 I'm Steve Goddard, Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, and I want to thank you for joining us today to the fall lecture, the second in the 2017 Chancellor's Lecture Series, Distinguished Lecture Series. Today's lecture is being web streamed live, so if you're online, I want to special thank you and welcome to everyone on the web. For social media users, use the hashtag, hashtag neb lecture, right, NEB lecture. The Nebraska Lecture is an interdisciplinary lecture series designed to bring together the University community and the Lincoln community and the out state of the state of Nebraska. Bring everyone together. We want to share the creative, the excellence, research and creative activity of our faculty, and the lectures are intended to be accessible so that we can all understand it. You don't have to be an expert in your area to be able to enjoy the lecture. So Matt, no pressure on you, but that's what we're expecting, okay? The lecture series is sponsored by the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of the Research and Economic Development, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute known as OLI. So a special welcome to any OLI members that are here today. Let's give them a round of applause. I'd also like to recognize the Research Council, which includes faculty from across the disciplines in Nebraska. The Council solicits nominations of faculty to present the Nebraska Lectures on the basis of major research accomplishments and the ability of the lecture to communicate those accomplishments in that creative activity or their research to a broad audience. Selection as the Nebraska Lecture is the highest recognition the Council can bestow upon an individual faculty member. So congratulations, Matt. If you haven't found out, Matt Wade is going to be our lecturer here. You all know that. I assume that's why you're here. So a few words first before we get to Matt's talk today about the TAES format. Following the lecture, Dr. Kathy Rudicill, vice chair of the Research Council, and Susan J. Russovsky, professor of education psychology, will moderate a question and answer series before we conclude. After we conclude, there'll be a reception across the hall in the heritage room, okay? So now, what I'd like to do is bring forward our Chancellor, Dr. Ronnie Green, to give some opening remarks. Well, thank you very much, Steve. It's a real pleasure to welcome all of you here in person at the Nebraska Union today for our lecture series presenter, and it's a real pleasure for this particular one for me to see Matt here today as our lecturer. This, as Steve kind of pointed out, this is one of the things that we hold dear as kind of a town and gown type of event. The Office of Research and the University Research Council go through the process of selecting our lecturers two per year, one in the spring, this one in the fall. That is a real honor to our faculty. I just can't underline enough for you that it's a real honor to be selected, to be a Nebraska lecturer and to be able to have the opportunity to give thoughts in a particular area that our faculty are working in. It really rises to the level of preeminence in our faculty. So Matt, congratulations on that selection. Now, I got to know Matt a few years ago. I initially got to know him because my daughter was a student in the college that he teaches in, and she told me there's this really cool guy over in the faculty of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, and I said, what's his name? And she said, his name's Matt, and she said, you need to get to know him, Dad. And so I've had that privilege to get to know Matt a little bit over the last few years. Let me give you a little bit of background on him. So you know where he's coming to with his lecture for you today. Matt is a professor of practice in our College of Journalism and Mass Communications. He also has a joint appointment in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. Matt established the first drone journalism lab in the country here at UNL. He's a true innovator in journalism, and has spent his career continually pushing the boundaries of how we consume and how we understand the news around us. Through his work, Matt has developed deep knowledge of the legal and ethical considerations of using drones for news reporting and for other purposes. I'm particularly excited today about the lecture here because Nebraska researchers across disciplines are exploring what is possible for use of drones and for application of their use from improving crowd security to tracking and pending storms to robotic water sampling in big bodies or lakes of water. Someday we might even get our Amazon Prime packages from a drone, according to Amazon, that is. So we know the potential is there. We know that this new technology offers kind of unseen consequences or things that we might be able to use the technology for in the future. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that drone sales for commercial use will rise from 600,000 in 2016 last year to over 2.7 million by 2020, which as you know is now not very far out in front of us. Progress doesn't always come easily in any area, especially in new technology areas like this one or without some challenges and setbacks. I'm excited again today about our lecture because Matt will help us put the drones era's current challenges and there are a number into perspective. I'm also really proud to say that Matt is a Nebraska alum and returned to the university to become a full faculty member in 2011, bringing his wide-ranging expertise in journalism to the table for us. Previously, he was a hybrid programmer and journalist for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida where he developed the fact-checking website Politifact. In 2009, Politifact was the first website to win a Pulitzer Prize. He also was an investigative reporter for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and co-founder of Hottype Consulting, which builds applications for media outlets. It's now my honor to welcome our colleague and our friend Matt Waite to the stage to present the drone ages here and we're screwing it up. Welcome Matt Waite. Man, there are a lot of you. When Mike Zellany-Sweet talked me into doing this, he made it sound like there wouldn't be a whole lot of people here, so, well, I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to introduce you to my little friend here. This is the Inspire One. This is a pretty magical device. It is about six pounds and it can fly for about 20, 25 minutes spinning on the weather. You can do absolutely cinematic things with the video, do absolutely amazing things with the photo, but these blades are about a foot long and when this thing cranks up, it's a flying lawnmower. You can do substantial amounts of damage to people in property with it. So I'm going to do a little demonstration here, y'all in the front row. When I yield duck, I mean it, I'll apologize in the emergency room, just get down. Okay. So by the way, what I'm about to do, to do this outside, I have to be a federally licensed pilot. I have to take a test through the FAA, it cost me $150, about airspace knowledge, weather, operations, the law, all kinds of stuff. After that, I have to have permission from air traffic control, because we're within five miles of the airport and they want to know what I'm doing. Since I'm on the university campus, to do this, I have to get permission of both a vice chancellor and the police department. And if I am going to get that permission, I need to have $2 million in liability