With ever more drones falling into ever more alarming hands, do we maybe have to think about them? (Please, no!)

Or, more than you probably
wanted to know about drones

In the May 14 New Yorker, Nick Paumgartner told us more about the state of drone technology and the prospects for their future use than some of us, at least, wanted to know.

Iran will duplicate captured US RQ-170 spy drone: IRGC cmdr. 03 Jul 2012 A senior commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says Iran has gained enough information from the US drone it captured last year to duplicate the aircraft. "The American RQ-170 drone will be undoubtedly duplicated," Commander of the IRGC's Aerospace Division Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh noted on Tuesday. Rejecting foreign media reports about Iran's inability to decode drone's information, the IRGC commander said the Islamic Republic has already proven its prowess by sending codes which made the drone land on the Iranian soil.

-- CLG's July 4 pass-along of a July 3 PressTV post

"The nature of technology is that it is introduced for one role and then it slippery-slopes into unintended roles."

-- Brookings Institution fellow Peter W. Singer, author of
Wired for War, interviewed by Nick Paumgarten

"The drone, a tool that allows CIA experts to kill someone halfway across the world by pushing a button, without exposing a single US life to danger, raises complex ethical and moral issues that as yet have been barely explored."

-- David Cole, in "Obama and Terror: The Hovering
Questions," in the July 12 New York Review of Books

"In 2001, the military had just a few U.A.V.s. Now it has more than ten thousand. With the wars winding down, the drones, field-tested at taxpayer expense, are coming home and looking for jobs. The same, presumably, goes for the humans who will operate them."

-- Nick Paumgarten, in "Here's Looking at You," his May 14
New Yorker piece on drones (only an abstract free online)

by Ken

Don't get me started on drones. No, really, please please please don't get me started on drones. I don't want to write about 'em, I don't want to think about 'em. Nick Paumgarten's May 14 New Yorker piece, to which I've referred (and from which I've quoted) above, really and truly told me way more about drones than I wanted to know.

Fortunately, Howie has been manning the DWT drone beat, from the standpoint of the morality of current drone use and the prospect as drones come home (see his "Unmanned" from February) and from the standpoint of the deep corruption involved in political support for the increasingly powerful drone industry, which has made none other than our pal Buck McKeon a special pet (see last month's "McKeon Wants To Take Money From Essential Government Services To Feed His Campaign Donors DC Pork" and today's "Will Drones End Buck McKeon's Disgraceful Political Career?")

All of which has had the happy effect of sparing me having to think about drones. Oh, I've had all sorts of issues from Nick Paumgarten's piece floating around my head for these couple of months, and then a jolt was provided by the section on drones in David Cole's "Obama and Terror: The Hovering Questions" in the current (July 12) New York Review of Books. But I think the kicker was that little CLG item I pasted at the top of this post, the one about the Iranian guard commander claiming that Iran will be able to drone up thanks to the drone that landed (or that it landed) on Iranian soil.

The point isn't whether you or I believe the Iranian commander, in terms of how soon Iran will have drones of its own. The point is how easily we Americans forget that our monopoly on drone technology is term-limited. It's not a question of whether but of when. We can do to stop it. And what the hell do we do then? The dangers are kind of mind-boggling, not least among them the prospect of payback from people our massively aggressive drone policies have been abundantly "doing unto." Considering how ruthless and unheeding of others our drone "policy" (for want of a better word) has been, we're in an especially terrible position to be lecturing or merely whining to others about doing the right thing with the technology.

On the extent and severity of the problems with our "national security"-related reliance, Georgetown law professor David Cole -- whose last book was The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable -- is especially strong in the new NYRB piece, stressing that not only are crucial questions about our drone program not discussed, they can't be discussed because the Obama administration has maintained such strict secrecy even about the principles being applied.

That is unacceptable and unwise. In the end, the legitimacy of the program requires transparency -- not about individual targets ahead of time, but surely with respect to general legal standards and procedures. As Michael Hayden, former director of central intelligence, told The New York Times, “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable. . . . I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret OLC memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a DOJ safe.” These days, our democracy too often does.

Cole is careful not to fall into the trap of equating Bush and Obama administration policies, but is adamant that the Obama administration's principles and record aren't acceptable. "President Obama is not the same as President Bush," he writes, "and has not institutionalized the worst of Bush’s policies." However, "While President Obama, unlike his predecessor, has steered clear of the politics of fear, he has also steered clear of the politics of defending our ideals."

I'm not going to go farther into this now, because I want to get back to Nick Paumgarten's piece, but I would encourage everyone to check out Professor Cole's careful laying out of the issues (starting with section 4, on page 2 of his piece). For now I might just repeat the quote I posted up top:

Drones make warfare deceptively "cheap." The use of ground troops and conventional bombing missions can be avoided, and we can engage in small-scale military interventions while short-circuiting the limits on warmaking in the Constitution and the UN Charter. For the time being, we have a virtual monopoly on this tactic, but drones have become the focus of the new arms race, and a world in which every nation is as free to execute its "enemies" across borders as we seem to think we are is not in our -- or anyone's -- interest.

