The drones, it turns out, already have a $63 billion budget, which was in an FAA reauthorization bill last week that our favorite peace-president is slated to sign into law. This signing will make it much easier for the USG to toss flocks of unmanned spy drones into the skies of America. The low profile legislation also authorizes the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for both the test and licensing of drones by 2015. If the law takes full effect, as many as 30,000 drones could be hovering over the U.S. by 2020. Feel safer now? I doubt it.
The drones, which have become infamous in Afghanistan and nearby Pakistan for killing civilians, oops, not necessarily the bad guys the U.S. was after, i.e., Taliban insurgents, but have also been used by government agencies like the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a division of the of the Department of Insecurity, for a few years. This was only in an observation/surveillance mode. But the Department of Insecurity also used drones in disaster relief ops, and advocates say they can be used to fight fires and locate missing hikers, and anyone else on the run, I’d add.
But mostly drones won their dubious reputation being flown by remote control from Langley, Virginia, the home of the CIA, and other bases. Probably, some nice enough fellows, sat down in comfortable chairs, in cozy rooms, with screens as bomb sights for targets. The joysticks were in their hands as they fired half-a-world-away to Pakistan, often bombing wedding parties and funerals, as purported insurgents slipped away or were never there in the first place due to bogus intelligence.
This is perhaps why advocates for privacy (you remember that, just the two of you or the family together) do not condone you or any American not knowing you’re under surveillance. This voyeurs include either government agencies or commercial entities taking a look-see. Steven Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, spilled the beans to the Washington Times. Thank god, someone spoke up.
Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the watchdog group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is particularly “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies.” Well, if you think of government as in Orwell’s 1984, it’s part of the package of police state oppression. If you further survey what’s going today in terms of infringement on Internet privacy, NSA phone spying, commercial phone companies spying for them, and everything short of agents disguised as indigents picking through your garbage, as Bob Dylan experienced years back, with one indigent being a writer or would-be writer on Dylan’s definitive lifestyle, including food packages, newspapers, used tissues, et al.
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