insurance. And really if I want to fly over to the stadium, the answer is no. So all of that has to happen in order for me to do this. Now you didn't think I was going to fly that around, did you? I'm crazy, but I'm not stupid. This is a parrot, a parrot mambo. It's not that big of a deal. If I stuck my finger in there right now, I'm going to get it back. I'll say ow, and that'll be about it. But everything that I've just told you is true. To do what I am doing right now, by the way, somewhere Chris Jackson and Gail Shaney are twitching in their seats because they're like, please don't do this. To do this, I have to involve two elements of the federal government, insurance, the university, the police. By the way, the other thing I have to do, I actually have to call the university police before I take off and say, hey, I'm here, I'm going to take off. If you get any calls, it's me. And they say, okay. So that's where we are in life right now. All of that to fly this thing. By the way, if I flew this outside, I'd actually be violating FAA regulations because I don't have a registration number on this. I have to get a same registration number that a 747 has. Cost you $5, which is the exact same amount that United Airlines paid on their last 747, $5. So when I talk about, this is the drone agent, we're screwing it up. This is a little bit of a flavor of what I mean. We are at a moment when things are a little weird. Speaking of weird, I gotta put something to rest here pretty quickly. I don't know about you all, but I get a lot of stuff in my inbox. Fake news, so to use the language of the moment. But I got something the other day that actually referenced me, and I need to sort of put it to rest. The name did ring a bell if you send it, but said my work is a great example of how interdisciplinary work is necessary to solve societal challenges great and small and develop effective public policy. Ooh, that's some pressure. I need to put some things to rest here. I'm gonna talk today about history, but I am not a historian. I'm gonna talk about the law, but I am no legal scholar. I'm gonna talk about public policy, but I'm no political scientist. What I am at my heart and my soul and my core is I'm a journalist. And the truth of the matter is that's what got me here in the first place. That's how I got into all this trouble. Is that I follow things like a journalist. I investigate things like a journalist. I think like a journalist, it's just sort of been beaten into my head. So before I joined the faculty here in 2011, that summer, I went to a digital mapping conference in Southern California. And I saw a Belgian company selling something they called a fully autonomous aerial mapping platform. It was a fixed wing little drone that looked like a leftover prop from a Star Trek episode. And it had a camera on the bottom of it and a computer brain. And if you programmed it, it would go out. And fly back and forth and back and forth over what it is you wanted photographed. And it would do that, come back and land. You'd pull the card out, you'd put that in the computer. It would stitch all those images together into a composite, high resolution single image of the ground. You could map places quickly. And I had just finished ten years as a reporter in Florida. I covered a lot of hurricanes, fires, floods. I think I'm earthquakes and volcanoes away from the biblical superfect of disasters at this point. So I covered a lot of things with really large spatial extent. And I instantly saw that that flying robot was my friend and I wanted it. So I ran over to the guy and handed him my wallet and I said, I will take that one. And he laughed and he said, well, there's $65,000 each. And I stacked my wallet back. And he said, oh, by the way, they're completely illegal in the United States. And the reason for that was there was absolutely no way for a pilot to intervene at all. It was completely automated. And at the time the FAA said, unless you're doing aeronautics research, no. The answer is no, you may not fly a drone at all for anything. But we're thinking about it. And that's when I got my first lesson in the fact that the FAA's definition of soon and my definition of soon are very, very different. I joined the faculty that August. I kept thinking about this. I talked to my dean at the time about it. And by the end of the fall, we were like, okay, we're gonna do something about this. We're gonna investigate this. We're gonna create some kind of program. We'll call it a lab. I learned later on that labs at universities actually has a meaning, which means PhDs and tons of NSF money. We have a room with tools. It's got a lowercase l lab. And I basically said to the dean, I said, look, I'm gonna go buy a bunch of flying lawnmowers and hand them to children. You okay with this? And he's like, yeah, it'll be all right. Okay, I'm leaving here and doing this. So I posted a website that said we're gonna do that. I built a website, posted about it on a Thursday night. I jumped on a plane and went to a journalism conference on Friday. When I walked in the door, I was met by a managing editor at the Washington Post who said, we need to talk. And the next person I talked to was a person at the Knight Foundation who says, we have money and wanna fund you. This is not how this is supposed to work. You don't just walk in a room and this stuff happens. So it went nuts from there. And indeed, talking about interdisciplinary work, a few months later, I got a call from Carrick Detweiler who's a computer science and engineering professor here who co-runs the Nimbus lab. And he said, hey, we heard about you guys. You wanna go out and do a story with drones. We've got some drones. Let's do this. And we're like, absolutely, we're absolutely gonna do this. Let's figure out what we can do. So here we are. This is late summer, 2012. Back when my knees could still bend like this. And we are about to go take this photo. This is the Platte River at Duncan, Nebraska. Duncan people in the house. No, funny. That's odd. There's so many of them. This is actually about a mile from my in-laws house, which is why I knew about it being a good spot. So you'll recall the summer of 2012 was one of the worst droughts that we've had on record. What we wanted to do was show people the expanse of it. It is not unusual in Nebraska for the Platte to run dry. That summer, it went dry in early May and stayed dry through September. The water that you're seeing in the river right there was because a little bit of rain had rolled through about a week before we went out to do this. You could, the joke of being able to walk across the Platte and not get your knees wet, you wouldn't have gotten the tops of your socks wet that day. This photograph here got the attention of the journalism world. Indeed, 40 different news organizations from around the world wrote stories about us. In the audience, for one of those stories, I have my suspicions, which one it was, but I won't name names, was the Federal Aviation Administration, who looked at us and went, huh, that's interesting. And in what is considered light speed at the FAA, which to you and I is eight months, they sent me this letter, which includes the words cease and desist. If you have never received a cease and desist order from a federal regulatory agency, I highly encourage it. You will never feel more alive in that moment. Also, I mean, this is July of 2013. I'm still pretty new around here. If you really want to get the attention of about four or five vice chancellors, this is the way. You are a name after this. After I got done soiling