Brookings: Topics - Drones

President Barack Obama’s Counterterrorism Speech Nails it on Drone Strikes

Michael E. O'Hanlon — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism speech Thursday did not deliver any radical policy changes or huge revelations, but it was well done nonetheless. It explained his reasoning behind the use of certain techniques of warfare including drone strikes and Guantanamo detentions, even as he also promised to minimize the use of these methods in the future and try to move towards a world in which the 2001 authorization for war against al Qaeda and affiliates would no longer be needed. It was an intelligent blend of the tone of his more idealistic speeches, such as the Cairo address of June 2009, with his more muscular messages like the December 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

But one section of his speech is worth particular focus – the use of armed unmanned combat vehicles or drones. Even though President Obama did not specify exactly how drone strikes would change in the future, and did not provide a great deal of new information about them, the modest amount of detail he did provide was welcome. That is because U.S. drone strikes are badly misunderstood around the world, a point underscored by a New York Times op-ed today contained the following statements:

“...the C.I.A. has no idea who is actually being killed in most of the strikes. Despite this acknowledgment, the drone program in Pakistan still continues without any Congressional oversight or accountability.”

Such statements are incorrect and inflammatory, causing problems for example in U.S.-Pakistani relations. Indeed, even so-called “signature strikes” have typically been conducted only after a great deal of surveillance of a given site, very robust establishment of the fact that such a site is an enemy headquarters or related facility, and considerable care in ensuring that noncombatants are not present (and as Obama said, Congress is “briefed on every strike that America takes”).

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Authors

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Publication: CNN

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Finally, Obama Breaks His Silence on Drones

Peter W. Singer — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Over the last four years, there has been a strange irony. One of the greatest speakers of our era has largely kept silent about one of the signature aspects of his presidency.

Under President Obama's leadership, U.S. civilian intelligence agencies have carried out a series of not-so-covert operations in so-called secret wars that have reached a huge scale. There have been nearly 400 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2008, in periods of activity that have ebbed and flowed dependent on everything from the availability of intelligence to local political tides.

But the long-term nature and growth in scale of the "drone wars" campaign made targeted killings a key feature of the administration's foreign policy, both in its internal approach to counter-terrorism and external perceptions of America. The advantages were clear to an administration that throughout this period faced a daily drumbeat of terrorism threats. Targeted killings by drones offered new means for action in ways that were more accurate, more proportionate and less risky to American lives than previous alternatives. They have repeatedly been used in successful operations that eliminated key terrorist leaders.

However, the short-term benefits came with long-term questions. As these operations increasingly were leaked to the media, they grew more and more controversial, whether from concern over civilian casualties, disputes over the appropriate role of the CIA versus the military in what had evolved into a massive air war campaign, Congress' sense that it was the victim of an executive branch end run or broader worry about the danger to constitutional powers.

As this played out, the president's absence from the debate became more and more telling. Yes, there were a couple of speeches by presidential aides finally acknowledging the use of such technology, quick mentions on late-night talk shows and even presidential jokes about drone strikes. But the administration's case in the public debate remained disjointed, tentative and, as the controversy surrounding John Brennan's confirmation hearings as CIA director illustrated, far from strategic or satisfactory. The time was long overdue for the true stamp of presidential voice and authority on the topic to be heard.

That is what makes the president's speech Thursday at National Defense University so important, and simultaneously so challenging for him. He has to try to strike a balance between arguing that terrorism threats will remain with us for the long term, as recent events in Boston and London would illustrate, but that the structures we gradually built up in response, from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the drone campaign, cannot remain with us in their ad hoc manner for the long term.

Beyond all the internal policy questions — such as what the CIA should control versus what the Pentagon controls — he has a broader task. He must lay out the overdue case for regularizing, so to speak, our counter-terrorism strategy itself, from the means to the ends. This will require touching on thorny issues such as how to bring more transparency to the ugly task of a targeted killings campaign, how to create more interaction with Congress — which both wants and avoids oversight — and, finally, how to find a path out of the Gitmo conundrum.

Beginning this kind of discussion has been described by some as just a way to change the topic in the midst of other would-be scandals dominating the news cycle. But let's be crystal clear: The president is making a big bet by speaking out on issues on which he still enjoys fairly broad public support.

The reason to take this bet is that the speech offers enormous advantages over the alternative of remaining silent. Though it may or may not assuage the genuine concerns at home about the drone campaign, the very act is hugely important inside government. Only the president can operate above the interagency disputes, and his vision will set the terms of internal policy development across multiple agencies (why those staff speeches and confirmation hearings never could substitute for his voice).

In turn, the public side of the speech matters in a manner beyond any blip in domestic poll numbers. Here again, only the president can truly stake out America's vision in a way the world notices. If well played, the speech might even be the foundation for future international norms that need to be set in the post-9/11, post-Osama bin Laden world. This is all the more important as our technologies proliferate and other nations, such as Russia, China and Iran, may seek to follow (or misuse) our precedents in drone strikes and targeted killings.

The issues at play are not just about which agency gets to do what and when to tell whom on Capitol Hill, but also how the United States might build a global coalition of the like-minded on the future of counter-terrorism.

In short, sometimes a speech is more than just a speech. By finally speaking out on some of the key issues that have grown to define his place in foreign policy history, Obama has his chance, finally, to set the terms of the debate and steer it toward more positive ends.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Los Angeles Times

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

The President’s National Security Speech: A Quick and Dirty Reaction – Part 1

Benjamin Wittes — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:53:00 -0400

One week ago, a senior Pentagon official went before the Senate Armed Services Committee, along with the Pentagon’s top lawyers, and declared that the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and its associated forces under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) would go on for another decade or two. He declared that the conflict geographically followed the enemy worldwide. The witnesses described the AUMF as giving the Pentagon adequate authority to target members of Al Qaeda and its associated forces.

If there was a unifying theme of President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University, it was an effort to align himself as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration’s operational flexibility in actual fact. To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has—but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.

A great deal of the President’s speech was noise—noise in the form of broad, overarching accounts of his strategic vision, noise in the form of continuous veiled (or not-so-veiled) criticisms of his predecessor’s strategic vision and fidelity to American values, and noise in the form of apparent changes in policy that in actual fact change very little. But there are also a few important announcements contained in the speech. Over the next few posts, I will offer some initial thoughts, focused on trying to identify those aspects of the speech that seem to me either more than verbiage or as notable because they in fact reflect less than meets the eye.

The overarching theme of the speech definitely falls into the latter category. The President presents himself throughout the speech as bringing this war to a close: “[O]ur commitment to Constitutional principles has weathered every war, and every war has come to an end,” he said at the outset. And then, later on, he declares:

All these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact—in sometimes unintended ways—the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.

The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.

In other words, while the Pentagon regards the AUMF as providing the authority it needs to confront the enemy for the next two decades, the president wants to work with Congress to get off the war footing and to secure the document’s narrowing, and ultimate repeal. It’s a striking contrast, whomever one thinks is right.

A striking contrast, that is, unless one does not quite take Obama at face value on this. After all, Obama does not need Congress to narrow or repeal the AUMF or to get off of a war footing. He can do it himself, declaring hostilities over in whole or in part. And Obama, needless to say, did not do anything like that. To the contrary, he promised that “we must finish the work of defeating al Qaeda and its associated forces” and while he used a lot of nice words about law enforcement and a lot of disparaging words about perpetual states of war, he also promised to continue targeting the enemy with lethal force under the AUMF. In other words, he promised—without quite saying it directly—to keep waging war:

Moreover, America’s actions are legal. We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces. We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war—a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.

So count me a little confused: Are we heading for ten or twenty more years of war under the AUMF or are we on the road to peace and the primacy of peace-time authorities? Or are we, as I suspect, on a road to more use of peacetime authorities and less war under the AUMF, a different vocabulary for conflict, but ultimately long-term use of substantially the same authorities we have been using?

Authors

Benjamin Wittes

Publication: Lawfare

Image Source: © Larry Downing / Reuters

Holder: We've Droned 4 Americans, 3 By Accident. Oops.

Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:39:00 -0400

In an extraordinary admission, Attorney General Eric Holder has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes since 2009 have killed four Americans — three of whom were “not specifically targeted.”

For all the effort that the Obama administration has gone to in asserting that its drones only kill the people that the administration intends to kill, Holder wrote in a letter today to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that Samir Khan, 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki and Jude Kenan Mohammad were “not specifically targeted by the United States.” The fourth American to die in a drone strike since 2009 was Abdulrahman’s father Anwar Awlaki, a radical propagandist whom the U.S. killed in Yemen in 2011.

The five-page letter, obtained and published by Charlie Savage of The New York Times, does not explain the circumstances that led to the unintentional killings of Khan, Mohammad and the younger Awlaki. Holder does not apologize for the killings, nor explain whether their deaths resulted from errant targeting, mistaken identity or another circumstance.

But after acknowledging that the administration did “not specifically targe[t]” those three Americans, Holder defended killing Americans the administration believes to be members of al-Qaida without due process, a constitutionally questionable proposition.

“It is clear and logical that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted,” Holder wrote to Leahy. “Rather, it means the government must take special care and take into account all relevant constitutional considerations, the laws of war, and other laws with respect to U.S. citizens — even those who are leading efforts to kill their fellow, innocent Americans.”

Holder’s criteria are familiar, thanks to a Justice Department “white paper” on targeted killing that leaked in February. To target an American that American must be a “senior operational leader” of al-Qaida “or its associated forces”; capturing him or her must be “not feasible”; the strike would conform to the laws of war; and “a thorough and careful review” inside the executive branch determines that the American is part of an “imminent” attack. Oh, and the drone strike can only be done outside the U.S., Holder emphasizes, in an apparent nod to the concerns of Sen. Rand Paul.

Only the concept of “imminence” here is far broader than its conventional definition. Nor does Holder explain what undergirds the determination that an American cannot be captured; the relative ease of drone strikes creates a structural disincentive for a policymaker to opt for a risky capture operation.

Americans are a tiny fraction of the people killed by U.S. drone strikes. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently estimated that 4700 people have died from drone-launched missiles. An unknown percentage of those casualties are people whose identities are not known to the government but who are presumed to be terrorists based on their patterns of travel and other behavior.

It’s worth noting that this is not an exhaustive list of Americans killed by U.S. drone strikes. Kamal Derwish of Lackawanna, NY was killed in a November 2002 missile strike launched from a Predator drone, one of the first such cases. It’s unclear why Holder did not list American deaths from pre-2009 strikes in his tally.

Khan was the editor of Inspire, the English-language webzine of al-Qaida’s Yemen offshoot. He was killed in the September 2011 strike that killed Anwar Awlaki. Abdulrahman, a teenager born in Denver, was killed in Yemen shortly thereafter, alongside his 17-year old cousin.

