I think the Taliban has proved that any sort of dystopian fears are wildly over blown.
Plus we already have police helicopters.
On the other hand, what if we scaled if up? It would be very useful for the police to have a constant fleet of drones in the sky ready to swing their cameras around to focus on anything. Report of a mugging at fifth and D? Get visual on it in seconds. Which as a potential mugging victim I'm all for, but still, the idea of constant airborne surveillance gives me the heebie-jeebies.
That said, this, along with many other potentially useful crime- fighting tools, is about to become technologically possible, and we're going to need rules about every new thing that comes along. Right now we have no useful framework for making rules, apart from seeing what people shout loudest about. Personal heebie-jeebies aren't a good guide to sensible decisionmaking.
E.g.: How many Congressmen / Congresswomen have been directly affected by the idiocy of the No Fly List?
There are 220 million smartphones in America. How many of them are set up to send location data? 80-90%? Shit, Android reads through my texts/email and gives me directions to where I'm going to meet someone for dinner before I even ask for them.
Privacy is dead.
I say "semi-" because I'd wager that less than 5% of people read and understand the implications of the TOS they click through.
Your privacy might be dead, but don't think that everyone else's is as well.
Also, the very nature of these devices ensure that they capture data that does not belong to the suspect under warrant. Just because a suspect lives in an area near me, does not give them any right whatsoever to collect my data.
[1] - of course, individual bad actors do break the rules. But as far as that goes, buying and servicing a drone is something that is hard to off the books.
This is often not true. Many cases have shown evidence of being put together through parallel construction. It's easy to find damning evidence if you know exactly where to look, the phone conversation that leads them to the evidence is not required.