National Review, the flagship journal of the conservative movement, has published an editorial that is broadly sympathetic to the Justice Department’s “white paper” laying out the Obama administration’s legal argument for the targeted killings of individuals (including U.S. citizens) aligned with terrorists, without judicial recourse. But the editors make a damning point of criticism despite their sympathy for the administration’s legal claims:
To be fair, it is true that the Obama administration fetishizes drones and over-relies on them in its prosecution of the War on Terror. This is due in no small measure to its own undermining of the Bush-era institutions and procedures built up to deal with captured enemy combatants. In its distaste for these institutions and procedures, the current administration has increasingly relied on death from above — collateral damage and intelligence collection be damned — as the more palatable alternative.
Catholics and others who believe that not all is fair in love and war (or at least not in war) should have been speaking out against Obama’s overuse of drones long ago. The basic facts were known well before we learned about the “white paper.” Too many liberals were more interested in protecting their man than in speaking truth to his power; too many conservatives were cheering him on when it came to targeted killing by predator drones. For anyone paying attention, the thirteenth chime of the clock should have been heard before the election when Obama campaign adviser and former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, responding to a question about the death of Abulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16 year old son of al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, in a drone strike two weeks after his father was slain in a presidentially ordered targeted killing, said that the boy “should have had a more responsible father.” I myself raised concerns about the President’s increased use of drones in a comment here at Mirror of Justice last summer. I am taking the liberty of re-posting it:
June 18, 2012
Catholics Should Criticize Indiscriminate Drone Use
Since assuming office (and receiving his Nobel Peace Prize) in 2009, President Obama has massively increased the use of unmanned predator drones in what used to be known as the war against terror. According to Chris Kirk, writing in Slate, Obama has authorized five times the number of drone attacks authorized by President Bush. Liberals, who would be screaming bloody murder if it were Bush, have gone strangely (well, not so strangely) quiet about this, while conservatives are cheering on a president whose other policies they abhor.
The use of drones is not, in my opinion, inherently immoral in otherwise justifiable military operations; but the risks of death and other grave harms to noncombatants are substantial and certainly complicate the picture for any policy maker who is serious about the moral requirements for the justified use of military force. Having a valid military target is in itself not a sufficient justification for the use of weapons such as predator drones. Sometimes considerations of justice to noncombatants forbid their use, even if that means that grave risks must be endured by our own forces in the prosecution of a war.
The wholesale and indiscriminate use of drones cannot be justified, and should be criticized. This is something that Catholic intellectuals across the spectrum ought, it seems to me, to agree about. If we don’t speak, who will?
On the lethal side effects of the Obama drone strategy, see this article by Clive Smith.
February 10th, 2013 | 10:33 am
Reading the above you would think that the 16 yr old boy was targetted directly and only for no other reason than being the son of a terrorist.
The attack appears to have been against a noted Al Qaeda bomb maker and the kid was in the ‘wrong place wrong time’. Yes it was wrong for an official to quirp that he “should have had a more responsible father” but there’s an element of truth to that no? The nature of terrorism is such that terrorists ‘make a battlefield of one’ around them. This means when they hang out in civilian places they put other civilians in danger.
The main criticism seems to revolve around two issues:
1. Drones
2. US Citizens.
I’m seeing why drones are any different than precision bombs dropped from a manned fighter or a SEAL team on the ground. Either the target is legitimate or it is not.
In regards to US Citizens, this seems like one of the worse concepts held over from the Bush years…that no rules apply when people aren’t US citizens. That is, of course, nonesense. The gov’t has no more right to murder 16 yr old non-citizens than 16 yr old citizens. But there’s nothing special about citizens on the battlefield. If you’re a citizen hanging around in an Al Qaeda camp there’s no Constitutional or moral reason why the US can’t bomb the camp.
