The inevitable use of drones to invade our privacy has been stopped short by some unexpected heroes.
In a recent interview concerning the impending use of drones, Mayor Bloomberg of New York calmly stated that, “Everybody wants their privacy, but I don’t know how you’re going to maintain it”. He went on to make it clear that drones were happening and we had better get used to it.
Perhaps there is an alternative.
After an altercation in February over some pigeons, a rights group known as SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness) sent up a drone to capture video. A group of duck hunters at a local club, the Broxton Bridge Plantation, were having a live pigeon shoot, which is legal in Ehrhardt, South Carolina.
SHARK, set on defending the pigeons, were asked at the time by local law enforcement officials and an attorney on the scene not to launch the small Mikrokopter drone. When they persisted, many of the shooters got into their cars and started to leave.
SHARK launched the drone anyways, and shots began to ring out. According to SHARK president Steve Hindi, some previously unseen shooters were “in tree cover”. The drone was shot down by the duck hunters, who had come to shoot pigeons out of the sky, and decided that shooting drones would have to suffice. The hidden shooters then “fled the scene on small motorized vehicles”.
his legal conundrum over drones is in no way limited to duck hunters in South Carolina. There are over 320 active domestic drone permits in the United States, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, many of them belonging to local and state authorities and federal agencies.
Congress has given the FAA until September 2015 to open the nation’s airspace to drone traffic, and an estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft within five years of that date. The drone invasion is imminent, and so far duck hunters are the best proven solution to defending our right to privacy.
A backup to keep in mind is offered by Domestic Drone Countermeasures, LLC of Oregon. They have developed a technology that will render the drones incapable of violating your rights with their reconnaissance cameras. This new highly effective method will “blind” the drone by scrambling the drone’s ability to see and record video in the vicinity of your property.
Whether your defense be by scrambling or by duck hunters, be prepared. There will soon be drones everywhere, and privacy may be a thing of the past.
