Plan

The United States Federal government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance by reducing drones usage

Drones are Racist

Drones are racist
Kindynis 12
(Theo, writer and researcher considers issues of policing, security and social control, October 14 th 2012,
Eyes in the sky: the rise of the police drones,https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/eye-sky-primer-policedrones/)
The notoriously brutal LAPD long seen by many in the black community as an occupying
(para)military force was the first police force to use the technology, flying a lightweight SkySeer
surveillance drone over the streets of South Central since 2006. Since then, the Department of Homeland
Security has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants for small UAVs to at least 13 police
departments, and the Supreme Court has ruled that individuals have no right to privacy from police
observation from public airspace. Until now, restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have kept many
drones on the ground. However, Congress recently passed a law requiring the FAA to loosen these restrictions and
most police forces are expected to be able to fly small UAVs by next year. In the meantime, the New York
Police Department is investigating the possible use of UAVs as a law enforcement tool, whilst the
Miami-Dade Police Department already has a fleet of drones ready to fly. Within the UK, arms manufacturer BAE
Systems was revealed in 2010 to be working alongside several government agencies to develop an
unprecedented national strategy for the use of drones by police in routine surveillance, monitoring and
evidence gathering. According to a recent report by Drone Wars UK, the British government has spent 2 billion on military drones since
2007. BAE, which already produces a range of UCAVs for use in warzones such as Afghanistan and Iraq including the deadly Mantis and
stealth bomber-style Taranis drones are now reported to be adapting military-style drones for a range of police uses. At least four constabularies
are known to have already used or trialed drones, with many more expressing an interest in the technology. However, those aircraft trialled so far
have been little more than small remote-controlled helicopters fitted with cameras. Furthermore, British law enforcements forays into UAV
surveillance have met with decidedly mixed results. Merseyside police have reportedly trialled a lightweight helicopter-style drone from 2007
until early 2010 when they crashed the 13,000 UAV into the River Mersey. To make matters worse, the force could face prosecution for using
the aircraft without a license a criminal offence. The British Transport Police apparently conducted a short trial with a similar model, though
eventually deciding not to purchase one. Meanwhile, a drone acquired by Essex police has been left to languish in a warehouse after the force
decided it wasnt worth the money. Whilst Staffordshire police have managed to use a drone to spy on revellers at V Festival, they were unable to
fly it over the main arena because of fears it might crash and injure someone. Most recently, plans to use larger military-style drones for aerial
crowd surveillance during the London 2012 Olympic Games were hampered by Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulations. However, the
prospects for drone surveillance by British law enforcement agencies look likely to change in the near future. Speaking at the launch of a new
National Police Air Service last week, police minister Damian Green endorsed the use of drones by British police for aerial surveillance purposes.
Drones are like any other piece of kit claimed Green; Where its appropriate or proportionate to use them then we will look at using them.
For his part, Chief Constable Alex Marshall further remarked that whilst drones are not currently used in mainstream policing they may well
offer something for the future. According to Chris Cole from Drone Wars UK, current CAA regulations are too severe for police drone use to be
practical for most forces, although this may be set to change in the next few years (the CAA has already licensed the testing of drones at
ParcAberporth in Wales). Regulations regarding small radio-controlled aircraft however remain dangerously lax, according to Emma Carr from
privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, and this is something it appears those selling drones are keen to exploit.
Furthermore, surveillance may only be the start. Military drones quickly moved from reconnaissance to strike recounts Wired magazines
David Hambling. If the British police follow suit, their drones could be armed but with non-lethal weapons rather than Hellfire missiles. Noel
Sharkey, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Sheffield University expressed similar concerns, asking, How long will it be
before someone gets tasered from the air for dropping litter? The answer may be: not that long at all; a $300,000 Vanguard Shadowhawk drone
purchased by the Montgomery County Sherriffs Department is already capable of firing rubber bullets, tear gas canisters and taser projectiles.
According to Salon, an Ohio police lieutenant interested in the drone was told by Vanguard representatives that it can also carry grenade
launchers and 12-gauge shotguns. Particularly worrying here is how drone surveillance tends to abstract people from their contexts, reducing
variation and ambiguity that might otherwise impede action such as pepper spraying or shooting a suspect by trigger-happy police .