February 10th, 2013 | 10:35 am
“This is due in no small measure to its own undermining of the Bush-era institutions and procedures built up to deal with captured enemy combatants. In its distaste for these institutions and procedures, the current administration has increasingly relied on death from above…”
What a nauseating and poorly drawn correlation. Ignore the fact that the majority of the so-called prisons where we indefinitely detain prisoners are still open, including Guantanamo. Ignore the fact that traditional intelligence gathering has been on the rise since 2005. Ignore the fact that the use of drones was also on the rise throughout the Bush-era.
I second and applaud the general emphasis of this piece, and whole-heartedly agree that we should be speaking out against this recourse toward distance and abstraction taken by the Obama administration. It’s not an end to endless war as he had promised, but just the search for a way to make it easier and more painless for us.
But still, this somewhat disgusting suggestion that Obama has been undermining Bush-era institutions established on dealing with detainees (just say it: torture sites) sounds like pure neo-conservative drivel. We can criticize Obama without blaming it on his shift away from a system of ineffectively breaking humans into saying whatever we want them to say.
February 10th, 2013 | 12:48 pm
The simple fact is that we now kill terrorist we would have in the past captured because Obama was an unserious, utopian candidate when it came to Bush era policies. This has had real life consequences both in the inability to interrogate those would be prisoners and in the fact that it has in effect removed the alive portion from Bush’s “wanted dead or alive” remark. I know you don’t like that fact but calling it neo-con drivel isn’t an argument. The opponents of enhanced interrogation don’t really want a debate the want to rule as out of bounds all the arguments of the pro-interrogation side. I honestly do not know if they truly and laughably believe enhanced interrogation tactics don’t work, or if they simply hate having to debate reality.
February 10th, 2013 | 12:57 pm
True, there is a great risk of killing civilians with drones. We should go back to carpet bombing and avoid that risk.
The arguments against drone warfare are laughable in the real world.
February 10th, 2013 | 1:36 pm
Sam, believe it or not, we still capture would be terrorist suspects, and we still interrogate them. That is the point. I find Obama’s policies incredibly problematic and affirmed as much in my post. That doesn’t change the fact that defending Bush’s “advanced interrogation” program buys into a careless form of binary thinking on the subject. I am not a fan of either.
I would love to see an honest debate about this, in fact, but the torture program of Bush was “undermined” before Obama ever came into office.
February 10th, 2013 | 1:44 pm
This is silly regardless of which side you fall. The alternative is inaction or a ground invasion of Yemen. Please, tell us which you would have preferred. If you think the collateral damage is unjustified, defend inaction, including perhaps the entirety of Bush’s wars. Narrowly attacking Obama’s drone strikes just looks partisan. I’m willing to bet Bush is still leading on the collateral damage count.
February 10th, 2013 | 3:35 pm
Obviously Catholics should criticize indiscriminate drone use. In fact, everyone should criticize indiscriminate drone use . . . if drones are ever used indiscriminately. It may or may not be the case that drones are being used unwisely, but it is certainly not the case that they are being used indiscriminately.
National Review and Robert George are essentially accusing the Obama administration of killing terrorists because they would rather not capture and detain them. John Brennan explicitly denied this in his confirmation hearings this past week.
February 10th, 2013 | 4:58 pm
Thank you for writing this, for all the good it will do. Our president comes increasingly to resemble a gang-banger doing drive-bys, and ‘progressive’ Catholics rush to his defense. But their selective approach to the Church’s prophetic responsibility is a longstanding scandal; it no longer surprises me.
February 10th, 2013 | 6:45 pm
There are some on the left who are now now critical of Pres. Obama’s use of drones. For example, in the excellent online site devoted to media bias, Newsbusters.com, there’s an article about this:http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-vespa/2013/02/10/msnbcs-now-alex-wagner-slams-obama-left-drones
February 10th, 2013 | 8:43 pm
1. Drone use does carry the risk of civilian casulaties, but much less risk than carpet bombing or even precision targetted bombing with manned planes.
1.1 Putting ‘boots on the ground’ carries with it even more civilian casualities risk. A drone can be fired dispassionately. A man holding a gun in the middle of hostile territory is going to be very much inclined to shoot first and ask questions later. In the Bin Laden raid, for example, it wouldn’t be surprising if some of the males killed in the house were not strictly combatants or threats. But asking men invading an enemy house in the dark to not shoot is asking a lot.