Jude Kenan Mohamad travelled to Pakistan from North Carolina in 2008, allegedly to become a jihadi, and never returned. He was arrested in 2009 for trying to enter Pakistan’s tribal regions without the proper paperwork. But he skipped out on his court date, and vanished. Friends feared him dead after a November, 2011 drone strike. But his status — alive or dead — was never officially confirmed until now. Mohamad’s FBI wanted poster does not list his death. (“The FBI won’t declare a person dead until there’s physical evidence, DNA evidence,” a law-enforcement source explains to Danger Room.) Nor have outside terrorist trackers like the Long War Journal counted Mohamad among the droned. (“I don’t track him as being killed,” says Bill Roggio, the Journal’s editor.)

Buried within the letter is another startling admission from Holder. This week, Holder writes, Obama approved “a document that institutionalizes the Administration’s exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities.” That would be the infamous Disposition Matrix, the bureaucratic codification of the administration’s so-called targeted killing program. Congress will now be “notified and briefed” on the document, so expect something resembling it to leak to the press.

It’s fitting that Obama has approved the disposition matrix and Holder has acknowledged the drone killings of Americans this week. Tomorrow, Obama will give a speech about the future course of the war on terrorism. It remains to be seen if he will acknowledge accidentally killing three American citizens without due process — one of whom was a teenager.

Authors

Spencer Ackerman
Noah Shachtman

Publication: Danger Room Blog

Eyes in the Sky: The Domestic Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems

John Villasenor — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:56:00 -0400

Editor's Note: On May 17, John Villasenor testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the important topic of privacy and unmanned aircraft systems, often referred to as drones.

Good morning Chairman Sensenbrenner, Ranking Member Scott, and Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today on the important topic of privacy and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).^{^[1]}

I am a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. I am also a professor at UCLA, where I hold appointments in the Electrical Engineering Department and the Department of Public Policy. The views I am expressing here are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of the Brookings Institution or the University of California. Portions of my testimony today are adapted from a law review article I recently published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.^{^[2]}

UAS, often referred to as “drones,” can be employed in an endless variety of civilian applications, the overwhelming majority of them beneficial. However, like any technology, UAS can also be misused. The most common concern regarding domestic UAS relates to their potential impact on privacy. This is a legitimate concern. Existing laws and jurisprudence provide an important foundation, but they also leave many questions unanswered.

For non-government operators, determining when UAS use violates privacy involves the tension between First Amendment freedoms and common law and statutory privacy protections. With respect to government-operated UAS, the Fourth Amendment is of course central to the privacy question. While the Supreme Court has never explicitly considered warrantless observations using UAS, a careful examination of Supreme Court privacy jurisprudence suggests that the Constitution will provide a much stronger measure of protection against government UAS privacy abuses than is widely appreciated. The Fourth Amendment has served us well since its ratification in 1791, and there is no reason to suspect it will be unable to do so in a world where unmanned aircraft are widely used.

This does not mean that there is no need for additional statutory UAS privacy protections. However, when drafting new laws it is critical to adopt a balanced approach that recognizes the inherent difficulty of predicting the future of any rapidly changing technology. Although unmanned aircraft pose real and increasingly well-recognized privacy concerns, they also offer real and much less widely understood benefits. A dialog conducted with full awareness of this balance will be much more likely to lead to positive policy outcomes.

[1] The acronym “UAS” is also sometimes expanded to “unmanned aerial systems.”

[2] John Villasenor, Observations From Above: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Privacy, 36 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 457 (2013).

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Authors

John Villasenor

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Lessons and Context of the Navy’s First Carrier Drone Flight

Peter W. Singer — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:33:00 -0400

The U.S. Navy recently made history with its flight of the X-47B UCAS, the first unmanned carrier drone (unmanned systems) to launch from an aircraft carrier. In 2009 and 2011, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings had the pleasure of hosting then Chief of Naval Operations, ADM Gary Roughead, to discuss the future of unmanned operations. The vision he laid out is well on its way to fruition, making it especially useful to place what happened today in the context of the larger U.S. defense strategy and to look at what lessons have been learned in the development of unmanned systems. As I explored in a look at the past and future of naval aviation after 100 years of flight, this success is only one part of a much bigger story.

What this history tells us is that, now that the Navy has crossed yet another step that the naysayers said could never be done, the challenges are as much organizational and political, as they are technical. For example, now that unmanned systems have shown they can fly off a carrier, what will be their exact role? Whether they will be delegated to take on tasks on their own or paired with manned planes, for a package that is greater than the sum of its parts, is a crucial question of naval air combat doctrine moving forward. It is akin to the questions that early warplanes faced as to whether they were to be tethered to the existing surface force of battleships as scouts or serve as their own, as a new form of a battle fleet.

We are only at the start of this robotic revolution at sea, just around the World War I stage of things, if manned airplanes are a parallel. Just as the first Navy planes started out doing only observation, but soon began to be used for everything from bombing runs to carrier onboard delivery (COD), so we are seeing a similar expansion in the roles of unmanned systems. UCAS originally started out being just in the observation ISR role, but clearly has a more lethal future, while the Marines are already using robotic helicopters for roles like cargo delivery in Afghanistan. But just like back then, we don’t yet have all the answers as to the optimal doctrine. Even the basic design of this technology remains to be learned and adopted.

A second lesson is that despite its relentless advancement, there are no signs that technology will end the central role of humans in war and at sea any time soon. However, not “ending”, isn’t the same thing as not “changing.” The specifics of the human roles will be altered, but again, this is nothing new. Most Navy warplanes today don’t have tail gunners or navigators. The skill sets and ranks of those who wear the wings of gold might be altered, which opens up the kind of internal identity and qualification questions in the Navy that have also recently challenged the Air Force. Does the remote operator (note: “operator,” not “pilot” is the terminology so far in the Navy, as opposed to how the Air Force views the requirement) of a plane that can take off and land on its own, who is sitting behind a computer screen, actually need 20/20 eyesight or the ability to do 50 sit-ups? Do they even need to be an officer (akin to how the Army has handled UAS versus the Air Force)? The next few decades will be an exciting time, with new paths being forged, much like they were by the first generation of naval aviation pioneers.

This leads to a third challenge that may be the most vexing to the Pentagon in the years ahead. In an article entitled U-Turn, I explored how there are a series of speed bumps that loom for unmanned systems, not so ironically just as they are making their mark. These range from internal cultural resistance to budgetary battles, in which the new is often disadvantaged against the old. We are seeing this play out here again. Few realize that (according to figures from the DoD UAs office), at the very same time the X-47 knocked down yet another technical barrier, the Navy’s planned UAS budget is being cut by 24%, several times greater than the rest of the budget cuts. Indeed, the tension that the successful UCAS test created for F35’s longer term buy numbers is much like Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, not to be spoken about, but palpable.

Bottom line: Congrats to the Navy and the team behind the X-47B on yet again making history, but this history tells us we have an array of questions to explore in the years ahead.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

What Will Keep a U.S. Defense Secretary Up At Night Through the Next Decade?

Mon, 06 May 2013 15:30:00 -0400

Event Information

May 6, 2013
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Editor's Note: This book is available to download now on Kindle and Nook. Hard copy and other e-book versions can be ordered through the Brookings Institution Press.

In his new book, Star Spangled Security: Applying Lessons Learned Over Six Decades Safeguarding America (Brookings, 2012), former U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown (under President James Carter) offers an insider’s view of U.S. national security strategy over service to ten presidencies and bridges it to current challenges facing the United States.

Dr. Brown currently sits on the Defense Policy Board and previously served as secretary of the Air Force under President Lyndon B. Johnson; director of U.S. research and engineering under President John F. Kennedy; president of Caltech; director of Livermore Lab; and a negotiator on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I and SALT II). He also led the development of the Polaris missile, nuclear ballistic missiles, the stealth bomber, and put the first GPS satellites in the sky.

On May 6, the Brookings Press hosted a discussion of Star Spangled Security. Drawing on his 60 years safeguarding America, Harold Brown discussed how to balance China’s ambitions with U.S. interests to avoid conflict; whose 3 a.m. phone call from the Pacific is most likely to trigger US military action; what strategic positions in the Middle East and in Africa will best serve American interests; what strategy might prevent rogue nations from using nuclear weapons; lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that ought to shape response to Syria now; a new perspective on drones; and the best ways to cut defense spending and reform the Defense Department.

Vago Muradian, editor of Defense News, moderated the discussion with Brown.

No-Fly Zone: How “Drone” Safety Rules can also Help Protect Privacy

John Villasenor — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:54:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: This article on how drone safety rules can also help protect privacy arises from Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University.

For most of the 20^th century, obtaining overhead images was difficult and expensive. Now, thanks to advances in unmanned aircraft systems—people in the aviation field tend to dislike the word drone—it has become easy and inexpensive, raising new and important privacy issues [PDF]. These issues need to be addressed primarily through legal frameworks: The Constitution, existing and new federal and state laws, and legal precedents regarding invasion of privacy will all play key roles in determining the bounds of acceptable information-gathering from UAS. But safety regulations will have an important and less widely appreciated secondary privacy role.

Why? Because safety regulations, which aim to ensure that aircraft do not pose a danger in the airspace or to people and property on the ground, obviously place restrictions on where and in what manner aircraft can be operated. Those same restrictions can also affect privacy from overhead observations from both government and nongovernment UAS. FAA regulations make it unlawful, for example, to operate any aircraft (whether manned or unmanned) “in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.” Aircraft must also be operated at a sufficiently high altitude to allow “an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface” in the event of an engine failure. Flying a UAS around someone else’s backyard can be a bad idea for lots of reasons, including the possibility of violating these rules.

UAS safety (and other) regulations are in the midst of an overhaul. Last year, President Obama signed an FAA reauthorization bill that provides for the integration of UAS into the national airspace by late 2015. Under this new law [PDF; see Sections 331–336], since May 2012 law enforcement agencies have been able to apply for expedited authorizations to use certain types of small UAS, which must be operated during daylight, less than 400 feet above the ground, and within “line of sight” of the operator. This means that the operator can see a UAS with his or her own eyes as it is being flown. (The phrase “visual line of sight” is sometimes distinguished from “line of sight,” which can refer to operation in which a radio signal can be transmitted directly from an operator to a UAS that may be beyond visual line of sight. However, in the 2012 FAA reauthorization bill, “line of sight” is almost certainly intended to mean “visual line of sight.”)