my pants, I called the FAA up and I said, all right, I've read the letter, what did we do? And they said, well, you're a state university. You're an agent of the government. And I said, hush you now. Everybody called that before. So under our policies, we believe you need government permission to fly a drone. Okay, I read the same rules you did, I didn't see that, fine. I'll believe your interpretation, because well, you're the FAA. What do I gotta do to become a government operator of an aircraft? And they said, well, you gotta do a little bit of paperwork and it'll take some time. And eventually we'll go ahead and say yes. Said okay, give me the paperwork. A little bit of paperwork to the FAA takes a year. In that year, without telling me, the FAA changed their mind. And they said, you're not a part of the government anymore. We've decided under FAA regulations, education is not a government function. So, sorry, your application's rejected. What can I do now? Well, you can become a commercial operator. Okay, oh by the way, the funny thing about that decision, it was actually, it was just in Washington a couple of weeks ago. And I was talking to a guy at the FAA and he said, oh wow, you got one of those letters? I'm like, yeah, I did. He goes, cool, we don't send those anymore. And I'm like, this is one of 12 ever sent. I'm gonna frame it and wear it around my neck at some point. So anyway, I said, how can I become a commercial operator? And they said, well, there's some paperwork, surprise. And in order to do it, you have to become a licensed pilot. Come again? Yes, we require you to have an FAA pilot license. We don't have a drone license at this point, so gotta have one. So guess what I did two years ago? I can now fly an airplane. This should terrify all of you. There's no good reason for me to fly an airplane other than it is insanely fun. Oh my goodness, I have the most expensive hobby known to man right now. It is so much fun to fly airplanes. But it doesn't mean no good now. Because I got my pilot's license, I applied for our commercial permit, and they said, we will take it under advisement. Which I felt was bad. Nine months later, they sent me an email, said, we're canceling your application because we're gonna come out with new rules. You don't need a pilot's license anymore. And you can fly under those. Fantastic. That was three years of my life that I won't get back. And I kept thinking, this is bizarre. Something's wrong here. This is weird. And so I started looking into it. And indeed, it is weird. It's much bigger than me. And it goes back centuries, believe it or not. Part of the original sin of why the drone age is in such a weird spot actually dates back to the Romans. The Romans created common property law. And I am not even going to try the Latin because I will embarrass myself terribly. But Roman property law was, he who owns the land owns the skies to the heavens above into the depths of hell below. Which was really easy for Romans to do because no one was flying around up there. Sure, you want it to the heavens above? Have at it, it's all yours. Rock on. Well, that was true until 1783 when a pair of French brothers said, hey, if we shove a bunch of hot air in a sack, we can go for a ride. And they did. And hot air ballooning became a thing. And people of Europe went, whoa, we're flying. And lawyers across Europe went, hold the phone. Well, they didn't have phones, but you give what I'm saying. If they're flying above property that we own to the skies to the heavens above, aren't they trespassing? And until 1947, the answer was, eh. Maybe, I don't know. Probably, and maybe not, I don't know. Trespassing usually involves being on the property and depriving somebody of the use of it by your physical presence. I don't know about you, I don't do a lot of hanging out above my property to about 250 feet in the air. If you do that, I would like to talk to you about your superpowers. So, it wasn't until 1947 that we actually got some answers on this. And the reason we got answers is because chickens killed themselves. I'm not kidding. United States Supreme Court decisions based on suicidal chickens. Welcome to America, folks. During the war, the Army Air Corps was going around buying up airfields. And they were expanding them so they could train bomber crews. If you know anything about World War II history, the bomber crews had some of the highest casualty rates of any units in the war. They were losing them all over the place. So they needed as many of them as they could. So in Greensboro, North Carolina, they bought up an airfield and they extended the runway right up to the fence line of the Cosby's Chicken Farm. And they began landing bombers on it day and night. If you have never been around a World War II air bomber, it is not a subtle aircraft. They are loud, they are big. And if it's landing near your house at one o'clock in the morning, you're gonna know. Dishes were rattled, stuff would fell off the walls. They were kept awake all night long. And the chickens went crazy. Some of them at the case file actually describes this in graphic detail, began smashing themselves up against the wall to make the madness stop. The ones that didn't go completely crazy stopped producing eggs, stopped eating, the chicken farm failed. And the Cosby's went bankrupt and they sued. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in 1947, the Supreme Court said, yes, the government messed up here and took away their property by making it unlivable. But what the government did not do was trespass on the property. And the ruling said, the ancient doctrine of owning the land of the skies of the heavens above has no place in modern life. Indeed, if it did exist, every transcontinental flight would be the result would be countless trespassing charges, if that were true. Common sense revolts at the idea that the air is not a public highway. And finally, in the United States, we had some clear idea of who owned the sky and where you could go. And because airplanes have a minimum safe altitude, which in rural areas is generally about 500 feet, in cities it's about 1,000 feet, we were fine with this for a long time. And that brings us to today. Where we are at right now is so much better than it was just a few years ago when I was getting letters from the FAA that made me wanna curl into a ball and cry. The law as it stands right now allows for regular commercial drone operations. You can get a license from the FAA and that will allow you to fly a drone for your business to make money. If you're on the clock and you're flying one of these, you need to be federally licensed. It's not, I tell my students this all the time, it's not hard, it's just work. You gotta learn a bunch of stuff, you gotta go take a test, and once you do that, you're good to go. You're good to go. It's not ideal, it's not easy, but it's much better than it has ever been before. But we're already starting to see things fray a little bit. I for the last year have been going around teaching journalists around the country how to use these, use them legally, safely, ethically. I've trained almost 400 journalists in the last 18 months at different camps around. I've got students who are getting their Part 107, there's several of them in the room here who have their drone licenses. They're graduating from here or will graduate soon. Being the first journalism students, among the first journalism students in the country to leave here being licensed to fly their own robot for fun and profit. In journalism, drone use is becoming very, very public, very