1.2 Full scale invasion automatically carries with it many more civilian casualities. Estimates are of over 100K dead in Iraq from Bush’s decision to invade.
2. This implies the real issue with drones isn’t that they are ‘indiscriminate’ but that they work a little bit too well. Maybe 20 years ago we would have never even considered doing anything about terrorists in Yeman but now we can take them out with very few innocent deaths on their side or casualities on ours.
Bret, it’s good to see that you consider any criticism of Obama by ‘the left’ as automatically valid. But the rules of argument still apply. Arguments must be logically coherent, based on true premises etc.
February 10th, 2013 | 10:17 pm
“National Review and Robert George are essentially accusing the Obama administration of killing terrorists because they would rather not capture and detain them. John Brennan explicitly denied this in his confirmation hearings this past week.”
Are you that sure you can take Brennan at his word on that subject? I’m not. Excuse me for saying so, but a politician’s comments on the motives of his boss are subject to other proof, even when those comments come from John Brennan. You sound as though his statement should settle the matter. Regardless of how the administration rationalizes the policy either internally or in terms of political spin, the end result is both a greater abstraction of wartime decision-making from the violence of the battlefield and a diminution of valuable intelligence. Both of those trends are worrisome.
Drones are a wonderful tool when circumstances warrant their use, yet an over-reliance on them to the exclusion of other methods is a mistake. If you believe our government is making this mistake, as I do, it’s only reasonable to inquire as to why. I suspect the answer to that question is somewhat more complicated than Mr. George allows. But given what we know about the people making the policy, I also suspect political considerations are of high, perhaps highest importance. It’s the path of least resistance for an administration that seems hard pressed to lead on this or any other issue. And the drone policy seems of a piece with the administration’s passive-aggressive stance generally.
February 10th, 2013 | 11:16 pm
Hi Boonton,
I don’t “consider any criticism of Obama by the left to be automatically valid.” I simply found the newsbusters story to be interesting, that’s all. I agree with you that arguments must be based on true premises and be logically coherent. I’m agnostic as to whether Pres. Obama is doing the right thing with drones. The problem that I think is revealing, is how people will condemn Bush, but not Obama, for doing the same things. It seems to indicate that whether using drones is morally proper, is secondary to their dislike of a particular president (i.e., Bush). Some on both sides of the ideological spectrum do this, of course, and it’s not justified.
February 11th, 2013 | 12:26 am
The drone memo merely becomes a focal point for discussing many aspects of US military policy.
1. Once upon a time, the US had rules of war that were noteworthy because they differed from the rules that tended to apply at most times and in most places. Outside of the war context, we regulated people’s behavior through criminal and tort laws. But ever since the US declared a “war on terror,” the rules of war have BECOME rules that can apply pretty much anywhere, pretty much indefinitely. Criminal law, and the procedural safeguards it entails, has become optional. The US – military and civilian – needs to reflect on what rules really SHOULD apply. Does it make sense to treat the entire world, for the rest of time, as if it were the front lines of WWII? Or should we impose some restrictions or procedures?
2. Let’s acknowledge that we’ve blurred the distinction between law-enforcement and war. No, we may not achieve all the rigor of criminal procedures when hunting terrorists, but let’s get as close as we can. For example, if the US executive develops a list of people to incapacitate – dead or alive – let’s get a court to pass on the plan. Perhaps we need some specialized, super-secret tribunal, analogous to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (And perhaps such a thing already exists….)
3. Assuming we can agree on and implement appropriate procedures for deciding which people should be targeted for assassination, I’m sanguine about the idea that the US might pursue a military objective using a drone rather than, say, putting boots on the ground. Yes, ideally, we’d capture rather than kill; that’s what criminal legal procedures would provide for. But where that’s impractical – for example, if putting boots on the ground would cause more death and destruction than a drone strike would – then we go with the best alternative available.
