While dodging this specific issue, there is a key philsophical issue in play. Should we desire a society where the police are 100% efficient at preventing unlawful activity? The knee jerk answer is obviously yes, yet it's certainly a knee jerk reaction. The most fundamental issue is that history has shown time and again that the corruption of the powers that be is not a question of if but a question of when. What happens when the powers that be become corrupted, but also perfectly efficient at carrying out their will? That is quite disconcerting and, for instance, is why the fact that society is increasingly turning into a surveillance state should be extremely unsettling. I'm far less concerned about a madman with a gun than I am about a madman with a national military and police force.

Another issue is that much progress in the past has been the product of unlawful activity. How long would slavery have lasted if abolitionists were able to have been effectively snuffed out? How would it be if the "founding fathers" instead were rotely hung, drawn, and quartered -- a practice that persisted in the English empire all the way up until 1870? Would America have been a better or worse place if every person who ever once indulged in a controlled substance or drunk before age was prosecuted? Imagine if prohibition or other morality based laws, including for instance laws against homosexuality, could have been effectively enacted. What sort of path of puritanism would that have set us on?

Of course I don't think anybody knows the answers to these questions, but I do think there is a strong argument that law enforcement does not have an inherent right to any means that would make their work more efficient. So do police have a right to obstruct all of society's freedom to operate drones for the sake of increased efficiency? I am not sure, but I do think any issue that proposes sacrificing freedom for security should be questioned.