A year
ago the UK was shaken by rioting on a scale not seen in decades, a key contributing factor to which was
the disastrous breakdown of relations between police and inner-city communities. According to the
Guardians Reading The Riots survey, many involved in the disorder cited policing as the single most
significant cause of the riots. In light of this, it seems reasonable to suggest that the kind of remote
control policing-at-arms-length that drone-based technology inevitably encourages, whereby the local

community is viewed from afar in a form of mechanised surveillance that dehumanises both the watched
and the watcher, is precisely what is not needed. Withdrawing from the beat to watch over the streets
through electronic eyes in the sky will only stand to further alienate an already overwhelmingly and
visibly homogeneous (white, male, respectable working-class) police force from the diverse inner city
communities it exists to serve. Furthermore, the use of drones by police will be seen by many as a refusal
to engage with the public at the most fundamentally human level, and thus further undermine their
already dwindling legitimacy.

Domestic drones fuel the militarization of police exports

violence abroad to minority bodies
Thrasher 12
(Greg, VOD Washington Bureau, Writer, May 24,2012, Drone Alert
,http://voiceofdetroit.net/2012/05/24/drone-alert/)
Our country spends billions of dollars on the purchase of weapons and hi tech security devices under the
premise of national defense and the protection and safety of the home land . Retired generals leave our armed forces to
peddle their services to defense contractors in the weapons industry. America not only arms itself but our nation is also the number one arms
dealer and weapons supplier in the world. We have

more weapons of mass destruction than any other nation on the

globe. America is indeed a profitable merchant in the market of warfare products .. Last week this escalation in
military purchases and devices came to the our homeland, not to protect us from our external foes but to
assist and augment the armory of our local police departments. The Federal Aviation Administration
loosened the restrictions on local police departments surveillance of us to allow them to use Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles, also commonly known as DRONES. Our nations high court, the Supreme Court, has even ruled that
warrantless surveillance by manned aircraft is not unconstitutional and does not violate the 4th Amendment of our federal constitution. In far
too many powerful public and private circles there are advocates focused on introducing the military into
our cities and other venues. We now face the specter of entire cities being profiled by the usage of
military-designed DRONES. Local municipalities, already burdened by fiscal deficits and lousy revenues,
are actually spending huge outlays of their budgets in the purchase of these hi tech anti- freedom profile
driven devices. Where is the outrage from our public officials, activist groups and even police unions over these invasive surveillance and
anti -privacy domestic military machines in our nations urban airspace? One of the real dark potentials of these DRONES is
not only their ugly invasion and violation of privacy rights, but these DRONES also have the capacity to
be lethal and deadly. The applications and operational features of DRONES are truly unimaginable. The
growing militarization of our local law enforcement departments is not to be excused by fictional claims
of terrorism and excessive urban crimes . We must reject and defeat the myths about crime and anarchy in
our cities. We must defuse and deflate the notions that our cities are cesspools of violence and crime. The
proliferation of the myth of crime and the profiling of entire bandwidths of people based upon their hue
and types of clothing is dangerous. Such a public policy creates a fertile soil for the introduction of
military devices like DRONES into our domestic venues. DRONES are part of the arsenal of gadgets and
devices which destroy the freedoms of all Americans . We must reject all kinds of devices and gadgets
which at the end of the day are WMDs on American soil.
Drones be racist

Cyril 3/30
(Malkia, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice, March 30, 2015, Black
America's State of Surveillance, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance)

The ACLU's Guliani pointed out, however, that invasive forms of surveillance, especially police
surveillance, often impact communities of color disproportionately, pointing to US Customs and Border
Protections' ubiquitous use of drone surveillance in vast border regions impacting huge swaths of the
populations that live in those areas. "You're not just talking about the physical border, you're talking about an area that encompasses
many major cities that have large minority populations, and the idea that these drones can be flown with little or no privacy
protections really mean that, people, just by virtue of living in that region are somehow accepting that
they have a right to less privacy," she said. African-American communities could well feel the
disproportionate impacts of the integrated use of domestic drones and other surveillance in the coming
years, as technologies such as StingRay are already being used mostly in the ongoing war on drugs to
track those suspected of selling and buying drugs. The drug war has long negatively impacted
communities of color, based on racialized drug policies and racial discrimination by law enforcement;
two-thirds of all those convicted of drug crimes are people of color, despite similar rates of drug use
among whites and people of color. These already-existing racial disparities in intrusive policing tactics and deployment of
surveillance technologies are one of the primary reasons civil liberties experts are saying the government often gets it backward when thinking
about privacy issues: deploying intrusive technologies first, and coming up with privacy policies governing their use afterward (when they may
already be violating many people's civil rights). "What we see with StingRays is the same phenomenon that we're seeing with [UAS], where
federal agencies are using them," Guliani said. "State and local agencies are using them. There's federal dollars that are going to buy them, and
we're kind of having the privacy debate after the fact with very little information."