conspicuous. And I think this photo right here is the perfect example of why drones in journalism matter. This is a photograph from Puerto Rico and it's from about maybe 50 feet in the air and it conveys scope and scale better than any story that I have read that any writer has written. Many of whom I know personally and respect greatly. This photo, and if you can't see it, there's a gentleman riding his bike right there to give you the idea of enormity. This photo I think is iconic. But journalism is a very visible but very small part of the drone world, very small. Near and dear to the hearts of this state is agriculture. I have described journalism as the bug spec on the windshield of agriculture drones. AG is gonna be a multi-billion dollar business just in drones all by itself. This is a map of nutrient uptake. Farmers can learn enormous amounts of what is going on in their fields at much higher temporal resolutions than they're able to with satellite imagery and at much less cost. The idea is simple and it's as old as business itself. Reduce the amount of money you have to spend, increase the amount of money you make coming out, profit. Fewer inputs, greater outputs, everybody's happy. There are other things, and it was mentioned before. We're talking about getting Amazon packages delivered. There's all kinds of fun stuff. We're starting to see some sort of weird things going on. This was just emailed to me by a friend this morning that a drone found an elderly woman who had wandered off. She's actually sitting right down here in the bottom corner, that's her right there, spotted her in this field. And I would tell you that, oh, this is weird and this is the first time. No, this happened six times in the last week that a drone found a missing person. You might not have heard about any of these because the one that got all the attention was actually this missing dog that was found in a marsh. This one was on local television all over the country because who doesn't like a happy ending? But it's not all sunshine and roses. It's not all happy. For as many good things as I can show you, I can show you just as many bad things. This happened just Saturday. A candy-carrying drone sprinkling candy on a family event in Japan, a prop busted off. It pitched into the crowd, injured six people, including children. About a month ago, a month and a half ago, we had our first confirmed collision between an aircraft and a commercial drone. Somebody was flying it too high and a military helicopter came through really fast and there wasn't time for either one of them to do anything about it. There was very minor damage done to the helicopter, but I think where I can all agree this is kind of scary. Nobody wants to be a part of that. Well, about two weeks later, we got the other part of this. A drone hit a commercial airliner in Canada. Again, very minor damage. The airplane was returned to service immediately, but this is the nightmare scenario. This is the one that keeps airspace regulators up at night. This is the one that scares a lot of people. So, when I talk about we're screwing it up, I mean all of us, every last one of us. I mean the government is screwing this up, I mean operators are screwing this up, I'm not doing the right thing, and I mean we as a society, we the people are screwing this up. The original sin here is the FAAs. It belongs to the FAA. They have been talking about regulating drones since 2007. They did not actually get around to doing it until 2016. As you might imagine, a lot happened with drones in the meantime. The states were absolutely screaming for help. What do we do about this? The FAA would say we are the airspace regulator and we'll get around to it. Well, states didn't actually wait around for it. I always borrow a line from The Daily Show. When I talk about the states, they refer to legislatures as the meth labs of democracy. Things that the states did were entertaining. Some of them are actively hostile to the constitution and probably wouldn't last 10 seconds in a court. For instance, the great state of Texas. If I take this Inspire 1 down to the great state of Texas and I find me a hill somewhere in Dallas that has a nice view of the downtown Dallas skyline and I take off and I go 10 feet in the air and I take a picture of the downtown Dallas skyline. I land, I take the photo, I put it on Facebook and I say, check this out. I am a misdemeanor criminal in the state of Texas. Do you want to know why? Because I did not get permission from every visible landowner in the frame. If I had taken my phone and stuck it on a selfie stick and held it high in the air and taken the exact same photo, I'm good. If I spent $1800 an hour to rent a manned helicopter and took the exact same photo, no problem. But I used a drone and I didn't get permission. I'm a criminal. I have been asked multiple times by a lot of media lawyers if I would please go to Texas and get arrested and I'm sort of at the point in my career where it's like, wouldn't be bad. I am sort of insisting on picking the jail. Like I want Barney Fife and his one bullet as my jailer. I don't want to go anywhere serious. So no one, not one person has been charged with that crime because the State Prosecutors Association that law came out, they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing anything with that. In Idaho, the exact same offense is a civil crime. There's a civil case. You'd be sued in a civil court over that. In many states throughout the Midwest if you photograph a feedlot with a drone, you're a criminal. So there's some stuff going on. Most state laws right now actually just say if law enforcement wants to use them for a criminal case, they need to get a warrant. All right, that's reasonable. It's the other stuff that has been taken a little bit far. Nebraska to this point has been what I would call a libertarian paradise when it comes to drones. There is no drone specific legislation on the books in the state of Nebraska. It's been tried several times and none of them ever made it out of committee. There is another bill being drafted right now in the legislature and it's a rather interesting monument to unintended consequences, at least as it's currently drafted. It's almost certainly going to change between now and the legislative session. But I wanna give you an idea real quick of why the states getting involved with this is not the best idea. It's not a terrible idea, but it's not the best either. This bill that may come for the legislature brings back aerial trespassing. That thing that William O. Douglas said was not part of modern society in 1947. It's back if you fly your drone over somebody's property below 300 feet, you're a criminal. Let's see, what was it, 18 months ago or so ago? My son got a drone. We had to fish it out of the neighbor's yard a couple of times. It's a little teeny one, no big deal. My neighbors are fine with it. They find balls and all kinds of stuff in their yard all the time just throw it over the fence. It's not a big deal. Under this law, my son would have been a criminal. He would have faced criminal charges. Any kid that gets a drone and just happens to wander over the fence line could face criminal prosecution. Is that what we want? I don't know. It does seek to make spying with a drone illegal. Now if you look at Nebraska's peeping Tom laws currently, this feels like making illegal things illegal to me, but now we really spell it out. You may not use an unmanned aircraft to peer in windows. Okay, probably not gonna get a lot of arguments about that one. The one that I'm baffled by is you may