WASHINGTON (AP) - Privacy laws urgently need to be updated to protect the public from information-gathering by the thousands of civilian drones expected to be flying in U.S. skies in the next decade or so, legal experts told a Senate panel Wednesday.
A budding commercial drone industry is poised to put mostly small, unmanned aircraft to countless uses, from monitoring crops to acting as lookouts for police SWAT teams, but federal and state privacy laws have been outpaced by advances in drone technology, said experts appearing at a Senate hearing.
Current privacy protections from aerial surveillance are based on court decisions from the 1980s, the committee was told, before the widespread drone use was anticipated. In general, manned helicopters and planes already have the potential to do the same kinds of surveillance and intrusive information gathering as drones, but drones can be flown more cheaply, for longer periods of time and at less risk to human life. That makes it likely that surveillance and information-gathering will become much more widespread, legal experts said.
The Federal Aviation Administration recently predicted about 7,500 civilian drones will be in use within five years after the agency grants them greater access to U.S. skies. Congress has directed the FAA to provide drones with widespread access to domestic airspace by 2015, but the agency is behind in its development of safety regulations and isn't expected to meet that deadline.
If Americans' privacy concerns aren't addressed first, the benefits of potentially "transformative" drone technology may not be realized, Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor, told the Judiciary Committee.
But experts were divided on whether Congress should update federal privacy laws to set a national standard, or whether the responsibility should be left to state lawmakers to craft their own solutions. Several bills have been introduced in Congress that would, among other things, require warrants before drones could be used for surveillance.
A variety of drone-related bills have been introduced this year in more than 30 state legislatures.
There is already limited civilian drone use. The FAA has granted several hundred permits to state and local governments, police departments, universities and others to experiment with using small drones.
Initially, most civilian drones are expected to be around the size of backpack or smaller, weighing less than 55 pounds and unable to fly higher than most birds. The U.S. military, on the other hand, uses everything from unarmed, hand-launched drones like the 2.9-pound Wasp to systems like the MQ-9 Reaper that flies up to 50,000 feet, has a 66-foot wingspan, weighs up to 10,500 pounds and can fire Hellfire missiles and guided bombs.
"I am convinced that the domestic use of drones to conduct surveillance and collect other information will have a broad and significant impact on the everyday lives of millions of Americans going forward," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
