with helicopters, right? We do it with man's we have hoist on our helicopters We do it that with man's systems, you know I think this doesn't impact major departments what it impacts is the smaller departments that can't afford a traditional aviation unit And and as such that when you get into that 50 60 70 thousand dollar market and be able to get federal grants or whatever to obtain that equipment That impacts them They'll never get into the traditional aviation unit, but this is an avenue for them to get into some aspect of aviation Oh, well, there's an exact same argument for journalism The law enforcement deals with is uh is the public elected representatives of people Journalism, it's the marketplace I don't think that many news consumers would bat an eye If I were flying a UAV over or a tornado path And showing them the extent of the damage The moment I stalk Lindsay Lohan the market's going to react poorly To that at least I hope Judging by TMZ's traffic, I'm not well TMZ said hilariously My phone lit up like crazy when a false report that TMZ had applied for an FAA permit had gone out And everybody's asked me is it true? Is it true? Is I'm I I have no idea But when it turned out to not be true, they were asking me about this I said Well, the reason everybody believed it was because it makes abundant sense that they would want to do this That's why we all believed it was because it just made sense But it's that marketplace that's going to do that that same kind of reaction And it's and it's going to be what mark what your market will allow you to do and what you allow you to get away with I just want to ask you one last round of brief questions because I think the audience is that there's a lot of people here And I know they're going to want to interact with you, but just briefly let me go around One of the things we want to get at in this whole conversation is How if we think this is a good idea to have a drone of one zone and that this is technology that can be useful in any number of ways Um, I guess a question is a do you think that's true? And we should be encouraging wider adoption of that technology and be how would you go about doing it in a practical way If if you have some ideas on that start with you Why is it a good idea? Well, I think mike said the computers are around would you say 50 years mike? And uh, then all of a sudden now we have cyber crimes So I think we're going to probably have some of this with uas's And so if would there be a tool of a crime or an instrument of a crime? I mean you could see that going down that path But I think it's going to be widely accepted as time goes on as these devices get smaller and more technical the the Systems on board the the imaging systems and and sensing systems become more Sophisticated that you will see them being applied more and more in law enforcement and public safety in general and by government You will see that, you know I'll make a devil's advocate argument. Um, I I do believe that there is Positive application of technology and I do believe that there are a number of industries that should be pursuing it But I'll make I'll make the devil's advocate argument that everybody having a drone of their own is a terrible idea Because speaking from from hard personal experience When you when you when you graduate up from the kind of toy size when you get in a little bit bigger now You're talking about Four six eight 12 inch long blades spinning really really fast. So now you have a flying lawnmower and I'm not good at flying it. My students are better than than I am But we've practiced a lot and we've practiced at some really confined and in kind of safe places Not everybody's going to do that and so a whole community of flying lawnmowers sounds outright terrifying to me So that's the devil's advocate argument. I'll make that that everyone having a drone of their own is a terrible idea Um, I don't know. I guess I'm on the fence here I think the timeline for integration into the national airspace of 2015 seems like a good timeline for me knowing how Regulation works and things like that. Um And so I'm happy just to let it do its thing. I know that's not quick enough for what some people want to do Um, and and I do think that there should be space for You know relaxing And somewhat quickly some of these restrictions like for right now, you know, you if you're 400 feet outside three miles of an airport and for recreational purposes, you know, you could do You you you could operate one of these things But in the second, you know, someone had mentioned this the second you do it for educational research or commercial purposes It's all of a sudden illegal and I think we got to explore ways of relaxing that a bit Before we have this full integration. I don't I don't have good answers there yet. Um, You know the certificate of authorization process is Is really onerous, but I think it is because you come from the safety point of view Um, either things flying out of the sky you have these, you know clouds of lawn mowers, um and things like that and Um, you know, so I I don't have a good answer I'm not going to say we should encourage it, but I also don't want to say we should discourage it You know, I really would like to see it, you know do its thing. Certainly me as a technologist Um, I am totally fascinated by them and if we were in a single income family I would probably have one in Tacoma park, you know Getting stuck in trees like there was this great picture You may have seen where a guy a videographer got his stuck in Lady Liberty's sword in Marion County, Ohio And he was sitting there for a week. Someone helped me get it down And we're like, we're not going to help you get you essentially what I was calling you lost frisbee And so I think that's something I hadn't predicted, but yeah, of course these things are going to get stuck all over the place Okay, let's open it to question. Yes, sir from the back right there from the the drone user group Woo, user group. I'm still Timothy Reuter president of the DC area drone user group And I love the title of this panel A drone of one's own because that's exactly what we're trying to do We try and train as many people as possible to build and operate their own drones And I invite everyone here if you're interested in doing that check out dcdrone.org And we're happy to help you with that, but I do have an actual question Which is I'd like to actually get your advice because we have this Funny situation in the us right now Where members of our group are allowed to do a lot of things that the people who are sitting up here are not So I'd be interested to get your perspective How we might best be able to responsibly use this opportunity To drive innovation in this space What are the things that you're not allowed to do because you're affiliated with institutions that you'd like to see Groups like ours doing to have a positive impact with this technology Under this recreational exception because we like to help people recreationally This is definitely for the other guys So I'll just make a funny comment Which is I'd love to be able to deliver 50 copies of written testimony to the hill without having to pay a courier So you know if we can get a drone to do that awesome I could make a funny comment as well that the the beer delivery I think there's a real serious weight to power consumption problem here that we need to talk about I think whiskey is probably the more optimal delivery vehicle here That said I would take I would take a I would take a page from the the open source movement post your code Post your results post your results write about what you do Make it all public Put it all out there so that people can see it People like me people, uh, you know who are doing