not use a motor vehicle, a dog or an unmanned aircraft to harass livestock. One, I didn't realize harassing livestock was legal in Nebraska currently. And two, if you're telling me I can use a bicycle, a cat and a helicopter and it's okay, maybe we haven't thought this through very well. You give me a mountain bike and an air horn and I can go terrorize cows all I want, but the moment I pick up my drone and it's not okay, something's off there. A little more seriously, never once mentioned in this bill our First Amendment rights. And we have First Amendment rights, all of us. Photography is speech. Courts have protected it for a very long time. There are questions about whether or not you can fly over somebody else's property and take photos, but not that many serious questions, to be honest. If I take a photograph of you in a public place, I'm protected by the First Amendment for that. You're in a public place. I could stand up here with my phone, take pictures of you. You probably would be a little weird because I'm up here on stage, but you'd have nothing to say. You're in a public place. You have no expectation of privacy here in a public forum, on a street, anything like that. If a drone photographs you in that very same place, still don't have any reason to be upset about it, you're in a public place. Now, this bill seemingly criminalizes investigative journalism in a couple of places. One, you can't fly over prisons. This one's tough, this one's tough because there are criminals who are now using drones to drop cell phones and drugs into prison yards, which get picked up and then become part of the illicit economy in prisons. So there's a legitimate state interest in stopping this, but this bill makes you a criminal if you fly within 500 feet of a prison. If I got a phone call tomorrow, tipping me off that guards were beating inmates in the yard at the state pen right now if I got down there and got a photo of it, and I flew my drone over there to catch them in the act, I'm now liable to criminal prosecution for doing something absolutely in the public interest. And I have done no real harm to the property. I have not committed any other crime other than flying over the prison according to them. I also can't fly over critical infrastructure and they define critical infrastructure as power plants, chemical plants, natural gas stations, ports, rail switching yards, you name it. Interestingly enough here, there's been two cases that are on point here. One happened in 1980. The EPA went to the Dow Chemical Corporation and said, we know you're dumping chemicals illegally on this property, let us on here, we need to write you a violation. And they said, no. So the EPA went to an airfield nearby, rented a Cessna, went and flew over it and took pictures of them, illegally dumping chemicals in the act. Dow took it all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, the skies are a public street. If you can see it from the minimum safe altitude of an aircraft, it's like being in your front yard. You have no defense here, it's first amendment protected activity. Now drones make this a little tough because there is no established minimum safe altitude. But we've already said in courts that photography from the air is protected. So if I were to catch one of these folks dumping chemicals illegally, I could be criminally prosecuted for doing something in the public interest. In Texas, again, a guy with a fixed wing drone was out flying around one day in an open field and he was taking a bunch of pictures. Well, he wasn't actually looking for anything, but he was taking a bunch of pictures. And when he got it back, he looked and he realized something. The meatpacking plant next door was illegally dumping waste blood into the headwaters of the Trinity River, which was the city of Dallas's drinking water supply. And he had photos of them doing it. And he took them to environmental regulators in Texas. They raided the meatpacking plant, wrote all kinds of fines, shut them down, can't do that. The state legislature in Texas took this and passed that law that I told you about making photographing somebody's private property a crime. Not dumping waste pick blood, photographing property. Welcome to Texas. So what this does, what this bill here does, sets up a conflict between the states and the federal government. And the FAA has for a long time now said, we are the airspace regulators. We assert jurisdiction over all airspace above the ground, no matter where it is, except inside here, which is why I could fly my drone around and not have to worry about it. Outdoors, the FAA says, we control airspace. It's not your job states to tell pilots where they can and cannot fly, but that's precisely what states have done. We are now in a situation where federal preemption is a problem. And until this last week, I would have told you we are careening toward a lawsuit somewhere that's gonna upend a lot of this stuff. Indeed, the first one was in Newtown, Connecticut, a federal court throughout Newtown, Connecticut's local drone ordinances, because they said they conflicted with federal law. You can't pre up federal law. And as I had gotten the slide deck all put together and looking really, really nice, the Trump administration created a new program. That program creates partnerships between states and the FAA to allow state and local governments to create their own experimental drone regulations. They say it is to speed up drone integration into the national airspace system. Local areas can experiment with their own laws to make things that the FAA doesn't allow now possible. So if you're the city of Seattle and you've got Amazon in your backyard, you are jumping up and down and screaming, please, please, please, can we give Amazon delivery drones in our town right now? And under this program, the FAA is gonna say, good luck, have fun. I learned at this very institution that you should always read the footnotes. Because if you do read the footnotes, you would read that the applicant may request reasonable time, place, and manner limitations on low altitude UAS operations within its jurisdiction. I'm not gonna read the rest, it's a lot of legal stuff. What I wanna point out to you is time, place, and manner restrictions are the magic words for the government restricting First Amendment rights. If you wish to pass a law that restricts First Amendment rights, you have to provide reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. They have to be content-neutral and there has to be a reasonable outlet for that speech. Written into the footnotes is something very, very troubling. And so most drone advocates are looking at this like, it could be okay, but the states have not exactly given us anything to be happy about at this point. But the whole issue of state and federal conflict is now completely in flux. And the last thing I wanna talk about is, are we overreacting to all of this? Are we using our rational brains to think about all of this stuff? Because there are lots of stories like this of near misses and scary things. And there are people who have agendas who are putting them out there. A lot of the near misses that you've read about are impossible. You're talking about an airline pilot at 2,000 feet, going 250 miles an hour claiming they saw a drone that size a mile away. One thing I learned flying an airplane, it's really, really hard to see other airplanes in an airplane, let alone a drone that size. And I was going 68 miles an hour. I was going 80 miles an hour. I was going slow. So this incident here caused a global panic. People