Visual line of sight operation is also required under a definition [PDF; see Section 336] provided for “model aircraft” in the 2012 law. However, that definition is specific to that section of the law and may not apply to all hobbyist unmanned aircraft. The FAA’s Advisory Circular [PDF] on “model aircraft operating standards” does not mention line of sight, though model aircraft operation beyond the line of sight would risk being viewed by the FAA as careless or reckless. The FAA is also very likely to require visual line of sight operation in new rules for most (but not all [PDF]) commercial, research, and other uses of UAS.

From the FAA’s standpoint, line-of-sight rules are aimed solely at ensuring safety, since an operator who can’t see the aircraft he or she is flying can find it harder to “see and avoid” other aircraft in the vicinity. But line-of-sight operation also provides some measure of privacy protection by excluding some of the most egregious potential abuses. It is very hard for an operator in front of a house to maintain visual line of sight while lowering an unmanned aircraft into the fenced‐in backyard to obtain eye‐level images through the back windows of the house.

While there is nothing physically preventing an unmanned aircraft from being flown in violation of these and other FAA rules, the potential consequences of doing so can provide a strong set of disincentives. An individual, company, or other organization that runs afoul of FAA rules could face fines or other legal consequences and find its authorization to operate unmanned aircraft suspended or revoked. That may not stop the most determined paparazzi from snapping overhead pictures of sunbathing movie stars, but it should help dissuade many would-be UAS voyeurs.

And what would happen if a law enforcement agency violated FAA rules while using a UAS to get images of a suspect’s backyard? Would acquiring those images be a Fourth Amendment “search,” and therefore be unconstitutional without a warrant?

While the Supreme Court has never specifically ruled on UAS privacy, it considered warrantless observations from manned government aircraft on three occasions in the 1980s. In the 1986 California v. Ciraolo decision, for instance, the court ruled that police observations from an airplane flying at 1,000 feet of marijuana growing in a backyard were constitutional. Noting that the “observations … took place within public navigable airspace … in a physically nonintrusive manner,” the court held that the “Fourth Amendment simply does not require the police traveling in the public airways at this altitude to obtain a warrant in order to observe what is visible to the naked eye.” In two other decisions involving observations of private property from aircraft—Dow Chemical Co. v. United States in 1986 and Florida v. Riley in 1989—the justices also viewed the fact that the aircraft were lawfully operated as a factor, although far from the only one, in finding no Fourth Amendment violation. In light of these precedents, a court might well find gathering images from government aircraft operated in violation of FAA regulations to be unconstitutional.

It’s still far too early to know exactly how FAA rules designed to provide safety and efficiency will affect unmanned aircraft privacy. Commercial UAS operation in the United States is not yet permitted, and the number of law enforcement organizations that have received FAA authorizations for operational (as opposed to training) UAS use is still very limited. And while there is a large and growing community of “drone” hobbyists, the overwhelming majority of them fly safely and in a manner respecting privacy.

However, as unmanned aircraft use increases there will inevitably be instances in which UAS are operated by private individuals, paparazzi, companies, and law enforcement agencies in ways that raise privacy concerns. Determining whether those uses violate reasonable expectations of privacy will sometimes start—though certainly not end—with an inquiry into whether the UAS was operated in compliance with FAA regulations.

Authors

John Villasenor

Publication: Slate

Image Source: © Jean-Paul Pelissier / Reuters

America's Care in the Use of Force (and Use of Drones)

Michael E. O'Hanlon — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:36:00 -0400

American University professor Akbar Ahmed’s new book, The Thistle and the Drone, is elegant and erudite in many ways. He demonstrates a rich historical and anthropological understanding not only of his native Pakistan but of other tribal societies around the world relevant in the broader “war against terrorism.” He cautions wisely about the geostrategic dangers that can result if Washington is seen as using force disproportionately or carelessly in ways that hurt innocent people in these areas. Ahmed is right to question whether the United States needs to reassess its approaches in these matters.

However, as someone who has followed these same issues myself, albeit from a somewhat different vantage point as a national security scholar with close ties to the U.S. military and intelligence community, I have a different perspective on several of the issues Ahmed raises. In some of his specific arguments, Professor Ahmed is not fully fair, accurate, or up to date.

He makes insufficient effort to understand trends in drone warfare including the huge progress that the United States has made in minimizing civilian casualties. While mistakes are sometimes still made, I believe after following the use of drones closely for years that the United States Armed Forces take a great deal of care in their use of force. It is dangerous for Ahmed to suggest otherwise, since in doing so he can fuel the very fires of hatred and distrust that he decries.

For example, in Afghanistan, ISAF forces have made extraordinary efforts to reduce their use of firepower, and accidental or inadvertent strikes now account for less than 10 percent of all civilian fatalities there according to UN figures. This is still far too many—a few hundred a year—but it is incredibly precise by the standards of warfare. Indeed, under General McChrystal three years ago, some NATO troops felt they were even being asked to accept greater personal risk to themselves and their fellow troopers when engaged in firefights so as to ensure maximum safety for Afghans. NATO troops do not fire on Afghan homes or other buildings unless in dire peril, and their care has produced a huge improvement in our track record.

In Pakistan, U.S. forces have had essentially a zero-casualty policy for at least three years. Attacks are not made if there is any realistic risk to civilians—with only a partial exception if al Qaeda’s top two or three leaders might be in the crosshairs. Yes, mistakes have been made. But these have been extremely rare. Peter Bergen tallies the number of accidental deaths of innocents as well under 10 percent of the total in recent times. To be sure, critiques are warranted, and we can afford to scale back our use of force now that bin Laden is dead, top al Qaeda leadership in general is decimated, and some key Haqqani leaders are out of the picture (we have already reduced the pace of attacks substantially, as Bergen’s data repeated at www.brookings.edu/afghanistanindex show). But the insinuations that we have not been extremely careful and have not tried to learn further lessons along are simply incorrect.

Ahmed goes further. On p. 39 of his book, he even says that "There appears to be a deliberate attempt by official agencies in the war on terror to obfuscate and distort." This is a big charge that he makes without substantiation or specificity.

There are a few other specific matters where dissent is warranted, as well. On p. 305 he suggests that many if not most American scholars blame Islam and its basic nature for terrorism. This is not accurate. Far more American scholars go out of their way to argue just the opposite in the last 12 years.

On p. 309 he actually suggests that a mainstream strand of American national security thinking wants to "eradicate Islam." This is, frankly, a preposterous and irresponsible allegation.

On p. 311 he suggests that it was a serious idea to carpet bomb Muslim villages with videos of Baywatch, and that Americans would take such nonsense seriously. Perhaps here Ahmed is being tongue in cheek, but in light of his other arguments, I couldn’t tell. I hope so!

On p. 313, he says that al Qaeda is now blamed for every outburst of violence around the world, and that Americans live on pins and needles because of fear of another attack. In fact, most Americans have moved on. They worry far more about the economy. In national security terms, recent policy has focused as much on the so-called rebalancing towards Asia, and the problems with North Korea. More than anything else, though, what typifies the current American public policy debate is less paranoia over al Qaeda than Americans' growing isolationism. Ahmed would have been more fair to criticize the country for its indifference towards the Syrian civil war than for hypervigilance towards militants.

Finally, on p. 319, Ahmed suggests that anthropologists were brought into U.S. foreign policy decisionmaking to help determine how to properly torture Muslim prisoners. This too is wrong.

Ahmed is a remarkable scholar who has made big contributions, but on the above matters, I simply disagree.

Authors

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

A Discussion About Drones

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with Charlie Rose, Peter W. Singer joins Michael Boyle of LaSalle University, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, and Scott Shane of The New York Times to discuss the revolutionary nature of drone technology as well as the dilemmas—strategic, ethical, political—that they present. Read an excerpt below.

Charlie Rose: Peter Singer, put this in the context of warfare overall.

Peter Singer: Well you have a revolutionary change that’s happening in the technology of war. Now, the question here is, are we talking about war or counterterrorism—we’ve got things conflated. But when you look at the technology of drones, it’s a gamechanger in war. It’s something along the level of the introduction of gunpowder or the steam engine or the airplane. By that I mean it gives you a series of capabilities that we didn’t imagine we’d have a generation ago, but also it’s giving us a series of dilemmas that we also didn’t imagine we’d be having a generation ago. And they’re dilemmas that are political, strategic, tactical, all the way down to ethical and legal.

Now one thing that’s happening here I think that’s a challenge is that we’re seeing things conflated. So, just as the example that Scott gave of the conflation between the JSOC kill list and process—the Joint Special Operations Command on the military side—and the one that the CIA is doing, both of which are taking place in the shadow wars that are out there.

Peter Singer: Signature strikes is an illustration of this, where on one hand we’ve seen administration officials say either “we don’t do that,” and other times we’ve heard them say “we do do that, but this is why.” But then we also have a variety of tactics beyond signature strikes that, for example, in an overt military operation you would never utilize.

One’s called a 'double tap strike,' which is where you strike at a target and then you wait for the rescuers to come about and you strike again. Now that’s been something that we’ve pointed out that if adversaries did that in Afghanistan or Iraq we would say “how dare you, this is evidence of how bad they are.” Yet there have been reports that we may have conducted strikes in a similar manner. Don’t know whether they’re confirmed or not.

But what I’m getting at here is that a civilian, political appointee lawyer, operating under a very different set of laws and priorities, looks at that issue and the question of what tactics you might bring, what rules of engagement you operate under, very differently from how a military lawyer would. And that’s part of the importance of whether these do shift from intelligence agency to military, but also whether they stay in the complete black ops world or whether we own up to the fact that these are not covert operations anymore, they’re frankly not so covert, and we need to stop running away from them and embrace the fact that we are doing them and these are the rules we’re going to operate under and actually stick and follow those rules.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Charlie Rose

Image Source: © KCNA KCNA / Reuters

America's War on Terror Is Now a War Against Tribal Islam

Akbar Ahmed — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

With the United States relying on the use of drones to target Islamic extremists, Nonresident Senior Fellow Akbar Ahmed writes in his new book, The Thistle and the Drone, that what began as the war on terror after the 9/11 attacks is now a war against tribal Islam. Ahmed explains that women are the innocent victims who suffer the most and argues that America must re-evaluate its war on terror and use proper methods to attack the right enemy.

The impact of the drones has been devastating and counterproductive.

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The Thistle and Drone is a Metaphor of Two Kinds of Society in the 21st Century

We are destroying an entire generation of human beings who are completely innocent.

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The Ordinary People Who Suffer the Most are Women

The enemy is not the ordinary tribesman. The enemy are the criminals.