The government already uses surveillance to control Muslim

populations in the US. Drone expansion would only expand
government Islamophobia.
Knefel 13
(John, journalist, March 11, 2013, Police Spying on American Muslims Is a Pointless
National Shame, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/police-spying-onamerican-muslims-is-a-pointless-national-shame-20130311)
Civil liberties groups led by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition released a new
report today detailing the detrimental effects of the NYPDs spying on Muslim
communities in recent years. The report, called Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American
Muslims, alleges that more than a decade of surveillance of Muslims throughout the
Northeast has chilled constitutionally protected rights curtailing religious
practice, censoring speech and stunting political organizing. They describe their
communities as being under a pervasive climate of fear and suspicion that affects
every aspect of individual and community life. The report combines publicly available
documentation about the NYPDs snooping regime including the Associated Press groundbreaking investigations

But the
significance of this report reaches far beyond New Yorks Muslim community and
even beyond the American Muslim community at large. The authors have provided
a needed rebuttal to the common argument that surveillance isnt a problem if you
have nothing to hide, and that spying itself is essentially value-neutral so long as you dont become a target
into the departments Demographics Unit with original interviews of 57 Muslims in New York City.

of an investigation. The Muslims interviewed in the report describe a terrifying reality where trust and privacy are
virtually impossible, and where lives are severely harmed by spying alone. The pervasive spying regime has
effectively intimidated many would-be critics. Many of the Shia organizations who were approached by activists to
speak up or speak out were hesitant to do so, says community organizer Ali Naquvi in the report. A lot of it seems
to be fear. They dont want to be targeted for additional surveillance. Discouraging this legitimate, constitutionally
protected behavior isnt simply an unfortunate by-product of total surveillance, but rather a primary and predictable

As anyone who has ever suspected themselves of being under surveillance

will tell you, that fear changes the way you think and act. Instilling such fears is an
extremely effective form of social control. And whether limiting civil rights and liberties in this way
outcome.

was the stated aim of the Intelligence Division doesnt really matter. That has been the effect one that was

entirely foreseeable. So what has all this surveillance, this so-called intelligence gathering, gotten us? A terrorized
local Muslim population, a police department that grossly exaggerates the terror plots it has disrupted and a crown
jewel investigation of a troubled man named Ahmed Ferhani that was so problematic even the FBI recently
dubbed the terror factory by one author because of its role in manufacturing plots that its own agents then
disrupt wanted nothing to do with it. And as the report reminds us, Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the
NYPDs Intelligence Division, admitted during sworn testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked
with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single criminal lead. While Muslims in the Northeast are the
people most directly affected by this surveillance, it is a national problem both in the sense that all of our rights

The states capacity for surveillance is

already enormous, and will only expand as technologies, including domestic drones,
continue to increase in sophistication. When total surveillance of one population becomes normalized,
are infringed if anyones are, but also in a more concrete way.

we are all at a greater risk of being illegally spied on. This report is an important document that illustrates just how
damaging that can be.

Warrant requirement is key

Sengupta 13
(SOMINI, United Nations bureau chief at The New York Times, 24 February 2015
10:18, Proposed Rules Regulating Domestic Drone Use Lack Police Warrant
Requirement, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29250-proposed-rules-regulatingdomestic-drone-use-lack-police-warrant-requirement)
The use of StingRay technology as it currently stands is already incredibly secretive, with police departments and
manufacturers such as Harris Corporation concealing their use of the phone-tracking equipment from the courts

The Department of Homeland Security's US

Customs and Border Protection and the FBI already use planes and drones in areas
that are more than 100 miles of the Mexican border to conduct aerial surveillance,
and government agencies have been revealed to have been using Cessna planes
outfitted with StingRay technology to track suspects. The FBI has been resistant to answer even
through the use of non-disclosure agreements.