started freaking out about a British Airways jet colliding with a drone on approach to Heathrow. One day later, the British version of the FAA came out and said, it wasn't a drone. And they asked him, what was it? And he said, it was a plastic bag that had been blown up by the wind. There was no damage, no nothing on that airplane. But we're all very, very scared about drones striking airplanes. But there are way more birds in the world than there will ever be drones. And when a bird hits an airplane, it's a big deal. This is a 737, a drone hit the nose cone. You can see what happened. It did not end well for the bird. So we're worried about the drone hitting. We've had two confirmed drone strikes and both of them just scratched the paint. Both aircraft were immediately returned to service. There was no real problem. A bird, on the other hand, doesn't have to have a federal license. Doesn't have to carry $2 million of insurance, all of that. So we're sort of getting out of whack here on just what exactly is a threat to an aircraft. People also are not waiting around for the federal government to take action. I have said before that Americans have two ways of solving problems. One involves a lawyer, the other one involves the Second Amendment. Well, there are dozens of examples of people just pulling out a shotgun and shooting their neighbor's drone out of the sky. This is a really poor way to solve a dispute. Particularly given the state of marksmanship in the country, please do not shoot at drones. There's two reasons. One, what goes up must come down. You have no way to predict where it's gonna come down, both bullets and drone. Number two is that under federal law, shooting an aircraft is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The FAA says drones are aircraft. So it doesn't take a great leap of legal imagination to say shooting a drone is a federal felony. Number of people who have been prosecuted by that, zero, matter of time, matter of time. People are also taking into their hands. They don't necessarily need guns. They go find the drone pilot and beat the hell out of them. This is actually a high school kid in a beach in Connecticut. He was flying around on a beach. A woman thought he was spying on him. She went and beat him pretty badly. He recorded it on his cell phone. You can actually watch it on YouTube if you really want. So we have a lot of weirdness going on here. We have our own discomfort with this whole idea. We have the government taking its time and regulating it. We have states, federal government, all kinds of stuff getting involved here. But I want to tell you something real quick. In 1890, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced something called the Brownie. And at that moment, everybody could own a camera. You didn't need a wagon load of equipment. You didn't need a neck brace to hold your head up because you had to sit still for so long. Everybody had a camera and we all freaked out entirely because suddenly we could be photographed and not know it. And people went nuts. They posted armed guards at swimming beaches because people were terrified they were gonna be photographed in their bathing clothes. And if you are familiar with the fashions of the time, they were bathing clothes. Indeed, our entire framework of the right to privacy began because of the freak out over the Kodak Brownie. A Harvard Law student who would go on to be a Supreme Court Justice, William Brandeis, co-wrote a Harvard Law Review article called The Right to Privacy. And that right was born in the United States because of the Kodak Brownie. We freaked out because of it. We freaked out after the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk in 1903 because suddenly pilots could peer into our backyards. People were actually afraid of that for a long time. We freaked out when our cell phones got cameras because we thought people were gonna take pictures of us in the gym locker room. That didn't happen either. So what we're doing now, freaking out about a flying robot is perfectly in line with our ancestors. It took our ancestors almost 50 years to get aviation sorted out. I'm hoping we can do this a lot faster. So what do we do? Here is the honest truth. For the most part, I don't know. This is really hard. There are as many arguments for as there are against, but what I would tell you from traveling the world and talking about this, from talking to everybody from small town farmers to Washington lobbyists, the first thing that we can do is we can all take a breath, let's calm down. Our ancestors, the FAA in 1903 said, we want no part of this. You states, you figured this out. And that set back aviation two decades. It wasn't until the mid 1920s that they passed the Air Commerce Act and finally came up with one set of rules for aviation in the United States. If you can imagine having to drive to Iowa and have an Iowa driver's license and Iowa car and follow Iowa rules once you crossed a bridge, that's the way aviation was for two decades. The FAA didn't actually come into existence until 1954. Small footnote, the organization for model aircraft, the AMA, they started in 1947. They predate the FAA. Drones have been around for a long time. We just call them something else. So we can calm down a little bit. Let's not do anything that's gonna set us back. Let's not do anything that our kids are gonna look back at us and go, pfft, morons. The second thing we can do is leave technology out of this. Anytime the law gets into an arms race with technology, they lose. What we need are laws that stop the behavior that we don't like, not the technology used to execute that behavior. For instance, if you don't want somebody harassing your livestock, then say so. How they do it doesn't matter. If you don't want me photographing you in a place of privacy, guess what? Our law has already handled that. Nebraska has something called an intrusion upon seclusion tort. If a judge or a jury says, you know what, that's beyond the pale. You shouldn't have done that. Guess what? You intruded upon seclusion. It does what it says on the tin. If we put drones into our laws, we're just adding technology for no good purpose. It's the action, it's the intent. That's the problem, not the technology. And the last thing is, I think our laws need to start taking a lot more stances like obscenity. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. A much more flexible framework for laws would be that. I don't know what a violation of privacy with a drone is, but I know it when I see it. We use an evolving standard because the technology is gonna evolve, our society is gonna evolve, both of them much, much faster than the law. The law should account for that. And just say, if a judge or a jury thinks that that's beyond the pale, then that's good enough. You did something wrong. But what we think is wrong will change dramatically over time. It has in many, many other places. I'm gonna show you one very quick thing that is what I think the perfect explanation of how we're doing this all very wrong. It actually comes from an Argentinian soccer match. And somebody needs to sign this person to a practice roster in the NFL. I believe the Cleveland Browns are looking. Boink! That's a heck of a toss. That's a Sunday throw, right? There. Two things going on here. That pilot should never have been flying over that crowd. If you have not had the joy of watching Argentinian professional soccer, it's a wee rowdy. And that crowd, they had to know that crowd was gonna do something. So that pilot should never have been there. Number