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Tribalism and Ethnicity are Still Very Important in Traditional Societies

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Authors

Akbar Ahmed

How America’s War on Terror became a Global War on Tribal Islam

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:00:00 -0400

Event Information

March 14, 2013
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Along with the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, America’s global war on terror has been characterized by the use of drones. In his new book, The Thistle and the Drone (Brookings, 2013), Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World Nonresident Senior Fellow Akbar Ahmed—the Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic Studies at American University and former Pakistani high commissioner to the United Kingdom— examines the tribal societies on the borders between nations who are the drones' primary victims. He provides a fresh and unprecedented paradigm for understanding the war on terror, based in the broken relationship between these tribal societies and their central governments. Beginning with Waziristan in Pakistan and expanding to similar tribal societies in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, Ahmed demonstrates how America's war on terror became a global war on tribal Islam. This is the third volume in his trilogy about relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world after 9/11 that includes Journey into Islam (Brookings, 2007) and Journey into America (Brookings, 2010).

On March 14, the Brookings Press hosted the launch of The Thistle and the Drone featuring a discussion on the regional, societal and humanitarian effects of the war on terrorism. Following Ahmed’s presentation, Mowahid Shah, a former Pakistani minister, and Sally Quinn, editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s “On Faith,” joined the conversation. Khalid Aziz, a leading official from Pakistan, formerly in charge of Waziristan, offered recorded remarks via video.

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How America’s War on Terror became a Global War on Tribal Islam

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The Global Swarm: An International Drone Market

Peter W. Singer — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

"One plan was to use an unmanned aerial vehicle to carry 20kg of TNT to bomb the area, but the plan was rejected because we were ordered to catch him alive." This is what Liu Yuejin, director of China's public security ministry's anti-drug bureau, described of the manhunt for Naw Kham, the ringleader of a large drug trafficking outfit based in the Golden Triangle, who was suspected of killing 13 Chinese sailors. Ultimately, they got him via a cross-border nighttime ambush, the Chinese version of the Abbottabad raid.

This case, however, is useful to think about when talking about the global market for unmanned aerial systems (aka "drones") and where it is headed, a topic that got new energy last week with a New York Times report on the confusion as to whether it was American or Pakistani drones that carried out a controversial airstrike.

Too often in policy and media circles, we discuss a supposed American monopoly on drones that is potentially ending. Or, as Time magazine entitled a story, "Drone Monopoly: Hope You Enjoyed It While It Lasted." The article goes on to say,"It is going to happen; the only question is when."

The answer is: several years ago.

Read the full article »

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

The Predator Comes Home: A Primer on Domestic Drones, their Huge Business Opportunities, and their Deep Political, Moral, and Legal Challenges

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:09:00 -0500

At the turn of the last century, a strange new technology began to appear in America. As a January 4, 1900 article about one of the very first sightings in the state of Florida described, “The Locomobile resembles a rubber-tired driving buggy in its outward appearance, except that no allowance is made for attaching a horse…A brake is attached to the rear axle that will stop the machine in a much shorter space than a horse can be stopped.”[1]

The locomobile, or “horseless carriage,” caught people’s fancy and powered a huge new industry. Businesses opened up in places that ranged from Basic City, Virginia, home of the Dawson Steam Auto-Mobile, a two-cylinder runabout with single chain drive and tiller rather than a steering wheel, to the Southern Automobile Manufacturing Company of Jacksonville, which assembled five cars a day that sold for a princely sum of $400 each.

Soon, the industry rippled out into all sorts of directions. It was only two years after the first car hit the roads of Florida that the first car dealership was created. This led to new endeavors in areas like the logistics and support “garages,” which had ripple effects out into other areas. For instance, just three years after the first news article on the locomobile appeared in The Florida Times-Union & Citizen, the very first newspaper advertisement for one appeared.

But this new technology also brought strange new questions, such as how to protect people from them. The first fine for “speeding” came just a year later in 1904, when a man was arrested for endangering the lives and property of pedestrians in downtown Jacksonville. He had exceeded the 6 mile per hour speed limit

The new technology also created new demands on governments, like an entire new type of infrastructure. Staying in Florida for the moment, it was in 1907 when the first of what we now call “snow birds” arrived via horseless carriage. Mr. Ralph Owen “accomplished the amazing feat of driving an Oldsmobile motorcar from New York to Florida in only 15 days.”

The reason this took so long is that no one was ready for it, especially the government. There were no real roads, at least as we think about them now, and no truly reliable maps for the pathways that did exist. Indeed, as late as 1921 the Automobile Club of America recommended that motorists traveling from New England to Florida simply bypass the entire state of Virginia because of these problems.

It wasn’t just the poor state of transportation that required a network of roads and highways to be funded but also basic issues like what safety equipment the new technology required. For example, early horseless carriages often had headlights but no turn signals. Drivers had to use hand signals to indicate their intentions to turn or slow down. A new business started selling a seeming solution, Devilseye Reflector Rings.[2] Drivers would wear large red rings on their fingers at night so that when they held their hand outside the car the rings reflected other headlights and allowed other drivers to see the signal. Soon, this concept was replaced by the novel idea of requiring the reflector be embedded in the car rather than carried by the driver.

These stories of the early days of “horseless carriages” and “locomobiles” aren’t just fascinating but they should serve to help us frame the issues we face today in “unmanned systems” and robotics. They were a technology that once seemed alien but we figured it out.

Where are we now? Robots and War

While unmanned systems have a long history dating back to Da Vinci’s designs for a robotic knight, and first emerged in war with German remote-controlled torpedo boats in the First World War, it wasn’t until just a decade ago that they truly took off.[3] Advances in technology made unmanned systems more usable, especially through the incorporation of GPS technology that allowed such systems to locate themselves in the world. At the same time, the new conflicts that followed 9/11 drove demand. When U.S. forces first went into Afghanistan, the U.S. military had only a handful of unmanned aerial systems (UAS, also called “remotely piloted aircraft” or, more colloquially, “drones”) in the air, none of them armed, and zero on the ground. Now it has a force inventory of more than 8,000 in the air and more than 12,000 on the ground. Another example of how far the change has gone is that last year, the U.S. Air Force trained more unmanned systems operators than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

But when we think about technologies like the Predator or the PackBot, we need to remember that they are just the first generation, the Model T Fords and Wright Flyers compared to what is already in the prototype stage.[4] We are still at the “horseless” stage of this technology, describing these technologies by what they are not rather than wrestling with what they truly are. These technologies are “killer applications” in all the meanings of the term. They are technologies that advance the power of killing. They are also technologies that have a disruptive effect on existing structures and programs. That is, they are akin to advancements like the airplane or the steam engine in allowing greater power and reach in war, but they are also akin to what iPods did to the music industry, changing it forever.

What Next? The Robotics Revolution

While many are surprised by the existing use of robotics, the pace of change won’t stop. We may have thousands now, but as one three-star U.S. Air Force general noted in my book Wired for War, very soon it will be “tens of thousands.”[5]

But the numbers matter in another way. It won’t be tens of thousands of today’s robots, but tens of thousands of tomorrow’s robots, with far different capabilities.

One of the laws in action when it comes to technology is Moore’s Law, which states that the computing power that can fit on a microchip doubles just under every two years or so.[6] It has become an encapsulation of broader exponential trends in technology that have occurred throughout history, with technological power constantly doubling in everything from power to storage to broader innovation patterns.[7] If Moore’s Law holds true over the next 25 years the way it has held true over the last 40 years, then our chips, our computers, and, yes, our robots will be as much as a billion times more powerful than today. But Moore’s Law is not a law of physics. It doesn’t have to hold true. What if our technology moves at a pace just 1/1000^th slower than it has historically? In this slowed-down scenario, we’d only see a mere 1,000,000 times the change.

The bottom line is that what was once only fodder for science-fiction conventions like Comic-Con is now being talked about seriously in places like the Pentagon. A robotics revolution is at hand.

We should be crystal clear here. The robot revolution happening is not the Robopocalypse that Steven Spielberg was preparing to film.[8] It is not the type where you need to worry about the former governor of California showing up at your door, à la The Terminator.[9]

Instead, every so often, a technology comes along that changes the rules of the game. These technologies – be they fire, the printing press, gunpowder, the steam engine, the computer, etc. – are rare but truly consequential.

The key to making technology truly revolutionary is not merely its new capabilities but its questions. Revolutionary technologies force us to ask new questions about what is possible and consider things that weren’t conceivable a generation before. But they also force us to relook at what is proper. They raise issues of right and wrong that we didn’t have to wrestle with before.

The historical comparisons that people make to the robotics revolution illustrate this. When I conducted interviews for my book, I asked people to give historical parallels to where they think we stand now with robotics. As I noted earlier with the comparison to the “horseless carriage,” many of them, especially engineers, liken where we are now with robotics to the advent of the automobile.

If the horseless carriage is the parallel, think of the ripple effects that cars had on everything from our geopolitics to our law enforcement. A group of people who were, at the time, desert nomads became crucial players in the global economy simply because they lived over a sticky black substance previously considered more of a nuisance than anything else. The greater use of that same – now crucial – resource has changed the global climate. The growing use of cars, in turn, led to new concepts that reshaped the landscape, whether through highways and suburbia, or through new social notions, like dating (teens previously could only court on parents’ front porches).

And of course a whole new world requires the establishment of rules of the game, or rather new rules of the road. It wasn’t just a matter of fines for “speeding,” but also changes to the very structure of American law enforcement. The rise of easy cross state crime enabled by the speed and reach of horseless carriages, such as the string of bank robberies by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, helped lead to the rise of the then Bureau of Investigation, now the modern FBI.[10]

Others, such as Bill Gates, make a different comparison to the computer in 1980.[11] Much like robots today, the computer back then was a big, bulky device for which we could only conceive a few functions. Importantly, the military was the main spender on computers’ research and development and a key client driving the marketplace, again comparable to the development of robots.

But soon, computers changed. They got smaller. We figured out more and more functions and applications that they could perform, both in war and in civilian life. And they proliferated. It has reached the point that we have stopped thinking of most of them as “computers.” I drive a car with more than 100 computers in it. No one calls it a “computerized car.” I have a number of computers in my kitchen. I call them things like “microwave” or “coffee maker.”

The same thing is happening with robotics – not just the changes in size and proliferation, but also the reconceptualization. Indeed, if you buy a new car today, it will come equipped with things like “parking assist” or “crash avoidance” technologies.[12] These are kind ways of saying that we stupid humans are not good at parallel parking and too often don’t look in our blind spots. So, the robotic systems in our car will handle these things for us.

