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Air Force Drones Spy on Americans, Slowly Causing Citizens to Become Accustomed to a Police State in Which There Will be Constant Surveillance Under an Oppressive Government.

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What are people to make of the fact that Air Force drones are being used in cities across the United States?

Of course this marvel of technology can be useful to monitor boarders or discover forest fires quickly, but spy on citizens?

What are they doing hovering over American neighborhoods? According to the official response, they are looking for lost children and tracking criminals on the loose.

Who knew that the suburbs were so dangerous? Of course the operative words here are Air Force drones.

This means that many police forces in the country are being outfitted with military-grade weaponry and equipment. That is never a good sign.

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Where’s Your Warrant?

The military is always lucky enough to get all of the real technological goodies well ahead of almost everyone else. Air Force drones are one of these special treats.

They can operate for a very long time with very little fuel, they can track people, photograph them in their moving vehicles and some believe they can even capture conversations.

They could sure do a number on a criminal, but first there has to be probable cause.

That’s the tricky thing about a country with a Constitution; people have rights… even criminals.

The rapid expansion of many worrisome technologies arrived sharply on the heels of September 11th.

While we were still reeling from the shock of the events that occurred that day, our Constitutional rights were being sacrificed to security.

Now some of those security measures are turning up in the skies over our neighborhoods and communities in the form of Air Force drones, among others.

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Real Safety

A really interesting thing about the unmanned military aircraft is that they present some safety and security issues of their own.

A 2007 article in the Washington Post talked about the rush to get these aircraft in the skies all over the United States and quoted one FAA official as saying:

”There may be an agency in the government that hasn’t asked us to use a drone, but I would be hard pressed to think of which one hasn’t. We are trying very hard to be very flexible… But it is a very complex issue.”

– Marion C. Blakey, an FAA administrator quoted in the Washington Post, 2007/

This comment was in reference to the FAA safety policies that began mandating official FAA waivers in order to use the unmanned machines in public air space.

Their unfiled flight plans and random routes of travel make them a distinct threat to the security of other aircraft.

It is awfully alarming, however, to think that just about every federal and state agency is seeking to get one of these machines in the air, over the ‘homeland’.

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What’s to be Gained?

The question begs to be asked, ”what is there to be gained from this?”

Most who follow these issues would use words like ”Conditioning” and ”Programming”.

As the military technologies continue to spill over into our civilian law enforcement agencies, there will come a shift in attitude.

No longer will police feel the need to respect many of our Constitutional rights simply because they won’t be obliged to do so.

If they can perform entirely illegal searches via the unmanned aircraft, they’ll eventually infringe on other rights as well.

The trick here is to not fall for the conditioning. Question the presence of electronic spying devices over our neighborhoods.

Read the Constitution and know your rights.

Remember, Ben Franklin warned us that if we give up liberty for temporary safety we don’t deserve either of them.

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