two, don't throw things at drones flying over people. All you have done is hurt somebody. So when I say we are screwing this up, I mean, we. So, with that, thank you very much for your time. And I am happy to answer any questions. I think I'm gonna tip this over. Thank you so much, Matt. That was really interesting. I never knew drones, my child has a drone. I hope it's okay that she flies in the yard without a license. Totally. So I'm vice chair of the research council and as such, it is my great pleasure to moderate the question and answer session that we now are gonna enter into. We have a microphone, a microphone here, and Mike has a microphone and a cube. Hope you can test. So if you would ask your questions into the microphone, then people who are watching online can also hear your questions. So yes, back there. Oh, right there. Sorry, yes. How are other countries handling it? When we started this, when the FAA said no, it was actually easier for me to send students around the world and fly elsewhere than it was to fly in Woods Park. So, I've had students on three different continents flying these. I myself have been there as well and we couldn't fly in our own neighborhoods, but we could go to India and it was no problem. Since then, most every country in the world now has some rule and they're starting to gel around a pattern and that pattern is very akin to what goes on in the United States where there is a knowledge exam that you have to take. And for instance, Chile, they're civil aviation rules with regard to drones of nine pages. So if you can read a nine page document in Spanish and take a test on it and you're above the age of 16, you're good. Most European countries have that knowledge exam, but they also require you to demonstrate flight capability. Honestly, for me, the serious limitation for flying internationally is most countries require you to speak the language of that country fluently. So when I was in Chile, I was gonna get a Chilean drone license and I read their rules and it said, you must speak right and understand the Spanish language. And I said, how well? What are we talking about here? I ended up not doing it, but Italy, Germany, France, their rules are almost identical to each other with a few little details aside, but you need to speak Italian, German, and French and be able to demonstrate it for their civil aviation rules. So it's evolving. There are very, very few countries on the planet that don't have rules now and they vary pretty widely in restriction, but most places are allowing it. Yeah. First of all, what you can learn about being a pilot is worth it, do it. Absolutely. I'm wondering still about 4th of July, it's crazy enough, I mean, I can't believe the craziness the 4th of July and then when you see what you assume are drones flying also, you wonder what's going on or is there's any regulations going on? Yeah. The short version is that's not okay and for me, this is both legal and ethical. The short version I always give people is the law tells you what you can do and ethics tells you what you should do. So the law says without a waiver, you can't fly at night. So the likelihood of those drone operators operating legally at night in that area is almost zero, but not completely zero. Secondarily, that's just dangerous and in some fireworks displays that are closer, like here in Lincoln where at least we've got the lake around it, there's a barrier to it, some places are a little closer and they're a lot higher and there are drone pilots that are up in there. So you are risking people's safety for a cool drone shot. If a projectile goes up and hits your drone, it could knock your drone out of control and send it down crashing somewhere, you don't know where, or it could send that projectile firing off. So now you've burned people for your cool drone shot. Is that worth it? I don't believe so, I don't believe it is. So yeah, the fourth of July thing, there was one pilot who did it in Nashville and it became a viral video thing and then next year, tons and tons and tons of people are doing it. It's dangerous and dumb and it's risking people's safety for a cool drone shot. One quick thing before I answer the other question. The whole idea of risking people's safety for a cool drone shot is just so insane to me. The example that I give people is a father in the UK wanted to get a cool drone shot of his infant son in the baby carriage from straight down with the drone. He lost control of it. It pitched into the baby carriage and cut his son's right eye out and his son will be blind for the rest of his life for a drone shot. Don't be that guy. Don't be that dumb. Think with your head. Put people's safety before your cool drone shot. It just, I don't understand that at all. Thanks Matt, great talk. One thing that didn't come up and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on. So the birds hit airplanes by accident but there's people who could fly drones into airplanes intentionally. Good, yes. Did you talk about that? Yeah, I mean it's like hitting a bullet with a bullet. It's pretty tough to do that. The more dangerous situation in my mind is not somebody like trying to hit an airplane with a drone. It's conspicuously sitting in a place that is dangerous for the aircraft. Like sitting over the final approach where if the pilot makes any move, you're gonna drag a wing on the ground and kill everybody. You don't have the ability to pull up in time. You have no choice but to hit it. Yeah, that's scary but welcome to America in 2017. There's technology in place now that a lot of airports are actually deploying that can jam the signals on these devices and drive them straight into the ground. There was a story in the World Herald just a couple of days ago about off at Air Force Base is deploying some mystery technology that they said they can take any drone out of the sky that goes over their property. The commercial drone operators now, their drone companies have geofencing on their drones. So every military installation in the country now has a no-fly zone. So if you're using the software as designed, you literally cannot fly over a military installation now. Airports are no-fly zones. You can't fly into those approach areas. Lincoln, believe it or not, is one of the first four cities in the United States to get automated airspace authorizations. The way it used to work was you had to fill out a form on the FAA's website and that form went to Washington headquarters and to get airspace authorization you had to wait 90 days. So if I'm a news reporter and the Capitol building is on fire, I had to file a request and 90 days later they would say, yeah, go ahead cover the fire. That's not gonna work. Now I can pull up my smartphone, I can get almost instantaneous authorization to fly anywhere but close to the airport. It will block me from doing that and there's an area in the approaches that there's a maximum altitude that you can't even fly above that. So technology is coming into this both on the sort of offensive and defensive ends of it. So I fly a lot either as a pilot or as a passenger and honestly I don't worry about this at all. I don't so. Matt, thanks for a great lecture. I agree with about 90% of what you said but I wanna push back on one thing. So you talked about how- He's a lawyer. Yeah, never mind. Guilty. So you talked about how in Texas they have had zero prosecutions for that law under the criminal statute but you also talked about how there have been zero prosecutions by the FAA for anybody who shot down a drone and we're pushing a dozen incidents now that are known and reported even in instances where people have been prosecuted under state law for shooting down those drones or at least they're in process right now. The FAA has not taken that step. So why do you think that sort of Texas will hold off on applying that statute because they think it's not permissible but you think it's a matter of time until the FAA will actually do it? The reason I think it's a matter of time it's not that the FAA would do it it's a federal prosecutor in an area wanting to make a name for themselves. The government. Yes, the government. It's the FAA honestly probably wants no part of this. This is, they are an aviation safety organization. They're rightfully proud that the United States has one of the most complex and the safest air spaces in the world. They are going to do everything possible to protect that including moving very slowly. So these disputes with neighbors over who shot a drone and is that illegal and all that they want no part of that. But someday a federal prosecutor is gonna go you know what I can make a name off of that and go that way that's the only reason I think it's they're gonna do that. Texas I think they just realize that it's dead on arrival. Even the legislature who drafted it admitted it's problematic now. It was back in 2013 when they made it they interviewed him just last year and he's like yeah we probably need to revisit it. So there's just sort of a general acknowledgement that it's not going anywhere. So that's my only reason. I rely much more on human nature than I do than finer points of law. Hi once again thank you. I have a question so recently I don't know if you saw it you probably did. I saw a viral video of a young man who had hooked up a handgun to a drone. Yes. And it ended up firing and of course it wasn't illegal so he didn't get convicted of any crimes. And then the FAA has done nothing to respond to like there's just impunity on the side. So I was wondering how you'd react to that now knowing that drones are becoming more ubiquitous and anyone can get one and maybe invoke harm. Yes it is actually a violation of federal law to arm a civilian aircraft. But again no prosecutions on that. The guy you're referring to is a kid named Austin Howett. The kid who got beat up on the beach is Austin Howett. Same guy, same guy. That same guy became a viral sensation for connecting a gun to a drone and he had just a servo motor that was pulling the trigger and it was bang bang bang bang bang. He then upped the ante on that one and mounted a flamethrower on a drone and cooked a Thanksgiving turkey for a viral video. But he also got arrested for attempting to kill a police officer not long after that because a police officer tried to stop him in a library parking lot from using Wi-Fi sort of from the parking lot. He wanted to ask him a question of what he was doing. He took off in his car and he actually went at the police officer and knocked the police officer out of the way with the car. He charged him with that crime. And at that point the FAA said, I guess that's taken care of. We don't need to worry about him anymore. So all of this stuff I would say to you is a matter of time. Companies operating drones without authorization in very busy air spaces above altitudes was sort of an open secret for a long time and the FAA didn't appear to be doing anything and then they slapped a $2 million fine on a single company. And when the FAA gets around to acting on you you don't want that. It's to borrow an old cliche. It's a very big battleship but once those guns turn, look out. Matter of time. States too have stepped in and said you can't arm a drone, Connecticut where that happened was the first, shockingly. So this is one of those places where yeah, that's happening and our institutions of government are going, wait, what? They're doing what with what? And we're having to figure this out as we go along. If you think a drone being used as a device for terrorism is new, it's not. It was actually a plot point in The Man from Uncle in 1956. If you go on YouTube, you will find it where somebody flew a remote controlled airplane into the Uncle headquarters and blew it up. So this has been around for a long time and frankly, there are a lot better ways to cause mayhem than a drone. If we go freaking out about every one of these things then we're just being a state of perpetual freaking out. But yeah, eventually we're gonna get around to that one and whoever it is, God be with them because no one else is gonna be. Yeah, thank you very much for the excellent talk. So do you see the possibility for using drones for the commercial delivery in the near future? And if so, how so? Use it for what? For commercial delivery. Commodity delivery, yes. Eventually I do. What I will tell people is that I think your poorly thought out two o'clock in the morning Amazon purchase is gonna drive itself to your house before it's gonna fly itself to your house. The issues surrounding self-driving cars are actually easier than automating drone flight. And it's not the technology. The technology is actually substantially more difficult because things are a lot busier in the two dimensional space than up in the air. You have a lot more room. It's these issues of, okay, if you my neighbor buys something and you fly and you cross my property, did you trespass, did you bother me, is that okay? Then at what altitude is it okay for you to fly? The other thing that I would say to you is there is a serious last mile problem with commodity delivery. And it goes something like this. Do you own a dog? Will your dog let the drone leave the yard once it sees it there? Answer, nope. So one of two things is going to happen. Either Amazon is gonna lose a drone or spots gonna lose a snout. Either one is bad for Amazon. So they have to figure out a way to bring that stuff down. The sort of darker one that I tell people is if your child knew that the drone was bringing their birthday present and you weren't watching and they went running out into the yard and reached up for it, it is all fun and games until little Sally loses a finger. It just is. And that's not gonna go well for anyone trying to deliver anything. So what do you do? Do you drop it with a parachute? Well, you know, somebody could not be watching and then suddenly get brain in the head with whatever it is you bought with it from Amazon. Do you build a landing pad on your roof? Okay, but that's gonna take a long time. I mean, a lot of people are gonna jump at the idea of building a landing pad on their roof just so they can get Amazon purchases. But I think eventually that problem will get solved. It's gonna require some awfully creative problem solving involving human nature to get your stuff to the ground. But I think there is way too much interest and way too much money to be made doing that for it not to happen. But I see a car pulling up to your house, pushing the package off by your mailbox and driving off and texting you that it's here. I see that happening far sooner than that thing flying to your house. It's one down here if you can. Oh, well, I think we're going to end our question answer. Yes, we're gonna end our question answer session but we are going to hear again from Steve Goddard and then we're gonna go get snacks so you can grab Matt during the snack time. Okay. Thank you very much, Matt and Kathy. It's a tradition to present our Nebraska lecture speakers with a token of our appreciation. So, Matt, this is for you. Bring a copy of your poster of your talk. Oh, thank you. Very good, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.