But again, just as the story of the automobile reveals more than just the shift from owning horse stables to garages, so, too, was the computer about more than never having to remember long-division tables again. What were important were the ripple effects. The game-changing technology reshaped the modern information-rich economy, allowing billions of dollars to be made and lost in nanoseconds. It led to new concepts of social relations and even privacy. I can now “friend” someone in China I’ve never met. Of course, I may now be concerned about my niece social networking with people whom she’s never met. It became a tool of law enforcement (imagine the TV show CSI without computers) but also led to new types of crime (imagine explaining “identity theft” to J. Edgar Hoover).[13] And it may even be leading to a new domain of war, so-called “cyber-war.”

This comparison is a striking one because it illustrates how bureaucracies often have a hard time keeping up with revolutionary change. For example, the FBI director was so averse to computers that he didn’t have one in his office and never used email as late as 2001. Sound amazing? Well, the current Secretary of Homeland Security, the agency in charge of the civilian side of American cyber-security, doesn’t use email today.[14]

The final comparison that is made is perhaps a darker one: work on the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Scientists, in particular, talk about the field of robotics today in much the same way they talked about nuclear research back in the 1940s. If you are a young engineer or computer scientist, you will find yourself drawn towards it. It is the cutting edge. It is where the excitement is and where the research money is.

But many worry that their experience will turn out just like that of those amazing minds that were drawn towards the Manhattan Project, like a moth to an atomic flame.[15] They are concerned that the same mistakes could be repeated – of creating something and only after the fact worrying about the consequences. Will robotics, too, be a genie we one day wish we could put back in the bottle?

The underlying point here is that too often in discussions of technology we focus on the widget. We focus on how it works and its direct and obvious uses. But that is not what history cares about. The ripple effects are what make that technology revolutionary. Indeed, with robotics, issues on the technical side may ultimately be much easier to resolve than dilemmas that emerge from our human use of them.

How Our Robots Are Changing

The first generations of aerial robots were much like the manned systems they were replacing, even down to some of them having the cockpit where the pilot would sit looking like it’d been painted over. Now we are seeing an explosion of new types, ranging in size, shape, and form. With no human inside, they can stay in the air not just for hours, but for days, months, and even years, having wings the length of a football field.[16] Alternatively, they can be as small as an insect.[17] And, of course, they need not be modelled after our manned machines, but can instead take their design cues from nature, or even the bizarre.[18]

The other key change is their gain in intelligence and autonomy. This is a whole new frontier. Traditionally, we’ve compared weapons based on their lethality, range, or speed. Think about the comparison between a Second World War B-17 bomber plane and a B-24 bomber plane. The B-24 could be considered superior because it flew faster, further, and carried more bombs. The same could be said in comparing the MQ-9 Reaper UAS with its earlier version, the MQ-1 Predator. The Reaper is better because it flies faster and further and carries more bombs. But the Reaper is also something else, which we couldn’t say about previous generations of weapons: It is smarter, and more autonomous. We are not yet in the world of The Terminator, where weapons make their own decisions, but the Reaper can do things like take off and land on its own, fly mission waypoints on its own, and carry sensors that make sense of what they are seeing, such as identifying a disruption in the dirt from a mile overhead and recognizing it as something that we humans call a “footprint.”

From these changes comes a crucial opening up of the user base and the functionality of robotics. Much as you once could only use a computer if you first learned a new language like “Basic,” so, too, could you once only use robotic systems if you were highly trained. To fly an early version Predator drone, for instance, you had to be a rated pilot. Now, just as my three-year-old can navigate his iPad without even knowing how to spell, so, too, can you fly some drones with an iPhone app.

The Civilian Side Opens

This greater usability opens up the realm of possible users, lowering the costs and spreading the technology even further. So, we are seeing the range of uses expand not just in the military, but also, once proved on the military side, moving over to the civilian world. Take aerial surveillance with UAS. It’s gone from a military activity to border security to police to environmental monitoring.[19] Similarly, the notion of using a robotic helicopter to carry cargo to austere locations was first tested out in Afghanistan, but is now being looked at by logging companies.[20]

A key step in moving this forward in the U.S. will be the integration of unmanned aerial systems into the National Airspace System (NAS) and expanded civilian use. While there has been a huge amount of energy around the topic of domestic drones, such that many politicians speak about them as if they are already “watching everything from above,” the present laws restrict civilian use. An ever growing number of special permits, however, have been issued to domestic operators, now summing 1,428.[21] These early users range from small police departments like Mesa County in Colorado, which found they cost over 90% less to operate than police helicopters, to universities conducting environmental research in Alaska.[22]

Congress has set a deadline of September 2015 for the Federal Aviation Authority to figure out how to make this happen on a more regularized basis, in essence opening up the national airspace to the civilian public and private sector use.[23] As part of this process, there are to be six test sites created around the nation, which some twenty states are competing to be awarded. While it is unclear if the FAA will meet the deadline, the step is coming, and with it, the next ripple effect outwards in the market.

Indeed, what the opening of the civilian airspace will do to robotics is akin to what the Internet did to desktop computing. The field was there before, but then it boomed like never before. For instance, if you are a maker of small tactical surveillance drones in the U.S. right now, your client pool numbers effectively one: the U.S. military. But when the airspace opens up, you will have as many as 21,000 new clients – all the state and local police agencies that either have expensive manned aviation departments or can’t afford them.

The scale of this market is estimated to be in the tens of billions in its first years, but it is frankly too early to know where it will end up.[24] If history is any lesson, we shouldn’t just focus on the sale of drones in roles we already know but recognize that there are many more ways we don’t yet know of where robotics might be applied to other fields. Who saw agriculture as a field to be computerized? And yet the application of computers has led to massive efficiency gains. So, too, is agriculture appearing to be an area in which robotics will drive immense change. Agribusinesses nationwide such as Monsanto are lobbying for the use of domestic drones in roles that range from the monitoring and surveillance of the fields to the crop-dusting to the picking and harvesting.[25]

Impact on U.S. military

There are a huge set of ripple effects that will emerge from the opening up of the airspace to domestic drones. One is a potential role reversal. What will be the impact on the U.S. military as a technology area that it once led in, blossoms on the civilian side?

Take the areas of acquisitions. What happens when manufacturers have a wider set of clients than just the DoD and therefore become less responsive to its needs? If the parallel is computers, microchips and IT networks, the U.S. military once was in the lead in the research and development and then purchasing of computing. Now it is often behind the civilian side and, indeed, in areas like microchips can’t get makers to shift to its unique demands.

Beyond the obvious applications moved over from the military side, the real change occurs when imagination and innovation cross with profit-seeking. This is where parallels to computer or aviation history hold most, as the civilian side then starts to lead the way for the military. For instance, the idea of moving freight via airplanes was not originally a military role. It started out in 1919 with civilians. Today, it’s both a major military role (the U.S. military’s Air Mobility Command has some 134,000 members) and an industry that moves more than $10 trillion in global trade.[26] And, yes, a number of airfreight firms are starting to explore drone air cargo delivery, from large-scale trans-oceanic movement to small movement of medical supplies or even fast food.[27]

Similarly, what will it mean for training, when more and more young service men will come in with experience using the technology at home, or even when they see more advanced versions on the market than what they get from the Pentagon? The bottom line is that discussions of the civilian side also matter to the military.

Economic Winners and Losers: Nations and Communities

A new industry raises another ripple effect: Who will be the winners and losers?

One can certainly think about this issue on the global level. The U.S. faces a strange situation of trying to compete in a world economy, where technologic knowhow is a key differentiator, and yet has an education system that too often moves in an opposite direction. American high school students rank 23rd in science and 31st in math among wealthy nations, and 27th in college graduates with degrees in science and math. And the trends aren’t improving greatly. In 2004, the number of American computer science majors was 60,000. In 2013, it had shrunk to 38,000. (It is all not bad news, we are graduating twice as many journalists.) [28]

But the issue of winners and losers isn’t just a matter for Washington policymakers; it should have huge resonance for state and local leaders. That is, if what is playing out in the field of robotics is comparable to horseless carriage, who is Detroit, which became the epicenter of this industry for the 20^th century, and who are going to be like Basic City or Jacksonville that had early automobile companies around the same period? Or, if the comparison is to computers, who is going to be akin to Philadelphia, a key node in the early days of computing, and who is going to be the robotics version of Silicon Valley?

Answering this question turns on challenging a false notion that has taken hold, that in today’s world of globalization distance doesn’t matter. But despite our new technologies, we have repeatedly seen at the state and metropolitan level, success happens in clusters.[29]

As Maryann Feldman writes in her study Location, Location, Location: Creating Innovation Clusters, “Grounded in place, innovation and entrepreneurship rely on an ecosystem of firms (both suppliers and customers), universities and community colleges, government agencies, and trade associations, all systematically aligned to encourage creativity and experimentation. Once started, concentrations of industries within places become self-reinforcing as talent is attracted to opportunity, the flow of ideas increases, and their potential is understood and appreciated. With that dynamic, it becomes easier and less costly for entrepreneurs to realize their dreams.”[30]

The role of the government is central in developing these clusters. While entrepreneurship is a private-sector activity, it is public policy that sets the stage. For example, I am from North Carolina. Like that old Saturday Night Live joke, we were really happy there was a South Carolina and District of Columbia whenever the education rankings came out, as that meant we had someone to look down on from our lofty perch of 49^th in the nation.

Yet, when North Carolina’s textile manufacturing economy declined, the local government did something brilliant. It fostered a new “innovation cluster” centering around the Research Triangle Park that is now the home to more than 130 research facilities and helped North Carolina become one of the hubs of the biotech industry. This boom then benefited the rest of the state and made it one of fastest growing states in the nation during this period. The success didn’t happen overnight. As Feldman noted, the policy world can nurture these kinds of success stories via “…steady and consistent state policy, investment tax credits, and quasi-governmental, sector-specific agencies.”

Job Gain and Loss

The rise of domestic robotics use holds the potential to create a number of jobs. Indeed, the AUSVI industry trade group has claimed some 70,000 new jobs will be created in just the first few years once the airspace opens up, arguing (with an obvious self-interest) that the US loses some $27 million per day in economic activity the longer it waits to do so.[31]

This boom for the robotics industry, though, raises deep questions not just of which areas will win out, but also which individuals will win and lose.

Just as the horseless carriage made titans of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, computers created a whole new generation of billionaires and millionaires. But, of course, just like with the craftsmen before the first industrial age, there were also losers. For hundreds of years, there was a highly skilled profession of men who did mathematics for hire. They were well paid, many making the equivalent of $200,000 a year. They were called “calculators.” They have gone the way of so many other professions reshaped by new technology like the blacksmith making horseshoes or the elevator operator.