research people who are in this kind of regulatory environment and see that Hey, this can be done and it's not so scary That's what I would do I agree It's about education letting people know the capabilities and about good quality r&d And they're in a position to do it for us They really are most of these companies started off in a garage And that's the way it's going to be done And I would also say test cases, you know to the extent you think that That something shouldn't be prohibited I mean it may take just as long to get through the judicial system as it would to you know wait for Regulation to happen, but that could be another way You know work with nonprofits that bring litigation to to actually try and challenge some of this stuff Okay, more questions. Yeah, right here Hi, I'm uh, William Angel In a legal and journalism sense Is there and should there be a difference between having a camera in your hand or you know on a backpack strap Is there a difference between that and having a drone flying over your head or 10 feet over your head? And should that should there be a legal and journalistic difference? Uh again, not a lawyer, but I follow a lot of them on Twitter. Um My sense is that yes, uh in terms of uh private property law and Things like that generally people own You don't own up to the end of the universe above your property It ends at the national airspace. So there's a there's a gigantic capital Q question of what happens between you know above your arm and 400 feet Um Can I look can if I can see something from the public street or something like that? Is it is it fair game? I don't know. Um, I don't know if that area has actually ever been explored. Uh, and it would be Fascinating and I think again Everybody and their brother is going to get sued So this is going to be one of those novel areas where where this is going to where this is going to come into play and I think Going back to this this drone federalism idea There are a number of states that would say absolutely you own that kind of invisible wall, you know at the edge of your property up to 400 feet and Poking a camera into it. There are there are some states that actually where that would be illegal Of photographing into somebody's property is already A misdemeanor crime. So Yeah, we're uh, we're into some interesting ground here. Yeah, and legally there's Legally, there's a bunch of different things going on here. There's been a bunch of sort of Um fourth amendment cases, which means government, you know collecting information about possible illegality where some of it said You know, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy from being imaged from publicly navigable airspace Others have said Look, they spent eight hours and like took Thousands of pictures without getting a warrant. That's not right And there you know, there's other things like this notion of privacy in public And I'm sure there's there's legal minds in this room that know this stuff way better than me But you know, there's a Georgia Supreme Court case where they actually found, you know That that photographing a woman's underwear in public. She was still had a reasonable expectation of privacy You know, we have private areas that we carry with us and stuff like that. Anyway, so it's pretty complicated But I think there is a a significant difference and you know the People constantly talk about, you know, manned aircraft versus drones. What's the difference? You know, that's an even clearer cut, you know situation the lower cost, you know, the There's there's the you know the fact that they can do things human pilots can't do go between buildings and stuff like that I do think that there there's a pretty big difference there Don thoughts on if it's if it's different the way he describes Not really I think It depends what you do with it. I mean if you do good with it and you're filming a story, that's one thing I think it depends how far they take it. Like you said when they go into that protected area That's where you're crossing the line Your associations as chiefs of policemen they have guidelines for telling individual communities like This is how you should police drones or keep an eye on Yes, I mean they we have that we also say we want you to use a reverse 911 system We want you to contact people. Hey, we are operating a uis in this area. This is what's going on We want them to do that We also want to make sure it's high visibility paint, you know paint schemes on it and lighting and that kind of stuff So, you know, we're letting them know. Hey, we're up. We're up there doing it Zero data retention, you know, unless it's for criminal investigation evidence, don't keep anything That's really from from from my perspective. That's so awesome Okay, sir here in the front. Yeah, because I missed you last time. I'm sorry Thank you. I'm Joel Garrow from Arizona State University in New America Charles Krauthammer has said that the first person to use a second amendment weapon to blow one of these things out of the sky Over his backyard is going to become an american folk hero. What do you think of that? It's already been done It's been done twice to my knowledge There was a an animal rights group That took issue with a number of private hunt clubs that were having these kind of canned dove hunts Where they just put a bunch of doves in a box. They open the box up. They go up They shoot them with shotguns They had a a small there was a Six rotor multi copter and they were over a public highway And they were trying to film this going on and exactly what you think happened began happening and you started hearing shots ring out and you know You know a a light gauge shotgun from that distance It took a pretty good shot to take one down and sure enough hit a motor And actually, you know credit to the pilot He was able to kind of put it in his outer rotation and get down to the ground and land without it crashing and nobody getting hurt They started yelling at each other across the fence. You know, hey, we got your drone You know, so yeah, there was a prior to that They had done the same thing at a different place It got shot down and crashed on the property of the hunt club The hunt club refused to let them go on there and get it That thing is still to this day hanging in a tree and is the subject of a court case over it so I hate to say it but Charles is kind of behind the kind of curve here people have already been shooting these things down Yeah in australia too. There's cattle ranchers in australia that have actually said if we see any of these Over our land and we're going to ball them out of the sky So maybe what he needs is a especially public Display like maybe a dick chainie or something, you know I I do a number of Interviews with other media about this they call me. I'm asking about this stuff all the time And I can almost guarantee you that within the first two comments on the story There's somebody saying I'm gonna get my shotgun down and shoot it down. It's just Predictable as it can be Part of me says take a crack sport if you can hit it good on you. Um, but um There are I I have a lot of kind of open questions about things that go up must come down And suddenly you're putting a lot of bullets in the air and that's You know look at any city on on new year's eve. It's a really desperately bad idea But it's a common feeling This is this is your nightmare. Yeah, absolutely whether it's our UAS or an agency's uas. It doesn't matter. I mean you're talking reckless endangerment at some point and then It gets a little crazy. I mean, but it's gonna happen. I pretty much guarantee it, right? So I'm gonna shoot at it Okay, well, we've reached the end of your time for this panel. So I want to thank you all for a great discussion