February 11th, 2013 | 8:36 am
“Catholics and others… should have been speaking out against Obama’s overuse of drones long ago.”
And had Evangelicals and others not joined the war chant in the begining, our country might not be in Afghanistan today.
http://spurgeonwarquotes.wordpress.com/
February 11th, 2013 | 9:05 am
The problem that I think is revealing, is how people will condemn Bush, but not Obama, for doing the same things.
Regardless of whether they would have condemned Bush for the same things, there really is no doubt that the wonderful phrase, “he should have had a better father” would have become a hit phrase among the commentariat had it been uttered by, say, Ari Fleischer, who had the misfortune of trying to say something diplomatic in the aftermath of a controversy stirred up by Bill Maher.
Anyway, am I the only one who thinks Prof. George may have been thinking of something other than “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or who remembers how vociferously they were opposed by many on this website, such as Joe Carter?
February 11th, 2013 | 11:50 am
For example, if the US executive develops a list of people to incapacitate – dead or alive – let’s get a court to pass on the plan.
See this is one of the problems I have with this line of reasoning. The above sounds like it’s being more respectful of civil liberties, but it’s the opposite. You’re saying a US court should pass or approve death sentences in absentia?!!!! Where in the Constitution is that permitted! Life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process of law. Period!
War is not law enforcement. The decision to bomb a terrorist training camp or the house a suspected bomb maker is visiting is a war decision. You don’t get a court to approve that anymore than a court would have approved the firebombing of Dresden or Tokoyo in WWII. If the terrorist happens to show up at a US embassy demanding his day in court, he should be arrested at at that point put to trial. Or if the terrorist happens to be taken by troops conducting a raid then he cannot be executed as he ceases to be a military target once he is in some type of custody.
February 11th, 2013 | 12:17 pm
The use of drones is not, in my opinion, inherently immoral in otherwise justifiable military operations; but the risks of death and other grave harms to noncombatants are substantial and certainly complicate the picture for any policy maker who is serious about the moral requirements for the justified use of military force.
So poking around wikipedia I’m getting a figure of about 150 or so drone strikes since about 2004. Let’s say it’s 200. Heck, I’ll give you 300.
During Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam it would not be uncommon for there to be 300 bombing sorties per week with each one dropping multiple bombs with almost no precision at all.
It’s clear that objectively the risks to noncombatants are dropping dramatically and do so even more when drones are used. This doesn’t alter the moral requirements for the use of force and perhaps we are seeing an effort to make our moral bar go up even faster than our ability to avoid harms to noncombatants but we should be clear about what the facts. Neither the left nor right is correct in depiciting the last 8 years as some type of Nixonian ‘carpet bombing’ of the entire middle east.
February 11th, 2013 | 1:13 pm
And that’s a lovely sentiment — with the practical effect that the administration gets to execute anyone they like (or dislike), no questions asked. How exactly does this policy honor civil liberties?
In retrospect, would that have been a bad policy?
Perhaps so. In WWII the US faced a force that posed a credible, existential threat to the US, justifying a four-year hiatus from normal rules of conduct. Perhaps judicial review would have proven unworkable.
In contrast, today’s terrorists pose no credible existential threat to the US; they threaten US lives, but they have no ability to topple the state. And it appears that we’re going to be in conflict with them indefinitely. This is starting to look more like a fight with organized crime than a military action.
Here’s the classic problem: In war, of course we hold POWs until the war is over; thus, a Nazi soldier might have been held by the US for about four years. But when can we expect the War on Terror to be over? Does it therefore follow that every POW gets a life sentence? We now face a circumstance in which the guy who shot up Newtown, CT, will gain his freedom sooner than a guy who is alleged to have run a commissary at an al Quida training camp. Does that make any sense?
In short, the nice, conceptual war/law enforcement dichotomy has broken down. We need some hybrid procedures for dealing with the New World dis-Order.