Indeed, robots have already and will continue to shape the economy both as an issue of growth and job loss. As a recent MIT study found, automation is "destroying jobs and creating prosperity," explaining both the gains in efficiency and the loss of as many as six million jobs over the last decade.[32] Robots are a large part of the reason the automobile companies of Detroit are back, but so many automobile workers are not back to work. (Already, one in ten has been replaced by a factory line robot, with many companies across a wide array of industries planning to fully automate their assembly lines.)[33]

Such trends mean that a part of our economy will make a great deal of money from robotics, which is why there is so much lobbying behind the area today. Last year, drone manufacturers gave $2.3 million in contributions to the House Unmanned Systems Caucus, while the industry’s trade group spent a quarter million lobbying for the FAA bill that opens up the airspace (the group proudly told donors that “Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word” in the language of the bill).[34] But these very same trends also mean the expansion of the industry will be seen as a threat to livelihoods, further stoking tensions and underlying suspicions of the technology.

Law and Privacy

One profession that will be busy, though, is the lawyers.

While some say drones are no different than manned planes or fixed surveillance cameras on the street, and so raise no new privacy issues, this is incorrect at face value. There are similarities but also fundamental differences.

To operate, a robot is always gathering and storing information about the world around it. Always. This is different from a regular plane, for example, where the human operator is gathering most of this information but cannot store it for playback. A robot’s operating requirements mean that even in the course of regular operations, it is gathering and storing information about everything that crosses its path. This gives robots an advantage over human operated planes, where a conscious decision to acquire and store data must be made. The other main advantage of unmanned systems is their ability to loiter for long periods of time, which again allows them to draw in more information, and as the ACLU's Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump have written, also allows them to “...pose a more serious threat to privacy than do manned flights."[35]

Taking in vast quantities of information even unintentionally is a key part of the concern. For example, a robot on a “Where’s Waldo?” mission to hunt down one person in a city will still be gathering data on the entirety of the city throughout the search process.

Visual information is not the only type of data being gathered. Unmanned systems also carry out electronic surveillance. A drone unveiled at the DefCon hacking conference in 2011 can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations – without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer.[36] This type of drone draws in electronic information on a wide group of people beyond the intended target – and, different from a computer, includes those who have not signed a user agreement or otherwise signaled they accept this intrusion upon their privacy.

Finally, the size and mobility of robotic systems is fundamentally different – many are being designed in increasingly smaller sizes, and they are able to move and track targets covertly when required. A robotic system can watch from above, but can also get up close and personal, unlike a fixed security camera or a high altitude spy plane.

These differences lie at the heart of a lot of the worries over domestic use of unmanned systems. Such suspicion has mobilized left wing groups like the ACLU, but also those on the right, such as the Tea Party movement, perhaps best illustrated by the speeches and legislation of Senator Rand Paul, who has attempted in the words of one article to launch “a Preemptive Strike Against Domestic Drone Use.”[37] While some 20 states from Nevada to North Carolina are competing to be the home of the six FAA drone test sites, the anti-drone movement has crystallized into efforts to ban the use of drones in at least ten state legislatures, ranging from Virginia to Oregon. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer, a right wing commentator on Fox News, even urged Americans to use their Second Amendment powers to shoot down drones (something already done by a group of hunters in Pennsylvania, who shot down a drone doing environmental monitoring).[38]

Building Code

With these concerns brewing, we are starting to see some steps forward to respond. For instance, an industry “code of conduct” has been put forward by the same trade group that prompted the current controversy over domestic drones with its successful lobby to open the airspace. The AUVSI code took on many of the concerns circulating, grouping them into three core themes of Safety, Professionalism, and Respect.[39] It laid out how the industry and users would "commit" to not operating drones "in a manner that presents undue risk to persons or property;" to planning for "all anticipated off-nominal events;" and to share such contingency plans with "all appropriate authorities." It made great sense and was reported widely.

The challenge for the robotics code of conduct, however, is much the same as other industries' attempts at self-regulation, ranging from banking to the private military industry. It's a laudable start, but it doesn't change the underlying issues and concerns. Like such other would-be "codes of conduct," it lacks a key ingredient: consequences.

It is a voluntary code with no results if one violates it. Indeed, much of what is laid out is actually restatements of responsibilities the firms and users already should abide by, regardless of any code. For example, the code says that the firms "will comply with all federal, state and local laws." So, before the code, they could violate the law at will? Of course not.

But more importantly, the code is not able to deal effectively with all the areas where the law is absent or vague. It says that "We will ensure that UAS are piloted by individuals who are properly trained and competent to operate the vehicle or its systems." Who will determine this, and what does "trained and competent" mean in a world where some believe drones should only be operated by rated pilots, even though new versions can be flown by teens using iPhone apps?

Likewise, the code pledges to "respect the privacy of individuals," which is a bold statement. But "Respect" could be anything from avoiding the monitoring of individuals without their express permission to showing them "respect" only in the public-relations sense.

Of course, these are thorny issues. Indeed, it's their very thorniness that is why an industry self-regulatory code is the beginning of the discussion, not the final answer

The Police Weigh In

The same could be said of a push by police chiefs, who have offered a code of conduct for their use of drones.[40] This effort asserted that police wouldn’t let any images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles be open to inspection by the public, and that the images would not be stored, unless they are evidence of a potential crime or part of an ongoing investigation. Of course, that’s a pretty large out clause.

More importantly, the police chiefs’ effort is a proposal, not yet policy, with some huge gaps. Even worse, it has a big dose of unrealism. For instance, it suggests that police would use a “Reverse 911 telephone system to alert those living and working in the vicinity of aircraft operations. If such a system is not available, the use of patrol car public address systems should be considered.”

In reality, such a system would be unworkable and even laughable. Each and every time a UAS flies, the police are going to call all of an area’s residents’ home phone (setting aside the growing number who only have mobile phones)? Or, alternatively, the police are planning to ensure public awareness of potential privacy losses by recreating the scene from the movie The Blue Brothers, driving through the streets yelling out on a car’s bullhorn?

Similarly, we have next order questions, like whether drones should be armed. This is cast aside quickly in the proposed codes, but again definition and context matters. Law enforcement in Texas has shown interest in unmanned aerial systems armed with a shotgun that shoots “less than lethal” rounds.[41] One person’s shotgun or taser is another person’s unarmed drone.

The bottom line is that, as with revolutionary inventions of the past, no amount of handwringing by pundits late to the game will see a technology of such great promise banned.

Instead, a revolutionized world requires the establishment of new rules, which in turn requires an understanding of the new technology. Much of the substance of these rules will likely come from both public discourse and the private sector. For example, the origins of the modern way we drive can be found in Rules of the Road, published in 1903 by William P. Eno. Known as "the father of traffic safety,” Eno’s book contained such revolutionary ideas as cars only passing on the left, stop-lights and one-way streets. (Ironically he never drove himself; he was always chauffeured).[42]

We are seeing a similar evolution now, whether in the development of industry codes of conduct or guidelines for university research groups. But much like the early “rules of the road,” these will need enforceable laws to make them real. Early cars and planes, for instance, needed more than Eno’s book – mainstream use of these inventions demanded the drafting of traffic laws and the creation of regulatory institutions like the Federal Aviation Administration. Similarly, the increasing use of unmanned systems has highlighted a gap at the state and federal level that demands action.

Where the Law Goes Next

As these laws are hopefully built by Congress, we need to recognize that much of what is written in the law is just the first draft. For instance, federal district court judges have spoken about how, much like with computers and the privacy questions they created, questions over the proper use of drones by law enforcement will end up as Supreme Court cases.

But even then what will the Court decide? A case that is frequently spoken about as a potential precedent is 2001's Kyllo vs. U.S.[43] In this instance, a federal government agent used a "thermal imaging device" to scan a home in Florence, Oregon. They did not have a warrant, but it allowed them to learn that marijuana was being grown.

When the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, the majority opinion, written by Judge Scalia, was that when the "government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search,' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

Many point to this as evidence that the Supreme Court will be less likely to approve domestic use of drones in an intrusive way by police. But they ignore the caveat. What about when a technology becomes in “general public use,” as drones are evolving to?

Similarly, last January in the U.S. v. Jones case, the Supreme Court ruled that placing a GPS tracking device on a vehicle is considered a search under the Constitution and required a warrant. Notably, though, it was the physical placement of the GPS on the vehicle that mattered most.[44] The Court said other evidence obtained without using the GPS device was admissible because the suspect had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" for a vehicle on the public streets. One way to read it is that your car can’t be tracked without a warrant; another is that your car can be tracked without a warrant, just as long as the police don’t place anything on the vehicle, which is no longer required with our current technology.

The underlying point is that the precedents cited with certainty by analysts and lawyers are often not as clear as they might be. And, when there are questions, or even potential abuses, it will be years before the legal system resolves them. The GPS case happened in 2005, but didn’t get resolved until 2012, well after the technology of a physical tracker was no longer needed. Moreover, just because the Supreme Court ruled one way, doesn’t mean it won’t rule differently on very similar issues, just at a different time. As everything from voting rights to abortion rulings demonstrates, all it takes to reorder the law is just a few seats changed on the court. Neither technology nor laws are written in stone, and justices don’t live forever.

User Questions

The innovation spread of robotics represents another trend of opportunity and peril. An ever-wider set of users is innovating for all sorts of positive purposes with robotics, from the great work being done by young students at robotics labs at McGill University to the team in Australia that built an autonomous drone to help find lost hikers.[45]

But not all of the people behind machines have only the best in mind. Take the traditional notion of using a robotic drone for surveillance. The new users have not just been militaries or police, but have also been civilians. These include news journalists who have reported on natural disasters with drones, as well as parents who want new ways to watch their kids.[46] A father in the U.S. gave new meaning to the term “helicopter parent,” using an automated quadcopter drone to escort his child to the school bus stop.[47]

The problem is that each and every technology has its darker side. The technology is enabling a new field of drone journalism (already taught at University of Nebraska and University of Missouri) that reports important stories with a whole new level of fidelity.[48] But the same phenomenon also advances the field of paparazzi. For instance, Gary Morgan, chief executive officer of Splash News, a celebrity-photo agency, has already said he’d like to be buzzing his quarry soon with silent, miniature drones mounted with tiny cameras: “It would strike fear in the hearts of every celebrity having a birthday party.”[49] And, one has the sense that the child may end up telling a therapist one day about his father loving him a bit too much, to the extent of following him with a drone.

Open Source

More seriously, just as software has gone “open source,” so has warfare. Robotics is not a technology like the atomic bomb or aircraft carrier, where only the great powers can build and use it effectively. Instead, just like with the “app” in the field of software, it is not just the big boys who control the field. The barriers to entry are not exceptionally high, and that means that bad actors will be able to gain and use this advanced technology.

