What's the difference between using a manned aircraft and an unmanned aircraft to do speed enforcement?
So it's not the increased efficiency itself, it's that the efficiency has put the problems we tried to ignore directly in front of us.
And thus we can't sit back and allow "logical extension of the old system" as justification for allowing it, because, again, the old system was only allowed because the scale necessary for abuse was implausible at the time.
In the past, actual manpower has been a meaningful limit on the size of surveillance operations. The government simply cannot have every person in the country be monitored and watched. Instead - theoretically - the government only has enough resources to surveil those who it actually suspects of a crime.
I direct you to Justice Sotomayor's insightful concurring opinion on United States vs. Jones: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing...
These quotes, in particular, are extremely releveant.
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"And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and community hostility.'"
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"The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'"
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In my view, this opinion sheds much needed light on how the perception that technology and scale does not influence the legality and constitutionality of government practice fails.
As a footnote, Sotomayor also discusses privacy in a digital age, and she provides a refreshing outlook on how new technologies can force a society to re-think its beliefs on the expectation of privacy.
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"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties . . . This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
Granted there are cheaper UAV out there, and generally its unlikely they could carry a payload sufficient for the level of surveillance necessary for traffic enforcement.
BTW - my intention isn't to advocate for drones, just to question the rationale of making a distinction between manned and unmanned surveillance, when in fact it might make more sense worrying about being aerial surveillance more generally.
In other news, there are smaller ships than the Queen Mary 2...
"Generally its unlikely they could carry a payload sufficient for the level of surveillance necessary for traffic enforcement."
Having been nailed with a speeding ticket from a Cessna: All they need is a camera with someone watching it that can say "blue car, coming from half a mile away". You don't even need radar or any sort of speed tracking, you just time the car between to landmarks (the same way that local police do it in states that only allow state police to use radar guns). The type of drones your local hackerspace whips up for fun on a weekend are damn near sufficient.
The very real question that needs to be considered is whether or not law enforcement should be doing aerial enforcement at all. How they do it is less interesting to me than the question of whether or not they should.