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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

I think we first need to determine what is upsetting about this, specifically.

Is it that they are flying a UAV that was originally designed for military use?

Or is it that they are flying a UAV period?

What if it was a new UAV, designed just for law enforcement? No problems then?

Presumably this UAV has no weapons on it, so I'm unsure what the problem could be unless we just flat oppose former military equipment being used?

It's safer and cheaper to fly a UAV than a manned vehicled - helicopters crash routinely and need multiple crews to keep them on station for extended duration. If it was a decommissioned military UAV that's being repurposed - then the tax payer has been saved a great deal of money as well.

So, what specifically is it that we don't like about this situation?

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>So, what specifically is it that we don't like about this situation?

The ongoing militarization of state level police forces without the democratic consent of the governed for a start?

> democratic consent of the governed

Just playing devil's advocate - but this is democratically consented to.

Your elected politicians have specifically allowed the sale or transfer of retired military equipment to state and local police forces, for multiple reasons but the least-of-which was cost savings vs. scrapping all the prepaid equipment.

Similar, but admittedly not quite the same, to the sale of demilitarized Humvees, tanks and fighter jets to civilians. Or NASA owning and operating former US Navy F/A-18's, B-52's and more... war machines now repurposed for peaceful training and aeronautical research.

Yeah in the same sense of how we all democratically opted in to mass surveillance or encryption breaking. Let's be honest the people who are at the receiving end of this technology haven't been democratically decided anything in a long time. What this actually is, is what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarianism and when it comes to these police measures that's not even an exaggeration.

Just as a random question, how many people do you think know that these guys (https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...) are flying above American cities

The solution is to vote-out the out-of-touch career politicians then, no?

I have a suspicion, being a Senator for 40 years sort of removes you from the concerns of everyday Americans.

These are the same Senators (and Representatives) that vote for these measures. They'll never be the target of these surveillance schemes... and when they are, they throw a huge fit[1] because they're supposedly above all of it. They're the same people who ban guns from the public, but own operate and illegally traffic them themselves[2].

They're the same ones that don't have to be strip searched every time they fly, but I digress...

[1] https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/13/pelosi-alle...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/2...

It’s not clear to me that the Senators voting for this aren’t similarly situated to “everyday Americans.” Remember when armed civilians stormed the Michigan Capitol and nothing happened? They aren’t politically connected, etc. Maybe the folks who keep electing these senators correctly perceive that the power of the state won’t be used against them, so long as they belong to the majority.

> The ongoing militarization of state level police forces without the democratic consent of the governed for a start?

Are you living in the same country as me? The “governed” love this stuff, and keep voting for the people that do it. Civil liberties has always been something that has to be achieved through anti-democratic means.

Yeah don't get me wrong I'm well aware that there's a lot of public support for it. I meant the governed in the narrow sense here, the communities who are actually affected (and largely segregated).

Same goes for the policing. The amount of separation between the police and the policed, demographically, politically and so on is hard to defend.

> What if it was a new UAV, designed just for law enforcement? No problems then?

Fewer problems. Presumably it would be much less capable. The sister comment[1] lays out how dangerous this UAV is, and how powerful. History has shown that the police/military are eager to gain capabilities, and very reluctant to part with them. If use of these very capable military grade drones becomes wide-spread, using them aggressively against live people becomes more probable. And very easy to do — they're already everywhere.

We should also think about how regulated their use should be! These have the capability to just provide 24h surveillance on certain areas, which would erode citizens' privacy greatly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23354643

> These have the capability to just provide 24h surveillance on certain areas, which would erode citizens' privacy greatly

How so? Public spaces have already been ruled over and over to have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Further, the plethora of surveillance cameras sitting in store windows, people's doorbells, streetlight cameras, and more already surveil anyone in any public area.

Is it just these UAV's are more visible so they make you think about it more?

Different methodologies of surveillance have different costs, capabilities, and potential risks. In theory anyone stepping outside of their door could be observed at any time but in practice personal observation is very expensive and potentially obvious. Non network cameras controlled by a plethora of individual business owners might paint on net a very detailed picture of a persons comings and goings but acquiring and correlating that data likely limits it to discovering comings and goings in a limited geographical and temporal area of interest because of a major crime.

Pervasive cheap surveillance which needn't be attached to a very expensive mobile weapons platform or be limited to just cameras could be a birds eye view of everyone's lives. Good justifiable benefits are obvious. With enough surveillance crime becomes really hard to perpetrate. We can pick out all the drug dealers and make tons of arrests before people adapt. Petty stupid crime like breaking into a car means the eye of Sauron sees you and follows you back to your house. Acts of violence that don't take place inside buildings could prompt an immediate response at least as fast as the cops are capable of dispatching a unit. Acts of violence within a unit could be detected by mikes outside on street corners if we were even more surveillance minded. Perhaps we can train it to detect the sound of a person being beat. I don't like people getting hurt do you? Acts of terrorism or mass violence are even more important to prevent. With enough smarts maybe we can flag people likely to go postal or at least notice what is happening 30 seconds before the shooting starts. 30 seconds before instead of 2 minutes after might make a HUGE difference in body count.

As great as that sounds I'm sure you can think of 100 more dystopian use cases. It doesn't do us much good to treat cars as faster horses and not bothering to consider the implications.

As I said in another comment, the importance of the change doesn't lie in a narrow look at the changed component. It is formally about the overall balance of rights, responsibilities of citizens and police/military[1], and less formally about trust between the two and the overall climate we want to live in, as a country.