If history is any guide, the repurposing of a low-entry revolutionary technology tends to happen fairly quickly. The first car bomb was set off as early as 1905, used in an assassination attempt on the Ottoman sultan. Similarly, the first hijacking of a plane took place in 1931, very early in civilian air travel.

A particular area of concern, then, is the use of robotic systems by terrorists and other non-state actors. Israel as a state has long used drones, and now so does its non-state opposition. Hezbollah, for example, is not a major state military, but it has already operated UAVs, as too has Hamas.[50]

The impact of this trend is twofold. The first is that it reinforces the empowerment of individuals and small groups against the power of the state. During the Second World War, for example, Hitler’s entire Luftwaffe could not manage to reach across the Atlantic to strike at Canada or the U.S. Just a few years ago, a blind 77-year-old man managed to build his own drone that flew itself across the Atlantic.[51]

And one man’s hobby may be another man’s plot. In 2011, the FBI arrested Rezwan Ferdaus, a man who wanted to recreate the 9/11 attacks (not so ironically, he had been angered by drone attacks in the Mideast intended to stop terrorism).[52] Unable to hijack planes, he instead obtained a large drone and planned to fly it into the Pentagon. Fortunately, he made the mistake of asking an FBI informant where he could obtain C-4 explosives. The plot was averted, but it showed we are now in a world where it is easier to get the drone than the bomb.

This greater reach and power may also see a lowering of the bar. One does not have to be suicidal to carry out attacks that previously might have required one to be so. This allows new players into the game, making al-Qaeda 2.0 and the next-generation version of the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh far more lethal.

Just as car bombs are not the only way automobile technology has been misused, we should not make the mistake of only focusing on terrorism when it comes to the potential criminals uses of robotics. The early horseless carriage may have been reworked into a car bomb by turn-of-the-century terrorists, but the main illegal use was as a getaway device for criminals. Similarly, the best example of innovation in the field of robotics last year might be the team of thieves in Taiwan, who used tiny helicopters equipped with pinhole cameras to carry out a jewellery heist. They made away with $4 million worth of loot before being caught.

Accountability

The challenge for the law is not just how to prevent bad guys from doing bad things, but what to do when things go wrong without someone having bad intent, such as when the Google car was in a wreck in August 2011. Like most wrecks, the various sides involved blamed each other, just now they did it via online social networks.

Now take these issues and move them into the air. Congressional investigators report that there were over 200 drone accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of four years. This doesn’t include the many that happened in the not so covert world of strikes in Pakistan and Somalia. Perhaps the most amusing, but also maybe scary case took place at a base in Djibouti in March 2011.

As The Washington Post reported, a Predator parked at the Camp Lemonnier started its engine without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed. “Technicians concluded that a software bug had infected the “brains” of the drone, but never pinpointed the problem…“After that whole starting-itself incident, we were fairly wary of the aircraft and watched it pretty closely,” the Air Force squadron commander testified to an investigative board.”[53]

The issue here isn’t that Predators are poised to take over the homeland, but rather another vexing question of law, politics, and ethics. Robotics has a long history of what one Vice President of a technology firm described to me as “oops moments.” These are when things don’t work out with your machine as planned and you have to take it back from the field. With military robotics, the examples range from the machine gun armed UGV that went “squirrelly” and started spinning around during a demonstration to the automated anti-aircraft system in South Africa that had what investigators thought was a “software glitch” during a training exercise. It shot nine soldiers by accident in a real world version of the famous scene from Robocop.[54]

Today, these oops moments might even be intentionally caused by hostile man-made threats, including criminal or adversarial efforts at UAS communications interference or hacking. Here again, this scenario is not science fiction, but was recently demonstrated in a test in Texas, where a university team hacked the navigation system of a drone.[55]

The issues this phenomenon presents are not just how to avoid them through technology improvements and deconfliction protocols, but also more vexing questions of process, policy, and even philosophy. How do we investigate and apportion out accountability in a realm where more and more is happening outside our old concepts of control and responsibility?

For instance, aviation law and insurance right now focuses on determining if the problem was a hardware error (a widget broke), wetware error (the human pilot made an error), or spiritual (an “Act of God” caused the loss). Now we have much in between, the role that software plays. And in the software field, responsibility and accountability is not something easily assigned. It can be stretched over the long periods of time between design and use, over the large numbers of people involved in writing and selling and buying and upkeeping software, by a business approach that often intends to let the customer find the errors, and by the fact that software will repeatedly be put in real world circumstances for which it wasn’t originally designed. In short, we have to figure out how to catch up our 20^th century laws, with our 21^st century technologies.

The Psychology Side

The irony in all this is that while the future may involve more and more machines watching us, whether it is police watching city streets from above, or the NSA reading your email, or your phone letting Starbucks know you are walking nearby, how we react to it will still be driven by the very fuzzy combination of our human programming, our identity and emotions – our chemical makeup that drives human psychology.

So what then will be the reaction to this next level step in the surveillance state? Will we redefine our notions of privacy, reacting like how teenagers have handled their online behavior on Facebook and Twitter? Who cares if all my behavior is shared with the world? Instead, I’ll embrace a loss of privacy that would have shocked my parents generation, and even mock it. One can already see this in the new offerings of anti-drone “stealth clothing” for any “style-conscious” terrorists the U.S. seeks, as well as “fashionistas who value their privacy.” As its designer told the media, it also doesn’t fall along clear partisan lines, making it the “Project Runway” version of Rand Paul’s filibuster. “It interests people on the far right as much as it interests people on the far left. Ultra-conservatives see it as anti-government and ultra-liberals see it as anti-military.”[56]

Or will we fear it? And is this a good or bad thing? Some, such as one senior State Department official, believe that our unmanning of war “…Plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”[57] The carryover of this belief to the domestic side is the belief that a world of more drones will be a safer world, via a deterrent value. Where’s Waldo won’t mug me if he knows he’ll be caught on screen,

But the psychology of scaring people with technology is a tricky business. It’s the domestic version of the problem we face in our counterterrorism today. Abroad the U.S. government is wrestling with the robot’s impact on our very human “war of ideas” that we are fighting against radical movements. U.S. troops in Afghanistan describe having drones overhead as reassuring, saying they can sleep better as they feel like someone is always above, watching out for them. On the other hand, many civilians there say it’s intrusive, and creates a climate of fear and distrust. That is, on the domestic side, the risk is that robotic surveillance will instead be perceived as an intrusive “Big Brother” figure, as the Russian police who have already used drones to monitor protesters have been called.

The broader issue might not be one of fear, however, but a redefinition of how those who are watched look at the watchers. There is the potential that the drone could become emblematic of those trying to police people they don’t know, on the cheap, from afar. The drone becomes like the cameras favored by the disconnected Baltimore police force of the TV show The Wire, who watch a world of crime play out that they don’t understand.[58]

Conclusions

The ripple effects of robotics will continue to push out into all sorts of domains, in ways both expected and unexpected. Through it all, though, one fundamental principle will hold true as it has in the past: There are always two sides to technologic revolutions. From our new technologies we gain amazing capabilities that seem like they are straight from science-fiction. But from our new technologies we also gain new human dilemmas that seem like they are straight from science-fiction. Moore’s Law is operative, but so is Murphy’s Law.[59]

The issues of domestic “drones” all seem futuristic, but notice how none of the examples that were explored in this article were from the distant future. The questions they raise are fundamental policy questions of today. We can ignore them, or we can embrace and engage in the opportunities and dilemmas of these exciting times.

The above paper includes sections explored in the article The Robotics Revolution, for the Canadian International Council. The author would also like to thank the Christopher Newport University Center for American Studies.

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[38] Amy Worden, “Activist group’s drone shot while filming PA pigeon shoot,” philly.com, November 21, 2012, http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/pets/Activist-groups-drone-shot-while-filming-PA-pigeon-shoot.html.

[39] “Unmanned Aircraft System Operations Industry ‘Code of Conduct’,” Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, http://www.auvsi.org/conduct.

[40] Stephen Dinan, “Police chiefs adopt drone code of conduct,” The Washington Times, August 16, 2012, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/16/police-chiefs-adopt-drone-code-conduct/.

[41] Stephen Dean, “New Police Drone Near Houston Could Carry Weapons,” Click2Houston.com, October 29, 2011, http://www.click2houston.com/news/New-Police-Drone-Near-Houston-Could-Carry-Weapons/-/1735978/4717922/-/59xnnez/-/index.html.

[42] Sharon L. Cohen, “The History of Traffic Laws,” eHow, http://www.ehow.com/about_5436948_history-traffic-laws.html.

[43] “Kyllo v. United States,” CaseBriefs, http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/criminal-procedure/criminal-procedure-keyed-to-weinreb/electronic-surveillance-agents-and-informers-and-entrapment/kyllo-v-united-states-4/.

[44] Jess Bravin, “Justices Rein In Police on GPS Trackers,” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577178811800873358.html.

[45] “Center for Intelligence Machines,” McGill, 2013, http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/.

Asher Moses, “Drone finds dummy ‘bushwalker’ in world-first,” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 5, 2012, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/drone-finds-dummy-bushwalker-in-worldfirst-20121005-273lv.html.

[46] Melissa Bell, “Drone journalism? The idea could fly in the U.S.,” WorldView (blog), The Washington Post, December 4, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/drone-journalism-the-idea-could-fly-in-the-ussoon/2011/12/04/gIQAhYfXSO_blog.html.

[47] “Father builds flying drone camera to follow his son on his way to school,” Mail Online, November 30, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2240860/Father-builds-flying-drone-camera-follow-children-school-bus-stop.html?ito=feeds-newsxml.

[48] Neal Ungerleider, “Drones Go To Journalism School,” Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/3006192/drones-go-journalism-school.

[49] Siobhan Gorman, “Drones Get Ready to Fly, Unseen, Into Everyday Life,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703631704575551954273159086.html.

[50] Zeina Karam, “Hezbollah says it sent drone over Israel,” USA Today, October 11, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/10/11/israeli-leader-accuses-hezbollah-of-drone-launch/1627315/.

[51] Chris Anderson, “The patron saint of DIY drones,” Geekdad (blog), Wired, April 3, 2007, http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2007/04/the_patron_sain/.

[52] Peter Finn, “Mass. man accused of plotting to hit Pentagon and Capitol with drone aircraft,” The Washington Post, September 28, 2011, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-09-28/national/35274975_1_rezwan-ferdaus-undercover-agents-fbi.

[53] Craig Whitlock, “Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations,” The Washington Post, October 25, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/remote-us-base-at-core-of-secret-operations/2012/10/25/a26a9392-197a-11e2-bd10-5ff056538b7c_story.html.

[54] Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1987), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/.