February 11th, 2013 | 1:56 pm
Does this count as a “drone fetish”?
http://gizmodo.com/5983175/report-ex+cop-christopher-dorner-is-now-a-target-for-drones
“Christopher Dorner, the ex-LAPD cop who allegedly killed three people has been on the run, successfully evading police, for over a week. To finally track him down, it seems that law enforcement is pulling out all the stops. According to the Express, Dorner is now a target for drones, among the first ever on U.S. soil.”
Considering the LAPD has already opened fire on the the wrong people – twice – I can’t find this all that comforting.
February 11th, 2013 | 2:51 pm
And that’s a lovely sentiment — with the practical effect that the administration gets to execute anyone they like (or dislike), no questions asked. How exactly does this policy honor civil liberties?
Here’s the difference. Imagine a man convicted of murder, sentenced to death, who escapes from jail. He hides out for decades living a ‘normal’ peaceful life under an assumed name. He is eventually caught. At that time the state can enforce the death sentence regardless of his years of peaceful non-violence.
Imagine a man manning an AA gun defending a Nazi airbase. He is relieved of duty returning to civilian life where he goes to work in Berlin running a cafe. The legitimate military target is the man manning the gun. When the man is no longer doing that, he ceases to be a legitimate target. A US soldier who attacks the cafe hoping to kill the man who shot down his buddy is violating the rules of war and can be tried for murder.
To the degree a terrorist is ‘on duty’, participating in war on the US he is a legitmate target. If he ceases to be, though, he is not a military target though he may fairly be a law enforcement target to answer for his crimes as a terrorist. No US court can issue a death sentence to anyone absent a full and fair trial.
Considering the LAPD has already opened fire on the the wrong people – twice – I can’t find this all that comforting.
See there’s a habit here of critics not paying attention to the facts. The article you cited talks about drones using thermal imaging to find him, not shooting rockets. How is that different than a manned helicoper using thermal imaging?
February 11th, 2013 | 3:01 pm
Perhaps so. In WWII the US faced a force that posed a credible, existential threat to the US, justifying a four-year hiatus from normal rules of conduct. Perhaps judicial review would have proven unworkable.
Err no it didn’t. Courts have never reviewed military target selection nor could they. There is no Constitutional way a court could approve a death sentence to the thousands of people in Hiroshima or Dresden. All a court can do is hear a case that a decision maker violated the rules of war and committed a war crime. If you can show that the 16 yr old was actually targetted simply as ‘punishment’ to his terrorist father then those who authorized the attack can be charged with murder. If, though, he was mistaken as a military target or happened to be too close to another suspected military target there is no court issue anymore than the people of Dresden can sue the airforce for the bombs that hit civilian homes.
In contrast, today’s terrorists pose no credible existential threat to the US;
1. The Constitution has no special provisions for ‘existential threats’. Consider the time period it was written. The US almost lost the Revolutionary War. In the War of 1812 the White House was burned by British soldiers. If the founders felt the need to have such a provision, it would have been incorporated.
2. WWII might credibly be called an existential threat to the UK, France and USSR but not the US.
February 11th, 2013 | 3:07 pm
“Arguments must be logically coherent, based on true premises etc.”
Frightening as it is to find myself in agreement with Boonton on just about anything, he is, of course absolutely right. Still, I can’t help but believe the arguments for drone use would strike him as much less coherent and based on much less true premises if the president were Republican.
February 12th, 2013 | 6:25 am
Hard to say if you’re right or not Fred, I do try to be consistent but I am human.
I’m not finding much of the criticism here very consistent though. On one hand the left is wrong for giving Obama a pass they didn’t give Bush. On the other hand Obama is radically different from Bush. And the press isn’t reporting about the left being critical of Obama, and the evidence of that is a piece MSNBC published about leftwing criticism of Obama. So in the consistency and coherency sweepstakes I still think I’m a contender relative to my compeitition!
In terms of difference, what did the Bush administration say about a 16 yr old whose father is a terrorist?
The critical difference I see here is that a drone attack can only be legitimate against a military target. Military targets cannot be people in custody and cannot simply be a death sentence against a particular individual but can be against an individual who is not in custody, for whom there is no easy way to bring into custody, who there’s reasonable reason to believe is engaged in terrorism.
