TRI In The News

That Droning Sound from Above

From Inside NoVa

Original article available here

When Gov. Bob McDonnell casually men­tioned during a radio in­terview that he supported the use of “military-style” drones by Virginia law enforcement it sparked an immediate uproar, but not from the usual suspects.

One would assume the ACLU would be filing a lawsuit claiming a drone­born invasion of “privacy.” (Although after legalizing almost all the old perver­sions, what could liberals possibly be doing now that requires so much solitude?) Instead of objections from Fairfax police pilots who may be grounded and Fairfax Auxiliary Po­lice officers who stand to lose one of the few perks of their unpaid job: heli­copter ride-alongs, it was John W. Whitehead, presi­dent of the Rutherford Institute, who declared, “… a rapid adoption of drone technology before properly vetting the safety, privacy and civil-liberties issues involved would be a disaster for your adminis­tration and the people of Virginia.”

Shaun Kenney, former communications direc­tor for the Republican Party of Virginia, blogged, “Who the hell wants to give government the right to fly a drone over your home?” And Bearing Drift, a conservative political blog, complained, “Say it Ain’t So, Governor!”

Unfortunately for my fellow conservatives, these complaints are 151 years too late. Air power for observation dates back to Sept. 24, 1861 when Thad­deus Lowe went aloft for the Union near Arlington.

George Armstrong Custer, who had his own prob­lems with practitioners of unconventional warfare, floated serenely over the Peninsula later in the conflict.

Today, police helicopters already fly over homes in Northern Virginia and the General Assembly has passed a law authorizing state police aircraft to cite drivers for speeding.

Drones just replace exist­ing technology with a less expensive alternative that does the same job with a smaller government foot­print, a development that would normally appeal to conservatives.

Helicopters have proven to be both very useful and very expensive. Cur­rently the estimated yearly budget for two Fairfax choppers is approximately $1 million, producing an average of 150 hours total flight time each month.

The budget includes pilots, cross-trained po­lice/EMS officers, ground technicians, mechanics and all the rest of the infrastructure. The use of drones, which Fairfax already has permission to do, would reduce some of these costs while increas­ing flight time.

These drone objections frequently mention the “right of privacy,” which is a shaky constitutional reed for conservatives to grasp. Privacy, as such, does not exist in the Constitution. It originated in Griswold v. Connecti­cut when Justice William O. Douglas discovered heretofore unknown “penumbras” and “ema­nations” leaking from the document that when run through a gas spectrom­eter were found to protect “privacy.” From this small step, the court later leaped to a right to abortion.

Conservatives can’t be a little bit private any more than they can be a little bit pregnant. Relying on this flawed constitutional reasoning validates the liberal intellectual frame­work that protects the “right to abortion.”

Limitations on drone usage don’t depend on an invented right from a liberal court, but are already found in the plain language of the Fourth Amendment which says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …” To be consti­tutional and admissible in court, drone usage would have to conform to exist­ing case law surrounding the Fourth Amendment.

Banning drones because of “privacy” concerns would be small comfort when PeePaw wanders off into the woods and civil libertarians fail to vol­unteer to join the search party.

Drones will prove in­valuable during pursuits, allowing police to main­tain aerial contact with suspects without filling the streets with a conga line of speeding cruisers careening around corners and risking collisions with innocent bystanders.

The use of drones by local police also con­forms to the conservative principle of subsidarity, which posits that power or governmental func­tions should be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized com­petent authority, that is consequently closest to the people. Anyone who has ever tried to complain about the TSA damag­ing their luggage will instantly realize the dif­ference between Charlie Deane supervising drone usage and Department of Homeland Security’s Janet Incompetano.

Personally, I don’t think we should allow the fact that certain Middle East­ern religious fanatics have had unpleasant experi­ences with drone technol­ogy to color our impres­sion of how the domestic use of UAVs would affect us in Northern Virginia.

The chance that a resident of Prince William or Fairfax would have a rendezvous with a drone-­launched Hellfire missile is nonexistent. Adding a Hellfire line item to the budget would put a big dent in Fairfax County’s pet “affordable hous­ing” program and here in PWC, Chief Charlie Deane would have to choose be­tween air interdiction and outreach to illegal aliens.