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Comment by asynchronous13 | Hacker News Reader

I work in the field of unmanned aircraft. I'm always amazed by the enormous disconnect between public perception and what I see going on inside the industry.

I've talked directly to members of several police departments about why they want unmanned aircraft. In Brevard county FL, for example, they want infrared cameras to help find patients with Alzheimer's disease that have wandered away from home. Several police departments want a cheap way to take aerial photographs of accident scenes so they can move wreckage and debris off the roads faster and keep traffic flowing. In general, it's for surprisingly mundane tasks. I happen to live in Colorado, and I'd love to use our products to help with forest fires, but the FAA won't let us.

Of course, any tool can be abused. It seems like that's the primary fear that people have with this new technology.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil

"Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal."

I think wanting to detect lost alzheimer's patients isn't quite equivalent to accepting the premise that germanic purity should be preserved.

The FBI won't be looking for Alzheimer's patients.

That's just a code word used by drone operators...

Hey Central - we have another "Alzheimer's patient" who has driven out of his low-class zone to a more affluent one... send a squad car over to help "remind him" of his place.

Are you proposing that unmanned aircraft can only be used for evil purposes?

I see huge potential for use in agriculture. I talk to wine growers in California and we figure out how much money they can save using one of our products instead of using a tractor. I see that as a good thing, but perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.

I agree with you, there's great potential good for this tech.

The evil that is coming from it and will continue to come from it is perpetrated by those that, as said earlier, accept the premise of the State/government that they work for.

If it's a person's job to use technology such that it results in innocents being killed, injured or sucked up into a byzantine legal system and that person keeps doing that job, that's an example of the banality of evil.

Making quads to replace manual labor isn't banal or evil.

Which is why the discussion should be about the policies and rules we need to allow good uses, but prevent bad ones.

We already have policies and rules that are considered "good" by the people that implement and execute policy. That's the problem.

> If it's a person's job to use technology such that it results in innocents being killed, injured or sucked up into a byzantine legal system and that person keeps doing that job, that's an example of the banality of evil.

I guess McDonald's fits that bill as well, as diabetes and obesity are among the biggest killers in the US.

Gluttony has always been a human failing. The National Security State is a relatively new one.

Can you please pinpoint the year that you think the "National Security State" is new?

Because it's been going on since time immemorial.

The National Security Act of 1947 is the beginning of the modern American national security state. Compare to human gluttony, it's a relative newcomer.

You would be thrilled about what the ancient Romans did then.

But if you want to stick with the U.S., you might find that stuff that President Lincoln did quite atrocious from a civil liberties point of view as well.

I'm well aware of the history of espionage, thanks. Lincoln and the Romans had no wires to tap, hence the "modern" national security state.

Some marketing fits the bill; without that, McDonalds is just an option to hurt yourself, while being spied on or killed by drones it NOT a choice, which does make a difference.

> perhaps I am simply living the banality of evil.

Possibly. Since we've already gone godwin, IBM sold computers to Germany. Those machines were used for something we do these days as a matter of routine - a census. It's hard to get more banal than a census. Yet that census was invaluable in identifying and segregating large chunks of people based on ethnicity. It was so instrumental to the Third Reich that James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor.

The tech is just a tool. It's who you give it to and what they do with it that matters. The question is, what do you do about it? You can't really restrict the dispersion of technology. Every attempt to do that so far has failed, for everything from munitions to cryptography. You can make certain uses illegal. That doesn't seem to be stopping the government or police these days. All that seems to do is put a lot of private citizens in jail. The only solid solution I can come up with is to come up with countermeasures of some sort.

How to solve a problem like human nature. It's quite a humdinger.

> "James Watson of IBM was given a medal of honor."

Specifically the "Order of the German Eagle", if anyone else was confused about this.

Thomas Watson, not James Watson.

That quote has to do with the authorities presenting bad things as good things. In order to apply it, you must first establish that what is being presented is bad.

If you agree that what is being presented is good, then this quote does not apply. Instead, then, we have to have a discussion about what policies need to be in place to prevent the things that we agree are, in fact, bad.

The quote has to do with the fact that most people engaging in evil don't even think about it. When a State says, "These are the bad guys. Go get them.", there's a sizable percentage of the population that can rationalize away the evil committed by "The Mission" because for whatever reason, they either lack the ability to reflect on what they're doing or they choose not to reflect on what they're doing.

