Jameel Jaffer is deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
As technology advances, so does the government’s surveillance power. If we want to protect our privacy rights, the exercise of this power has to be subject to limits. Without sensible limits on the use of surveillance drones, government entities – the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, your local police department – will almost inevitably use drones to collect huge volumes of sensitive information about people who’ve done nothing wrong. The available technology is already incredibly powerful. A surveillance drone can already be used to track a person as she travels from, say, her house to her doctor’s office to her place of worship to her school. Within a few years, it may be perfectly feasible, economically and technologically, for a local police department to use unmanned drones to collect the identities of those who attend political rallies.
It’s crucial that we place clear limits on the use of drones to collect information about citizens, many of them not suspected of any crime.
Some of the information that surveillance drones can collect might seem innocuous and not worth protecting. But, as the Supreme Court recently recognized, new technologies that allow the collection of huge volumes of seemingly innocuous information can easily be used to create detailed dossiers about innocent citizens.
It’s not that the domestic use of surveillance drones should be categorically prohibited. These drones can be put to all sorts of laudable uses. They can be used, for example, for geological and environmental surveys. They could be used by ordinary citizens to monitor the conduct of police. An Op-Ed in this newspaper recently argued that drones should be used to monitor human rights abuses in Syria.
But it’s crucial that we place clear limits on the use of drones to collect information about citizens. Law enforcement agencies should generally be prohibited from using surveillance drones except to monitor those who are reasonably suspected of engaging in criminal activity. When surveillance will be particularly intrusive – for example, if it will be prolonged, or if it will include peering through a window – the surveillance should be based on a warrant and probable cause. And when the government collects information incidentally about individuals who aren’t suspected of criminal activity, or when criminal suspects turn out to be innocent, the information the government has collected should be discarded.
Drones will no doubt prove to have many good uses, but we need to adopt some rules to protect privacy.