[55] “Drone Hacked By University Of Texas At Austin Research Group,” The Huffington Post, June 29, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/29/drone-hacked-by-universit_n_1638100.html.

[56] Claire Stern, “Adam Harvey Launches Stealth Wear, an Anti-Drone Clothing Line,” The Daily Beast, March 5, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/05/adam-harvey-launches-stealth-wear-an-anti-drone-clothing-line.html.

[57] P. W. Singer, Wired for War.

[58] The Wire, created by David Simon (Blown Deadline Productions/Home Box Office, 2002-2008), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.

[59] Ranaan Avidor, Murphy’s laws site, http://www.murphys-laws.com/.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Ill Will and the Multiplier Effect: Counterterrorism Attacks in Pakistan

Paul R. Pillar — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

A story from northwest Pakistan involves a discrepancy between reality and perception with regard to U.S. drone strikes. Last month two attacks in the tribal belt generated the kind of spreading news that has come to be routinely associated with the drones. A couple of al-Qaeda types are killed, but so are several villagers. The Pakistani foreign ministry lodges a protest with the U.S. embassy. According to American officials, however, the United States and U.S. drones were not involved at all in the attacks. “They were not ours,” said one official.

American speculation is that the Pakistani military conducted the attacks and attributed them to the United States to escape blame for the collateral damage. If so, this represents a reversal of a previous Pakistani practice of claiming responsibility for what really were U.S. drone strikes, to escape the embarrassment of allowing the Americans to conduct, or not preventing them from conducting, attacks on Pakistani territory. So a variable in this case is whatever public relations problem the Pakistani military and government most want to avoid in any given week.

There is a larger phenomenon at work, however, which helps to account for the believability of the Pakistani cover story. Once the United States gains a reputation for something, for good or for ill, the reputation not only becomes hard to shake but also gets applied by foreign populations in an exaggerated or overly expansive way. People are reacting to the reputation more than to individual events, because their perception of an event is heavily colored by the reputation.

This phenomenon can sometimes work to the advantage of the United States. It is involved in deterrence; a reputation for striking back can dissuade others from some transgression without actually having to strike them. But more often lately it has been a disadvantage. This applies particularly to the reputation the United States has acquired for Muslim-bashing. Americans tend not to understand the phenomenon fully because they see this reputation as a bum rap and know their intentions are better than that. They not only do not realize what is coloring other Muslims' interpretation of American actions in their part of the world; they also miss how some of their actions are adding to the reputation and thereby coloring the interpretation of future events.

The policy lesson in this is to take full account of the reputation-based multiplier effect in weighing the costs and benefits of actions ranging from drone strikes to military deployments and much else. The policy-maker needs to realize how existing reputations will color how foreign publics and governments interpret whatever action is being contemplated. He also needs to realize how the action may in turn affect the reputation of the United States and thus affect how the United States will be either thanked or hated for future actions—maybe even actions the United States itself does not commit.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

Drones and the War on Terror: When Can the United States Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?

Robert M. Chesney — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: On February 27, 2013, Robert Chesney testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary on the topic of drones and the war or terror.

Chairman Goodlatte, Ranking Member Conyers, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

In the pages that follow, I consider whether there is a useful—and constitutional—role that the judiciary might play in connection with the use of lethal force against U.S. persons overseas for counterterrorism purposes. I conclude that there is, though that role is a narrow one requiring very careful calibration. Before explaining that conclusion, however, I wish to make two threshold points.

First, this conversation should focus on the use of lethal force against U.S. persons (i.e., citizens and lawful permanent residents) without respect to the weapons or weapons platform that might be involved. It is true that we have grown accustomed to equating lethal force in the counterterrorism setting with the use of "drones" (i.e., remotely-piloted aircraft). That is perhaps to be expected; drones are the focus of intense public curiosity and media scrutiny, and important policy questions arise as a result of their particular capacity for loitering, gathering intelligence, striking with immediacy, and projecting force into regions that are not easily accessible by ground forces. But if the task at hand is to identify the legal boundaries hemming in the government's capacity to use lethal force overseas against U.S. persons, then it is a mistake to frame the issue solely in terms of drones. The same issue would arise, after all, if we were speaking instead of missiles launched by manned aircraft, sea-launched missiles, shells from artillery, or bullets from a rifle. Below, therefore, I refer to the use of lethal force without specifying particular weapons or weapons platforms.

Second: Though I conclude below that some form of judicial review in this setting would be permissible as a constitutional matter and desirable as a matter of policy under certain conditions, I do not mean to suggest that such review is strictly required by current law, still less that the government acted unconstitutionally in using force in the particular case of Anwar al-Awlaki or that the positions set forth in the Justice Department’s White Paper are incorrect. On those matters, I am in general agreement with the views set forth by Benjamin Wittes and John Bellinger in their testimony today.

Having said that, I turn now to my primary focus: What can and should Congress do, going forward, with respect to the potential role of the judiciary in decisions to use lethal force against U.S. persons abroad for counterterrorism purposes? I start with an overview of the distinct constitutional issues implicated by this subject, and then turn to a survey of the options for judicial review. In addition, I also provide a concluding section that highlights larger trends that are destabilizing the overall legal architecture of U.S. counterterrorism policy, separate and apart from the issue of targeting U.S. persons in particular.

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Authors

Robert M. Chesney

Publication: House Committee on the Judiciary

Drones and the War on Terror: When Can the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?

Benjamin Wittes — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: On February 27, 2013, Benjamin Wittes testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary on the topic of drones and the war or terror.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for inviting me to testify on the question of when the United States may lawfully target alleged American terrorists overseas. I am a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. I co-founded and am Editor in Chief of the Lawfare Blog, a website devoted to balanced and sober discussion of "Hard National Security Choices." I also serve on the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law. I am the author or editor of several books on subjects related to law and national security: Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantánamo (2011), Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (2008), and Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform (2009). I have written extensively about the legal underpinnings of U.S. targeted killing operations. Currently, I am co-authoring a book with Professor Kenneth Anderson of American University’s Washington College of Law, entitled Speaking the Law: The Obama Administration’s Addresses on National Security Law, from which this testimony is partially adapted. The views I am expressing here also reflect those of Professor Anderson—but not those of any other person or entity.

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In this testimony I want to explain the essential legal rationale underlying the administration’s position with respect to the lethal targeting of an American citizen abroad who is believed to be a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces. I also intend to address some of the misreadings of the administration’s view, which have cast it in a far more menacing light than its rather restrained reality justifies. In fact, as I will explain, there is nothing extraordinary about the administration’s position, which actually claims very little in the way of power to target Americans. The exact contours of the administration’s thinking remain somewhat clouded by its refusal to release the legal memoranda that underlie both its public statements and the leaked “White Paper” that has recently garnered so much attention. What’s more, the precise legal theory may vary somewhat depending on whether military or covert forces do the targeting.

That said, enough is public to draw the following conclusion: No significant aspect of the administration’s position on this subject ought to give rise to concern that it is claiming undue power.

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Authors

Benjamin Wittes

Publication: House Committee on the Judiciary

Image Source: Chris Maddaloni

It's Time to Recognize the Valor of Cyber Warriors

Peter W. Singer — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: In an interview with NPR's Celeste Headlee, Peter Singer argues that outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the military will award a new medal to recognize exceptional accomplishments in areas including drone and cyber warfare. Read an excerpt below.

Celeste Headlee: What is different about this medal from other military medals?

Peter Singer: Oh, it's an odd sort of medal, in that the very description of it, the official description says that it, quote, "may not be awarded for valor in combat under any circumstances," which we've never seen happen in a medal before. Essentially, the idea is that it's to recognize accomplishments that are exceptional and outstanding, but not bounded in any geographic or chronologic manner - that is, it's not taking place in the combat zone. And so, essentially, it's recognizing that people can now do extraordinary things because of the new technologies that we're using in war, drones and cyber, but that the system wasn't prepared to recognize them.

Headlee: But, you know, explain for me exactly how - when a person distinguishes themselves if they're a drone pilot, for example. I mean, how do you go above and beyond if you're sitting at a computer, piloting a drone?

Singer: Well, you're putting your finger on one of the controversies that surrounds this, and that's what a lot of the spin around has been. But let's use the case of the mission that got the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Zarqawi. So there was a team of unmanned aerial systems, drone operators, that tracked him down. It was over 600 hours of mission operational work that finally pinpointed him. They put the laser target on the compound that he was in, this terrorist leader, and then an F-16 pilot flew six minutes, facing no enemy fire, and dropped a bomb - a computer-guided bomb - on that laser. Now, who do you think got the Distinguished Flying Cross?

Headlee: Whoa. The...

Singer: The people who spent 600 hours, or the six-minute pilot? And so that's really what we're getting at. Actually, the drone operators, in that case, they didn't get the medal, but they did get a nice thank-you note from a general. This is a true story, here.

So, essentially, you know, what we're hitting at is, one, you have this growing portion of the military that's engaged in these kind of operations. It's important to the future of the military. But at the same time, the system wasn't set up to recognize some of their accomplishments. But the other thing that's playing out here - and it's what I went into in the piece - is that we have to recognize that technology has always changed what we think of as heroism.

So, you know, when the first guns came out in the 1400s, there was a nobleman back there who, you know, essentially said: Anyone who uses a gun is a coward. We've change our notion of that. Or there's a great saying from a - in World War I where this French general was complaining that three men with a machinegun can defeat a battalion of heroes. I mean, we've seen this play out. We've seen the story play out before. It doesn't make it something, you know, that we should celebrate or be happy about. It's just the cold, hard reality of war, is that technology continually reshapes our notions of the values that we look for in it.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: NPR

Obama, Own Your Secret Wars

Peter W. Singer and Thomas Wright — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Irony pervades President Obama’s place in foreign policy today. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to roll back the nuclear bomb, the signature weapon of the 20th century, but he has also broken new ground in the use of revolutionary military technologies — from the armed drone to cyber weaponry — that may well become the signature weapons of the 21st century.

As the controversy continues about secret drone strikes and leaked legal documents, Obama promised in his State of the Union address last week to work with Congress to make the drone program, now shrouded in secret, more transparent.

But the problem is that a tipping point has already been reached, and it’s not just a matter of playing nice with Congress. A veil of official semi-silence surrounds these new technologies, the policy that guides them and their growing use in what can only be described as not-so-covert operations. When crucial information does come out, it’s most often through leaks to the press.

It is time for a new approach. And all that is required of the President is to do the thing that he does perhaps best of all: to speak.

Obama has a unique opportunity — in fact, an urgent obligation — to create a new doctrine, unveiled in a major presidential speech, for the use and deployment of these new tools of war.

Read the entire opinion piece at nydailynews.com >>

Authors

Publication: New York Daily News