How Drones Entered the FBI's Spying Toolkit 39
Jason Koebler writes The FBI has had an eager eye on surveillance drones since first experimenting with remote control airplanes in 1995. But budget cuts nearly ended the Bureau's unmanned machinations in 2010, and it took a dedicated push aimed at making drones "a tool the FBI cannot do without" to cement their place in the FBI's surveillance toolkit. The near termination—and subsequent expansion—of the FBI's drone program over the past four years is chronicled in hundreds of heavily-redacted pages released under a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over the past several months.
They don't "need" drones (Score:5, Interesting)
If FBI agents want a hobby great, let them pay for it out of their own pockets. Quad copters are not that expensive, and off of the tax payers dime they can do what ever they want. Watch porn, go to the bar, fly kites, or fly drones.
On the tax payers dollar, there is absolutely nothing for a drone to do that manpower can't do better.
The FBI's job is to investigate federal crimes and arrest suspects of those crimes. Can they covertly listen in to conversations with a drone? Can they covertly film better with drones? Can they make arrests with drones? No to all of those things. The only thing they can possibly do with a drone is survey a bust location with a drone, and if a cop does not already know the bust location they are not good cops. The "bad guy would have gotten away if we didn't drone him" are impossible scenarios that don't happen.
With the lack of arrests and prosecution the FBI has shown, I simply distrust the agency. I'm sure there are great agents working there that want to do the right thing, but the executive side shuts down real criminal investigations. The concocted "terrorist" attacks that the agency propagated to get additional funding plays a part in that.
I'm not against some of the drone technology in the Military. As a veteran I know first hand that the Military has to deal with situations that are based on 2nd hand or out of date intelligence. This makes for unknown scenarios and a simple surveillance drone can turn the tide of an encounter. Their job is to handle well armed well trained military units of other countries. They are trained to watch out for civilians and try not to harm them, but civilians are the secondary concern of a soldier.
Law enforcement, including the FBI, is not the military. The jobs are totally different, and the expectations are totally different. The Police's job is to protect and serve the public first. If an "unknown gang" has "unknown weapons" then the police have failed miserably at their jobs. That's not a dig on the individual officers, that's a dig at their management who sends them out to do the wrong jobs. Speed traps for example piss off the public and serve primarily to obtain revenue (which is in addition to what we pay for in taxes). It takes police off of patrols and basically turns them into thugs (we all know about the quotas, don't bother trying to bullshit us). If police were visible, patrolling the streets, and actually talking to members of the community, they would have been tipped off about that "unknown gang" long before there were problems.