For anyone who realizes he really knows very little about drones, Nick P's piece is the obvious corrective. As I noted above, only an abstract is available free online. We'll have some quotes from it nevertheless. Meanwhile, an online chat he did is available to one and all and I've plucked out a couple of Q&A's:

From Craig: How are drones being used domestically right now?
Nick Paumgarten: Some police departments, with special permission, have deployed drones as part of pilot programs (non-pilot pilot programs, I guess). The border patrol is using them on the Mexican and Canadian borders. Do-it-yourselfers are building their own and flying them, often not quite legally, for kicks, or to make cool films, or to test new technologies. I saw one link to videos a drone took in the Grand Canyon. These were gorgeous. The Park Service came and confiscated the computer chips, I think. The FAA stopped other commercial uses in 2007.
From Guest: Do you think that drones are dangerous because they can be used by both sides in any conflict?
Nick Paumgarten: Yes, once two opposing sides have drones, that complicates matters, doesn't it. Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot and a professor of aeronautics at MIT, and a drone expert, told me she expected that in 10 or 15 years drones will be having it out in the skies overhead. I presume she meant in a war--above a battlefield -- not just randomly and independently. And of course, once two sides get ahold of a military technology, the arms race kicks in, and we've seen where that leads.

(Ah yes, "once two opposing sides have drones.")

"The legal issue of domestic drone deployment is itself a little like a drone: it has stolen up on us and is now hovering noiselessly overhead." -- Nick Paumgarten

In February, Congress, without much fanfare or debate, passed a law that will eventually open the national airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.s, for commercial, scientific, and law-enforcement and public-safety use. [I would just point out that Howie devoted a lot of attention to it in that February piece above] President Obama, a strong supporter of drone use abroad, quickly signed the bill into law. It requires the Federal Aviation Administration to have regulations in place for U.A.V.s by 2015. Air safety, not privacy or due process, is the F.A.A.'s chief concern, and in that regard alone it has its hands full. Five years ago, the F.A.A. banned Americans from operating drones, apart from special exemptions granted to around three hundred military contractors, research programs, and law-enforcement agencies. For a while, the hiatus muffled the murmur of excitement and worry over what our lives might be like once the drones take to the air. . . .

"[I]t was the advent, in the mid-nineties, of the Global Positioning System," Nick writes, "along with advances in microcomputing, that ushered in the possibility of automated unmanned flight."

Model-plane hobbyists began adapting their toys to suit a range of tasks, in some cases mounting them with cameras and seeking out customers -- farmers, fishermen, wildlife managers, meteorologists -- who might benefit from having pictures, videos, or other data taken from the air. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, developed a keen interest. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and manhunts in places like Yemen, the military applications, and the corporations devoted to serving them (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman), came to dominate the skyscape. Many of these manufacturers had one client: the Department of Defense. . . .

Military innovation usually assimilates itself into civilian life with an emphasis on benign applications. The public proposition, at this point, anyway, is not that drones will subjugate or assassinate unwitting citizens but that they will conduct search-and-rescue operations, fight fires, catch bad guys, inspect pipelines, spray crops, count nesting cranes and migrating caribou, and measure weather data and algae growth. For these and other tasks, they are useful and well suited.

"Of course," Nick notes, "they are especially well suited, and heretofore have been most frequently deployed, for surveillance." Which brings us to the quote I extracted atop this post from Peter W. Singer:

"The nature of technology is that it is introduced for one role and then it slippery-slopes into unintended roles."

Singer believes that drones will be as transformative as the advent of gunpowder, the steam engine, the automobile, or the computer. "Their intelligence and autonomy is growing," he said. "It used to be that an aerial surveillance plane had to fly close. Now sensors on a U.A.V. can detect a milk carton from sixty thousand feet. The law's not ready for all this."

A privacy issue? What privacy is that?

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union concluded, in a report on drones, "The prospect of cheap, small, portable flying video surveillance machines threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions, and abusive use of these tools in a way that could eventually eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed in their movements and activities." Supreme Court decisions in the eighties upheld the use of manned aerial surveillance in drug arrests on private property without a warrant, but it is surely inevitable that, with a proliferation of drone-assisted police work, such precedents will come up for review.

"Drone people," Nick notes, "seem universally to have accepted the fact that the era of privacy ended a while ago." He quotes then-Sun Microsystems C.E.O. from 1999: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." What's more:

The surrender of privacy can lead to a rise in transparency, which, on a good day, can have a mitigating effect. Drones have deployed at Occupy protests in Warsaw to monitor the police, in Texas to uncover violations at a slaughterhouse, in Indonesia to keep an eye on loggers. Aid workers have discussed using them in Africa to deliver medicine to remote villages.

Of course, that's on "a good day." Would anyone care to wager on the likely ratio of bad days to good ones?

What happens when "bad guys" get drones?

Then there is the fear that drones, in the wrong hands, pose an especially insidious threat. If they are relatively cheap and easy to obtain, then the bad guys can get one. The acuteness of this anxiety hinges on one's definition of bad guy. Last year, the F.B.I. charged Rezwan Ferdaus, a Massachusetts man, in an alleged plot to fly a remote-controlled plane into the Pentagon. (He already had the plane but was arrested trying to procure the C4.) In 2003, border vigilantes in Arizona began testing two drones to track illegal immigrants. Iran claimed last month that it had managed to crack encrypted codes from a Sentinel drone that crashed there in December. And what if drones fell into the hands of Hollywood paparazzi? Laurel Canyon would become Waziristan.

Which brings Nick to "the most fearsome wrong hands," which "may be those of a malevolent regime" -- in which category he thinks not just of human agents but of "machines possessing superior intelligence."

Which is another whole subject. The more you look at this whole drone business, the more open-ended and the more alarming it seems -- at least to me. And the signs are all that it's only going to get more complicated, and more impossible to think about.

#