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." -Hannah Arendt

And what does the quote have to do with the current discussion? The implication is that the given examples are evil.

The thread topic is "FBI Surveilling U.S. With Drones".

That does not answer my question. Yes, I can quite easily come up with many ways in which that quote is relevant to the topic. But what were your intentions? The problem with dropping a quote without context is that people end up countering points they think the person was trying to make. The person you responded to said "Hey, here's a bunch of good uses of drones that we currently can't do." The implication of dropping your quote there is, "I don't want you to do those things."

Or maybe you did not mean to imply those things. Which is rather my point that without context, there's not much value in dropping a quote. I find quotes are great to illustrate or support discussion. But they are not discussion itself.

> But what were your intentions?

I fail to see why my intentions matter one whit in a discussion about increased surveillance by the government.

I was asking what your intended contribution to the conversation was. What point were you trying to make?

The point was made in my first post:

"the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.""

People who use your products or subsystems for evil are NOT going to tell you about it. Yes, you can do great stuff with drones. But to bring that up in the context of BAD stuff possibly being done with them, can seem naive and (inadvertently or not) help covering for bad stuff.

Let's say there is a topic about how a flaw in the SSL implementation of browser X can be used to take over the machine of a user by sending them to a specific link; and someone says "yeah but without that bug SSL is quite useful actually". It's at least kinda missing the point, and in a way that's in the playbook of PR firms to boot. To start out with "I am amazed at the disconnect" and the continue trying to create a disconnect is kinda rich, if you think about it.

If any time a drone is launched, it's recorded to a publicly available website with its intended mission, freely available, I'd have far fewer qualms with their implementation. I don't disagree that there are good uses for these technologies. Just with how we don't not only know nothing about them, but we don't even know how to know anything about them, and often have no way to learn anything about them at all.

Yup, this is exactly right. Most of us don't necessarily have a problem with drones, or even wiretaps. We have a problem with secret drones, and secret wiretaps without any functioning system of accountability.

Totally agreed. Everyone hates surveillance until their daughter goes missing. On one hand it's a nessessity for security in a world where the average person is given tremendious killing power, and on the other hand uncontrolled surveillance is probably the biggest threat to government change, democracy and freedom.

There needs to be a system of checks and balances on the people who use surveillance. Heavy penalties, transparent operations, etc... Until this system gets balanced out everyone's going to be on edge for a while.

They don't want IR cameras to help people with alzheimers, they want to spy in our houses. It's insulting you would pretend to believe them. You are a weapons manufacturer, not a humanist helping the world or a scientist working to save lives. Oh and as a Canon City person, keep your sympathy for us fire victims and direct it to all the women and children already killed in the drone wars.

And the difference between using an unmanned drone and a manned helicopter is...?

I can tell when a helicopter is above me, and there is a much greater cost of operation making it impractical to use helicopters for constant surveillance in giant drag nets of innocents.

Having spent some time near an army base where they train drone pilots, I assure you that you can tell when a drone is above you too. They're not silent or invisible. Your comments border on delusional, like arguing that the existence of telescopic sights on rifles means that all telescopes are weapons.

A 747 at 12km is silent from the ground in every populated area I've ever been in; how could an MQ-9 at 15km possibly not be silent?

You're right about that, I'm thinking of a different model. OTOH the price of an MQ-9 is a lot higher than that f a helicopter, and it's not the case that you can just throw thousands of them up in the air for a panopticon.

Somebody needs to watch the 'Collateral Murder' video again.

OP actually works in the industry. Like full time. But I'm sure that you, random Internet commenter with no apparent expertise in the field, know better than he does. Thanks for your well-informed, well-cited input.

If the surveillance is continual --- none of your examples appear to be but presumably continual surveillance is the desire of the government -- then it isn't practical, as we have seen historically, to have policy prevent bad uses.

Some tools enable such terrible things that whatever good they may also do is inconsequential.

And this will continue as long as they put up a fierce fight to prevent themselves from also being watched.

Do you ever think though that flying aircraft holds a special place in the fears of men? I think that if it flies people are automatically scared of it. I might just be biased.

I think if it doesn't randomly drop hellfires around, you can get used to it. We do not live in constant fear of birds after all.

Birds do drop hellfires constantly.

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