Police can only fly the drone within the line of sight of the operator, which essentially turns the drone into a remote-control plane with a camera on board. Additionally, the drone can only go as high as feet and must weigh less than 25 pounds, which means that it can only stay in the air between 30 and 90 minutes.
For practical purposes, this means driving the drone to the scene, using it, taking it down and driving it away. The drone would be able to do short surveillance before an event, maybe survey the crowd, and once an exigent event happened, the system would be up in the air…providing a different vantage point. Despite those limits from the FAA, state lawmakers in Florida and Idaho have enacted laws requiring a warrant before police can use drones, and Virginia enacted a two-year moratorium on any law enforcement use of drones.
In all three states, however, lawmakers carved out exceptions for circumstances such as threats to national security or imminent danger. Surveillance Expansion Unlikely Privacy advocates acknowledge that in situations like the Boston Marathon bombings, drones can be even more useful than fixed surveillance cameras to quickly scan the entire area for evidence. Concerns pop up, however, when it comes to how the video collected from these cameras is organized and stored.
For instance, said Wizner of the ACLU, there are very graphic images of crime victims in the security-camera-collected footage, which under current federal policies will probably be retained indefinitely. Should the Massachusetts bill become law, any video footage collected from police drones that was not within the scope of a warrant would have to be deleted 24 hours after the collection of the video.
Federal grants to states for emergency preparedness and homeland security are also at an all-time low. In Massachusetts, funding from the state homeland security grant program is down 76 percent over the last five years, as Stateline has previously reported. Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. We'll never know for sure whether recurring news about civilians killed in drone strikes helped push Tamerlan over the edge or helped him rationalize atrocity.
But I assume jihadist recruiters know their business, and know what kinds of things can incite people like the Tsarnaev brothers. And they seem to consider Obama's drone strike policy a gift from God. If that "gift" isn't what gave us the Boston bombing, it will probably, if continued long enough, give us some other horrific bombing down the road. When Lisa Merriam celebrated the assassination of al Awlaki in Forbes , she was under a misapprehension that seems to have motivated that assassination and has helped sustain Obama's drone strike program: that the enemy should be thought of as a kind of overseas army, and if we kill all its soldiers, we'll have won.
In truth, the enemy isn't just jihadists, but jihadist memes. And if every time you kill a jihadist you create several more by spreading the memes, you're not winning. That's especially true if some of the jihadists you create are already in America--assets more valuable to America's enemy than jihadist foot soldiers in Yemen.
Another premise of Obama's drone strike policy is that "high value" targets are hard if not impossible to replace. After all, who could possibly fill the shoes of the famously charismatic al-Awlaki? Now we have our answer. Though Obama ensured that al-Awlaki isn't around to preach to people like Tamaran Tsarnaev, Tsarnaev seems to have found someone equally charismatic to follow: Feiz Mohammad, an Australian YouTube preacher who, as Noam Scheiber of the New Republic notes , has "the chiseled look of a former athlete" and "impeccable dramatic timing".
Obviously, to note how American policies contribute to terrorism isn't to diminish the moral culpability of the terrorists or to embrace jihadist rationales.
And it's not to suggest that terrorists should get veto power over American policies. If Inspire inveighed against, say, freedom of religion in America, no compromise of that principle would be in order even if terrorism was the price paid for defending it. But with drone strikes, the whole point of the policy is supposed to be to prevent terrorism.
If the policy is in fact contributing to terrorism, that's a pretty strong argument against it. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. A security official said the US drone fired two missiles at a compound in Manzar Khel area of Datta Khel, some 40 kilometres towards west of Miramshah, the headquarters of the agency.
Tribesmen recalled seeing six drones hovering in the air since the afternoon, spreading panic and fear in the area. One of the drones fired two missiles at around sunset, killing at least four militants.
The compound caught fire after the strike leaving all the bodies burnt. The last drone strike occurred in the agency on March 22, when US drones targeting a vehicle in Datta Khel killed four militants. He can be reached at: barrylando gmail. New from CounterPunch. Jeffrey St.
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