If you make a given police enforcement mechanism cheaper, it will be used more. What does that do to your average person's sense of privacy/fear/trust? What kind of relationship do we want to have between citizens[2] and its government?

[1] That line is being blurred.

[2] Not subjects

I suppose, to that end, what about my rights to not be looted or have my car flipped over and set ablaze?

I suppose in those situations, I'd be grateful for some law enforcement presence monitoring the situation and guiding folks on the ground to the most appropriate places needing the most attention.

If law enforcement did their jobs properly, things wouldn't escalate to the point where you need to worry about being looted or having your car flipped over and set on fire.

This is a failure of law enforcement, and drone surveillance is a lazy band-aid that they're applying to a situation they themselves have caused.

I certainly don't condone rioting, looting, and setting random buildings on fire. But the police created this situation.

"Needing the most attention"? Bah. The only thing the police should be doing in this situation is standing down, admitting their wrongdoing, and accepting punishment. That will do much more to stop the rioting and start healing the police-citizen divide than anything else they can do. But of course that's not going to happen; police as a whole seem more interested in militarizing and acting above the law.

> I certainly don't condone rioting, looting, and setting random buildings on fire. But the police created this situation.

This specific situation? Ya, sure, maybe.

What about the rioting, looting, setting buildings on fire, etc. in Berkeley because some students opposed Ben Shapiro giving a talk? How did the police create that situation?

> The only thing the police should be doing in this situation is standing down, admitting their wrongdoing, and accepting punishment.

How exactly are the police being "punished" by my store being looted by people who don't even know why the riot started in the first place, let alone give any damns about someone being murdered by one police officer.

How is people carrying off 6 new televisions, freshly robbed from a local store, going to stop the rioting and "heal" the police-citizen divide?

> What about the rioting, looting, setting buildings on fire, etc. in Berkeley because some students opposed Ben Shapiro giving a talk? How did the police create that situation?

The New York Times States

> By the end of the night, the authorities said they had arrested nine people, some of them accused of carrying banned weapons. But no major violence was reported.

People remember the consequences of sitting idly by during the rise of fascism. The proper response to fascist light is anger. Almost all the people were able to do this without getting arrested let alone setting buildings on fire.

> How exactly are the police being "punished" by my store being looted by people who don't even know why the riot started in the first place, let alone give any damns about someone being murdered by one police officer.

When order breaks down people a minority take advantage. Everyone knows why the riot started in the first place. You are justly angry about bad behavior but how angry were you when black person after black person was murdered? If you don't want order breaking down punish all the guilty especially officers who murder the citizenry.

This is sadly typical. An utter refusal to engage, just an expressed preference for as much state violence as needed to protect their car.

> This is sadly typical. An utter refusal to engage

Unfortunately I feel this is the direction most political conversations go as-of late. Talking right past each other.

To claim the other side has an utter refusal to engage is not just unfair, it's a perfect description of exactly the behavior you have just engaged in yourself. It would be more apt to substitute "utter refusal to engage" with "utter refusal to accept my opinion as fact".

I am the GP poster above. I thought I asked some provoking questions about why we have a problem with a former military drone (presumably demilitarized) flying over a city to conduct surveillance during a time of civil unrest.

Instead of thoughtful responses, this question has largely received criticism and claims that I support state violence. I haven't a clue how this is considered reasonable discourse - and it's no wonder the country grows further and further apart politically.

To take this meta-discussion a step further, I think this is the inevitable course of an argument where one group cares about X but not Y, and the other group cares about Y but not X. The two debaters won't have much to say to each other except "Let's talk about X", "No, let's talk about Y", etc. You can't have a structured debate unless both people care about the same thing and hold explicitly contrary views on it. But this is rarely the case in today's fragmented information landscape where different information sources emphasize different things.

Thanks for explaining where you're coming from here. I'll offer my perspective.

I replied to your original comment, indicating my belief that the issue is substantially more complicated than your framing suggested, and briefly explained a couple reasons why. I have several more, if you honestly have any interest.

Your reply was to claim it is just about your property rights - the only relation to my comment was the response hierarchy. I honestly still don't see how that's not a refusal to engage.

One point:

> claims that I support state violence

Well, what do you call what's going on? (I do also consider intrusive surveillance a form of violence, but understand why some think that's dilutive to the term.)

> What if it was a new UAV, designed just for law enforcement? No problems then?

> So, what specifically is it that we don't like about this situation?

What potential "mission-appropriate" use is a Customs and Border Protection drone performing 300 miles away from the border in a domestic unrest scenario?

What specifically do you think this CBP UAV is equipped with that should preclude it from flying over a city? Cameras?

What part of _Customs and Border Protection_ do you think should NOT preclude it from monitoring domestic unrest 300 miles from the nearest border?

The UAV is owned by CBP, and is effectively loaned to local police. Why is that a problem?

We can't allow agencies to borrow equipment and specialists? They should all buy their own, at tax payer's expense?

Would you feel any different if this UAV had been bought by local law enforcement instead of borrowed? If so, why?

To me it seems quite likely that this is on loan to or being flown on behalf another agency.

> So, what specifically is it that we don't like about this situation?

Mass surveillance of any kind is unacceptable, especially in a civilian context

The military industrial police state

I think you are expecting logical reasoning from a group of people who are acting emotionally.

any form of government law enforcement personnel or equipment is drawing anger - regardless of form, function, or origin.

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