Drones are coming home to skies near you: feel safer? | Kade Crockford

American democracy urgently needs laws to protect our privacy from the national security state's new surveillance technologies

Military surveillance technologies trickle down to domestic law enforcement faster than ever before. Drones are only one highly controversial example of this endemic problem. And while cutting-edge technologies bring new – and yes, different! – threats to our personal privacy, the right response can be found in the spirit of a document written well before human beings ever conceived of an all-seeing eye in the sky: the Bill of Rights.

Organizations like the ACLU are doing their best to counter the threats posed by emerging technologies with a host of privacy protection bills at the state and federal levels. But we need to come to grips with the fact that the digital revolution necessitates something broader than scattershot law reform, though that will help. Ultimately, we need a mass movement for privacy. We also need to fundamentally rethink our relationship to the government in the post 9/11 era.

The medium is the message – and this one should serve as a warning

National Security Professionals, journalists who cover Yemen and Pakistan, and targeted killing apologists regularly remind civil libertarians like me that drones are not the only technology deployed in the Obama administration's ever-expanding "war on terror". "It's not about drones!" they cry, evidently tired of repeating that flying robots are but one delivery system among many for US-fired bombs.

And they have a point. As investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill reminds us, one of the most horrific known US attacks in Yemen was executed by cruise missile, fired from a US Navy ship. Forty-one civilians died in that bloody 2009 strike on al-Majala. Clearly, the US has a diverse arsenal capable of punishing Yemenis and Pakistanis with Hellfire. The drones are not alone in the dealing out of that death and destruction.

But the people who tell us not to single out drones are also wrong. Drones are different. They are cheaper than fighter jets (pdf) and ships. They crash more often than manned aircraft. They can hover in the sky for hours or even days, collecting surveillance information or waiting to strike. They can act autonomously. And obviously, the deployment of unmanned bombers poses zero physical risk to the people flying them. For the US, the human cost of fighting wars with robots is relegated to the psychological.

Those who caution civil libertarians not to focus on drones, ipso facto, are right in one respect: the Obama administration's obsession with targeted (and not-so-targeted) killings is the central problem with its policy in Yemen, Pakistan and now north-west Africa. As Ned Resnikoff put it: