Drone manufacturers have powerful friends in Washington.
San Diego, CA - You’ve probably heard of the Congressional Black Caucus, or perhaps the Progressive Caucus. But what about the drone caucus? Officially, it’s the Unmanned Systems Caucus.
Primarily, the caucus advocates for drones — those pilot-less planes infamous for their role targeting insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They’re used as a spy tool in Iran, a drug-fighting tool in Mexico and an anti-smuggling tool along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Many of the most successful drone manufacturers are based in Southern California and elsewhere around the southwest.
The drone caucus — like the technology it promotes — is becoming increasingly important in the nation’s capitol as the government looks to unmanned vehicles to help save money on defense, better patrol the country’s borders and provide a new tool to U.S. law enforcement agencies and civilians.
“It’s definitely a powerful caucus,” said Alex Bronstein-Moffly, an analyst with First Street Research Group, a D.C.-based company that analyzes lobbying data.
“It’s probably up there in the more powerful caucuses that sort of is not talked about.” And, he says, caucus members are well placed to influence government spending and regulations.
“You have members that are tapped into sort of key places," he said. “You also have members who have been around for a long time."
The caucus is co-chaired by 10-term Congressman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, a Republican from Southern California who also chairs the House Armed Services Committee. He shares the drone caucus chair with Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas.
The caucus includes eight members who also sit on the House Committee on Appropriations, which largely controls the government’s purse strings.
Many of the drone caucus members are well supported by the industry they endorse. According to Bronstein-Moffly’s data, the 58 drone caucus members received a total of $2.3 million in contributions from political action committees affiliated with drone manufacturers since 2011.
Twenty-one members of the drone caucus are from border states. These members collected around $1 million in campaign contributions from top drone manufacturers during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, according to campaign finance data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics and analyzed by Fronteras Desk and Investigative Newsource.
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/jul/05/drone-makers-friends-washington/
Electric eye on America: US set to deploy drones for home use.
The US Army has completed a two-week demonstration of a new ground-based sensor system for its drones. It now hopes to get the drones certified for domestic flights, but critics are concerned that their use could breach privacy rights.
The demonstrations took place at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and involved testing the Ground Based Sense and Avoid (GBSAA) system for the MQ-1C Gray Eagle Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The drone has been on duty in Afghanistan, but the Army now hopes to deploy it at home.
The Pentagon hopes to send the Gray Eagles to five bases throughout the country: Fort Hood (TX), Fort Riley (KS), Fort Stewart (GA), Fort Campbell (KY) and Fort Bragg (NC). However, it first needs to get the drones certified with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
In February, Congress tasked the FAA with coming up with a plan to integrate rules for drones into domestic aircraft regulations. Under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, the aviation authority was to produce rules for the certification of the first UAVs to be used by law enforcement and emergency response agencies in May. Licenses for these drones are to be issued in August.
While UAVs are actively deployed by the US military for operations in hot spots like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it appears that the government and private companies are now eying their potential uses in the civilian sector.
“UAVs, commonly known as drones, offer real promise for an array of domestic applications,” John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “In an era of ever-tighter budgets, they could dramatically reduce the cost to law enforcement agencies and private companies involved in gathering vital — in some cases, lifesaving — information.”
Potential applications for drones by various government and state agencies include monitoring traffic, inspecting pollution and supervising borders.
The deployment of drones at home carries a covey of issues, most importantly privacy and safety. Current regulations, as stipulated by Supreme Court cases such as California v. Ciraolo and Florida v. Riley, do not prohibit the government from spying without a warrant on individuals and their property from “public navigable space.” Extending the same regulations to drones could mean that it would be legal to perpetually hover over somebody’s backyard and conduct 24-hour surveillance of their property.
There have already been reports of drones being used by the US government to spy on citizens at home. Journalist Joseph Farah, a known Obama critic, said he recently spotted a drone hovering over his residence in rural Virginia.
Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have already expressed their concern over the domestic deployment of drones, saying privacy could be jeopardized by drone use for widespread public surveillance. http://rt.com/usa/news/us-army-domestic-drones-619/
How I accidentally kickstarted the domestic drone boom. By Chris Anderson:
At last year's Paris Air Show, some of the hottest aircraft were the autonomous unmanned helicopters—a few of them small enough to carry in one hand—that would allow military buyers to put a camera in the sky anywhere, anytime. Manufactured by major defense contractors, and ranging in design from a single-bladed camcopter to four-bladed multicopters, these drones were being sold as the future of warfare at prices in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In May, at a different trade show, similar aircraft were once again the most buzzed-about items on display. But this wasn’t another exhibition of military hardware; instead, it was the Hobby Expo China in Beijing, where Chinese manufacturers demo their newest and coolest toys. Companies like Shenzhen-based DJI Innovations are selling drones with the same capability as the military ones, sometimes for less than $1,000. These Chinese firms, in turn, are competing with even cheaper drones created by amateurs around the world, who share their designs for free in communities online. It’s safe to say that drones are the first technology in history where the toy industry and hobbyists are beating the military-industrial complex at its own game.
Look up into America’s skies today and you might just see one of these drones: small, fully autonomous, and dirt-cheap. On any given weekend, someone’s probably flying a real-life drone not far from your own personal airspace. (They’re the ones looking at their laptops instead of their planes.) These personal drones can do everything that military drones can, aside from blow up stuff. Although they technically aren’t supposed to be used commercially in the US (they also must stay below 400 feet, within visual line of sight, and away from populated areas and airports), the FAA is planning to officially allow commercial use starting in 2015.
What are all these amateurs doing with their drones? Like the early personal computers, the main use at this point is experimentation—simple, geeky fun. But as personal drones become more sophisticated and reliable, practical applications are emerging. The film industry is already full of remotely piloted copters serving as camera platforms, with a longer reach than booms as well as cheaper and safer operations than manned helicopters. Some farmers now use drones for crop management, creating aerial maps to optimize water and fertilizer distribution. And there are countless scientific uses for drones, from watching algal blooms in the ocean to low-altitude measurement of the solar reflectivity of the Amazon rain forest. Others are using the craft for wildlife management, tracking endangered species and quietly mapping out nesting areas that are in need of protection.
To give a sense of the scale of the personal drone movement, DIY Drones—an online community that I founded in 2007 (more on that later)—has 26,000 members, who fly drones that they either assemble themselves or buy premade from dozens of companies that serve the amateur market. All told, there are probably around 1,000 new personal drones that take to the sky every month (3D Robotics, a company I cofounded, is shipping more than 100 ArduPilot Megas a week); that figure rivals the drone sales of the world’s top aerospace companies (in units, of course, not dollars). And the personal drone industry is growing much faster.
Why? The reason is the same as with every other digital technology: a Moore’s-law-style pace where performance regularly doubles while size and price plummet. In fact, the Moore’s law of drone technology is currently accelerating, thanks to the smartphone industry, which relies on the same components—sensors, optics, batteries, and embedded processors—all of them growing smaller and faster each year. Just as the 1970s saw the birth and rise of the personal computer, this decade will see the ascendance of the personal drone. We’re entering the Drone Age.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/ff_drones/2/
Drone industry releases ethics code.http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/2/drone-industry-releases-ethics-code/