Will Hunting Drones Become a New Sport?

Deer Trail, Colo. residents are already lining up for permits, reports Reuters, apparently keen to blast unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky. Town clerk Kim Oldfield said the whole thing started when resident Phillip Steel, worried that the country’s becoming “a surveillance society,” pitched the idea of issuing permits to hunt drones as a way to protest their rise (hypothetically anyway) on the national scene.

That led town trustees to decide last month that the question warranted a public vote. And once the decision to put it to a vote was reached, applications for the $25 permits began pouring in — not just from Deer Trail residents, says Oldfield, but everywhere, including a few from folks living in the U.K. and Canada.

“I stopped counting when it hit 985,” Oldfield told Reuters. Deer Trail’s population was 546 as of the 2010 census.

Not that anyone’s looking to pick off a bunch of unmanned vehicles, says Oldfield, noting that those in favor of the drone-hunting permits want to stage a contest — basically a skeet shoot using drones in lieu of clay disks — which could promote tourism and allow the city to reap a little extra revenue.

Still, the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t amused, issuing a note last summer when the ball started rolling pretty much warning people to keep their weapons holstered if a drone happens by, permit or no. ”Shooting at an unmanned aircraft could result in criminal or civil liability, just as would firing at a manned airplane,” said the government agency.

A Strange Funny by: TIME online

VIDEO What can a drone really see from 17,000 feet? Quite a bit actually.

Barack "Death From Above" Obama

 

Late last August, a 40-year-old cleric named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber stood up to deliver a speech denouncing Al Qaeda in a village mosque in far eastern Yemen. 

It was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three members of Al Qaeda came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Mr. Jaber agreed to meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection. 

As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby. 

The killing of Mr. Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to American efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in Pakistan and Somalia. Individual strikes by the Predator and Reaper drones are almost never discussed publicly by Obama administration officials. But the clandestine war will receive a rare moment of public scrutiny on Thursday, when its chief architect, John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, faces a Senate confirmation hearing as President Obama’s nominee for C.I.A. director. 

From his basement office in the White House, Mr. Brennan has served as the principal coordinator of a “kill list” of Qaeda operatives marked for death, overseeing drone strikes by the military and the C.I.A., and advising Mr. Obama on which strikes he should approve. 

Read More: NY Times

The Drones Are Coming

 

Drones on domestic surveillance duties are already deployed by police and corporations. In time, they will likely be weaponized.

By 2020, it is estimated that as many as 30,000 drones will be in use in US domestic airspace. Photograph: US navy/Reuters

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, "a huge push by the defense sector" to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds – meaning that you won't necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs.

Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them. 

An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step – one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. (The US constitution allows for the deployment of National Guard units by governors, who are answerable to the people; but this system is intended, as is posse comitatus, to prevent the military from taking action aimed at US citizens domestically.)

Read The Rest of the Story: The Guardian