The person doesn’t have to be ‘doing terrorism’ at the moment of the attack….just like in a war you can bomb barracks housing troops who are asleep and technically ‘off duty’. But it must be someone engaged in terrorism, not simply punishing someone who years ago was engaged but has since ‘left the fight’.
February 12th, 2013 | 7:55 am
It’s not that I don’t make the distinction. But (a) I don’t want a surveillance state in the U.S. and I don’t like drones overflying me, and (b) I don’t trust the government to maintain the distinction between unarmed and armed drones.
February 12th, 2013 | 12:36 pm
This is a sign of warrior-caste morality-akin to calling killing with crossbows more evil then killing with swords. It is technically based not morally. Drones are not more evil then any other weapon, and they certainly are less questionable then long-range artillery.
February 12th, 2013 | 2:47 pm
That’s a thought-provoking analogy.
February 12th, 2013 | 3:51 pm
It’s not that I don’t make the distinction. But (a) I don’t want a surveillance state in the U.S. and I don’t like drones overflying me, and (b) I don’t trust the government to maintain the distinction between unarmed and armed drones.
A doesn’t seem very realistic. I imagine it is only a matter of time before Google or some other company starts putting surveillance drones up to do things like traffic reports. It seems rather silly not to use that tech to try to look for a mad killer loose in the woods….or to help rescue a lost hiker or something like that.
B. What would be the difference if a sharpshooter was in a manned helicopter? Or a helicopter with rockets? Are you really saying you don’t trust the gov’t to have weapons? That’s fine but not very realistic and hardly a position that has any connection to the Constitution or civil liberties.
February 13th, 2013 | 9:18 am
Boonton –
The courts have already decided that technology like infrared scanners and GPS bugs can’t be used without probable cause and a warrant. Why not drones?
I don’t trust the government to have easy-to-use weapons given the current ‘rules of engagement’ that seem to apply to domestic law enforcement. See, e.g., the two cases I linked to above of police opening fire on completely innocent drivers.
February 13th, 2013 | 4:44 pm
The courts have already decided that technology like infrared scanners and GPS bugs can’t be used without probable cause and a warrant. Why not drones?
You’re confusing searching someone or someplace without a warrant versus searching for someone or something in public. For example, its perfectly legal for law enforcement to go up in a helicopter and look for fields of pot growing in wooded areas and if they spot one act on it. using a drone would be no different except it would save on fuel.
I don’t trust the government to have easy-to-use weapons given the current ‘rules of engagement’ that seem to apply to domestic law enforcement. See, e.g., the two cases I linked to above of police opening fire on completely innocent drivers.
For domestic law enforcement drones would almost never be able to use force. Police cannot fire on someone unless they are in danger or someone else is. In the recent case you have a suspect who has been killing cops and seems to be very good at it. When you have live cops confronting a vehicle you can’t blame from from being ‘on edge’. At least with a drone you can avoid firing. A drone wouldn’t be able to fire on him for domestic law enforcement unless it was to stop him from killing someone in that moment.
February 14th, 2013 | 9:09 am
Boonton –
Correction: Police are not supposed to to fire on someone unless they are in danger or someone else is. The cases under discussion, along with many others, show that they nevertheless are able to do so. And more to the point, they do at times.
Being “on edge” and “shoot first without evaluating the situation” are two different things. Or, at least, they are supposed to be.
Constant, omnipresent, inescapable surveillance when in public is different from tailing a suspect. See here for a discussion of a few of the issues involved.
February 15th, 2013 | 6:04 am
Constant, omnipresent, inescapable surveillance when in public is different from tailing a suspect. See here for a discussion of a few of the issues involved.
Two radically different things. A drone flying around beaming images of the streets to a cop at a computer is no different than a cop in a helicopter flying around…or a cop in a patrol car driving around. Attaching a GPS to someone’s car so you can track him is much more problematic.
