The Impact of Drones on Privacy Rights

We now turn to drones. They've been used. They are the stuff of science fiction, but they've become a key weapon overseas in the hunt for terrorists. Now they are coming here. In February, President Obama signed a bill that opens US airspace to thousands of these unmanned aircraft. Jeff Glores, been looking into it for us. And he joins us with more Jeff Good Morning. Erica, Good Morning to you drones right now, where personal computers were in the early 80s, improving at an extraordinary pace about to become part of our everyday lives. The question is, are we ready? They come in just about any size you want. His large is a passenger plane as small as a hummingbird. Unmaned aerial vehicles. Or as most people know them. drones. There's no stopping this technology. Anyone who thinks they can put this genie back in the box, that's silliness. Peter Singer, a military expert, and perhaps the country's foremost authority on drones, has watched them dramatically alter the American battlefield overseas. And he says they're about to become the next big thing at home. Their technologies that not only give you capabilities that you couldn't have imagined a generation earlier, but they're also technologies that cause questions that you are asking yourself a generation earlier. This is Lakota, North Dakota, sparsely populated, but now heavily debated, because this is the first time I've seen it. Because this is the first known site where drone was used domestically to help arrest a US citizen. It's the case of Rodney Brossard, a rancher accused of refusing a return of herd of cows that wandered onto his land. When police tried to move in, the family allegedly greeted them with loaded weapons. You think this was an easy call? So, Sergeant Bill Mackie, who runs the SWAT team in nearby Grand Forks, called in the reinforcements, specifically a predator drone, a massive aircraft that, up until now, most people associate with Hellfire missiles and terrorist strikes. This was a dispute over cattle, and a predator drone was called in too much. I can't really get into what the dispute was over. What I can tell you is the SWAT team wasn't there over a property dispute. The SWAT team was called out to render resistance, reference arm subjects, and using the unmandered vehicle, seemed appropriate in this instance. Brossard's lawyer is looking at challenging the drone use, a potential test case for the rest of the country, because the rest of the country is about to get a lot more of them. Everyone wants an eye in the sky. Real estate agents, to view properties, farmers to find thirsty crops, energy companies to build pipelines, and local police departments want to watch neighborhood surveillance flux, or find hard to catch criminals. You think the FAA was dragging its feet? No question about it, and that's why we acted. John Micah is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which just passed legislation that the FAA estimates will put 10,000 drones in the sky by 2017. The catch, the issues involved with robotics, they go well beyond safety. Sanger says that while the legislation did put in place rules to prevent drones from colliding with jets, it did little to clarify who can operate them, and who can be watched. That drone is not just picking up information on say what's happening in that specific scene. It's picking up everything else that's going on. Basically, it's sort of recording footage from a lot of people that it didn't have their approval to record footage. You're sitting in your backyard in Florida on a weekend. You see a drone flying overhead? I'd concern you. Well, I think everyone else that concerned about aircraft coming close to my property and invading it from above. Right now, should people be worried that big brothers come and watch them? Well, there's always that concern, but there are means of tracking folks through their cell phones, their computer usage. We live in a new age. This is where they get made. This is the factory. Arrow Virements is where 90% of the military small drones are made. And it's a factory floor. We needed defense department clearance to enter. AVs, next big markets, drones for local police departments. Does the average person understand how much these can see right now? The average person probably doesn't even realize that the small backpackable systems are used as extracurricular. They're extracurricular systems are used as extensively as they have been. They're assembled. Steve Getland gave us a tour. An rare infield demonstration. This is the Raven. How heavy is this? With that camera, it's about four and a half pounds. And four feet wide. What it lacks in size, it makes up for in camera quality. Okay, so we're just looking into this like this, right? Yes, so you tell me how it operate this switch right here. The camera around wherever you want to look, go to a left. You just take a little bit to the left. So you can take a look and see some contents in the back of that truck. See inside that. Doesn't miss much does it. It's pretty good. People are going to use it for both good and bad. It's going to raise incredible new opportunities, but also incredible new challenges. Singer believes that for every local police department trying to keep people safe, a less well-intentioned operator may be tempted to use drones for no good. And right now, there is little preventing either side from doing whatever they want. Like it or not, unmanned systems are the future. Unfortunately, we're really not ready for them and everything from our policies to our laws to the deep, deep ethical questions. This is one of those classic cases good and bad. Science will not be stopped. But it won't be too fast. We're sending them to the beginning. We're a personal computer. We're about 30 years ago where the horse list carriage was in 1910. Nobody knew what was going to happen. We just knew it was going to happen. And the question is, as we said here, are we ready and how do we accommodate for what's about the happen? Beyond that, who gets them? Well, primarily, it's going to be local law enforcement. They want these because they want to spend, let's say, $50,000 on a drone instead of spending $50,000 on a cruiser. So they can help in some of these missions. And that is finding someone who might be missing an elderly person who wandered off, a criminal who might be hard to catch. That is likely up first. It's what the so much we want to ask you about we're out of time. But the other question here is, is that the person who wants to build it in their backyard. I mean, are they going to apply for a certificate of authorization with the FAA? I would think no. Just build it and put it up in the...