February 15th, 2013 | 8:54 am
Boonton –
How ’bout law enforcement covertly taking over the GPS system already in the car? Is that any different?
From the article I linked to: “Justice Scalia… reasoned as follows: Just as a constable might surreptitiously, and without consent, climb aboard a stagecoach and keep track of the stagecoach’s travels from one place to another, so, too, the GPS device can, surreptitiously and without consent, be attached to the underside of an automobile and enable the police to keep track of the automobile’s travels.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Alito mocks Justice Scalia’s originalist reasoning, saying that for an Eighteenth Century constable to have done the sort of surreptitious surveillance possible with GPS-monitoring “would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both.”
What made the police activity in Jones a search, according to Justice Alito, was not the fact that such monitoring began with a trivial trespass onto the underbelly of Jones’s vehicle, but instead the fact that it invaded Jones’s reasonable expectation of privacy against having all of his trips monitored for twenty-eight days. [emphasis added]
Why would police want to use drones rather than cops in helicopters, anyway? Is there a difference from their perspective?
Yes, obviously: drones are orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to deploy. The difference between helicopter and drone surveillance is as the difference between retail and wholesale.
Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. I mean, a nuke is just a somewhat more powerful bomb, right?
February 15th, 2013 | 1:53 pm
Yes, obviously: drones are orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to deploy. The difference between helicopter and drone surveillance is as the difference between retail and wholesale.
This reminds me of the first court rulings about wiretapping. Initially courts ruled you didn’t need a warrant. A phone line is outside your home and doesn’t belong to you. If the cop taps it and listens in to you talking with your friend about a murder, that is no different than if you opened your window and shouted to your friend about murder ‘cross the street and a cop overheard it.
But as phones became more standard and less ‘new feeling’ the thinking evolved to incorporate the idea that tapping your phone was like tapping your home itself, an invasion that required a warrant.
The solution here wasn’t to ban all wiretaps but to work wiretaps into the law in a way that lets us enjoy their benefits (catching criminals) but regulating the infringement it may impose on us.
Likewise there’s nothing inherently wrong with using a drone to try to find a killer in the woods. In fact it may be better to do so than it would be to dispach hundreds of cops to walk through the dark where they may end up accidently shooting innocent people or even each other. You would be better off accepting drones but advocating some reasonable systems of thought that keep them from becoming a danger to our civil liberties
February 15th, 2013 | 4:04 pm
Boonton – I thought I was “advocating some reasonable systems of thought that keep them from becoming a danger to our civil liberties”? Did you not read my comment of February 13th, 2013 | 9:18 am?
February 15th, 2013 | 7:08 pm
Ray,
From your 9:18 comment you seem to be saying that drones shouldn’t be used without a warrant. Why? Why is buzzing around town watching the roads with a drone different than buzzing around with a helicopter or cruising in a car?
Here I think the civil liberties problem is the storage of data, not the method of its collection. There’s nothing wrong, IMO, of a traffic light that takes a picture of Ray running it so he can be mailed a ticket. If there’s a police report that Ray has kidnapped his ex-wife’s son, I think there’s nothing wrong to look at the cars that went thru the traffic light to see if Ray passed a particular intersection. I do think there’s something wrong with keeping the fact that on 9:18 2/13/13 Ray went thru a particular light in a database forever so years later a person can reconstruct every move Ray made from terabytes of data stored on servers or in ‘the cloud’.
Likewise armed law enforcement drones are not a major issue IMO. Law enforcement has a much higher bar in using weapons than the military does. Since a drone is not a person, it would be almost impossible for it to ever be in a situation where police could justify using it as a weapon. Unlike a person who is shooting at a cop car that just pulled him over, deadly force cannot be justified simply to defend a piece of hardware. What’s missing in this discussion is recognition of the fact that drones lessen the need for deadly force in both law and war.
February 18th, 2013 | 8:57 am
Boonton –
Given a sensible legal regime – and some modifications to current law-enforcement culture – I might well agree with you. Given the current situation, however, I can’t.
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