lawmakers' questions about how many drones it operates and how often they are used. "It is both technologically
possible and by no means a leap to imagine that once the FAA approves broader use of drones within the US by law
enforcement, [law enforcement officials] may put StingRays on them," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney
with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, and an expert on StingRay technology. UAS have also been
outfitted with thermal sensing technologies to produce heat maps of people inside buildings. Other advocates worry
if domestic drones are deployed as a platform for providing temporary internet service to consumers, it could
potentially give corporate drone operators access to the internet data of those consumers and threaten net
neutrality. "If internet companies were to deliver internet service in hard-to-reach places, which would be a good
thing, would they then be collecting information in large quantities and would that information then be something
that their contacts would then have access to?" asked Drew Mitnick who is junior policy counsel at Access, an
organization dedicated to issues of internet freedom. It's questions like this that the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration has been ordered by the White House to answer in a collaborative process,
alongside civil society and industry groups, to develop guidelines for commercial drone use. The ACLU's Guliani

invasive forms of surveillance, especially police surveillance,

often impact communities of color disproportionately , pointing to US Customs and Border
pointed out, however, that

Protections' ubiquitous use of drone surveillance in vast border regions impacting huge swaths of the populations

"You're not just talking about the physical border, you're talking
about an area that encompasses many major cities that have large minority
populations, and the idea that these drones can be flown with little or no privacy
protections really mean that, people, just by virtue of living in that region are
somehow accepting that they have a right to less privacy," she said. African-American
communities could well feel the disproportionate impacts of the integrated use of
domestic drones and other surveillance in the coming years, as technologies such
as StingRay are already being used mostly in the ongoing war on drugs to track
that live in those areas.

those suspected of selling and buying drugs. The drug war has long negatively
impacted communities of color, based on racialized drug policies and racial
discrimination by law enforcement; two-thirds of all those convicted of drug crimes
are people of color, despite similar rates of drug use among whites and people of
color. These already-existing racial disparities in intrusive policing tactics and
deployment of surveillance technologies are one of the primary reasons civil
liberties experts are saying the government often gets it backward when thinking
about privacy issues: deploying intrusive technologies first, and coming up with
privacy policies governing their use afterward (when they may already be violating
many people's civil rights). "What we see with StingRays is the same phenomenon that we're seeing with
[UAS], where federal agencies are using them," Guliani said. "State and local agencies are using them. There's
federal dollars that are going to buy them, and we're kind of having the privacy debate after the fact with very little
information."

Current UAVs are used to police and militarize the border

WALL AND MONAHAN 2011
(Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky University and Torin Monahan, Vanderbilt University, 2011 Surveillance
and Violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes
http://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/Wall_Monahan_drones_politics_2011.pdf)
By meshing aerial reconnaissance with aerial bombardment, drones function primarily as technologies of war. Yet

UAVs are also being

used as technologies of state surveillance and policing and are deployed in security-scapes other than
military combat zones. For instance, in the USA drones are increasingly being used to police foreign migrants
in relationship to its territorial borderzones, particularly by locating people who are attempting to enter
the country illegally. In addition, as we will detail below, some police departments are now conceiving of drones as
surveillance devices that might prove useful in the routine policing and monitoring of domestic territories.
Soon after President Obama announced in May 2010 that 1200 National Guard soldiers (Werner and Billeaud, 2010) would be deployed to the
already heavily militarized 244 Theoretical Criminology 15(3) and surveilled USMexico border (Dunn, 1996; Pallitto and Heyman, 2008),

Brewer wrote a letter to Obama urging him to send also what she referred to as aviation assets,
that drones have proven effective in US military
campaigns overseas and that they would therefore assist in securing the US border : I would also ask you, as
conservative Arizona Governor Jan

specifically military UAVs and helicopters (Lach, 2010). Brewer asserted

overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan permit, to consider wider deployment of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] along our nations
southern border. I am aware of how effective these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and it

seems UAVs
operations would be ideal for border security and counter-drug missions. (Quoted in Lach, 2010) This appeal for
drones at the border obscures the fact that UAVs have already been providing aerial surveillance over US
border regions (Shachtman, 2005; Gilson, 2010). Since 2006, the USA has spent approximately $100 million for UAVs
on both the southern and northern US borders as part of its efforts to create a so-called virtual fence
(Canwest News Service, 2007). As of 2010 the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was operating six unarmed Predator drones for
overhead surveillance missions along the USMexico border, five of which were based in Brewers state of Arizona (Gilson, 2010). Since late
2007 or early 2008, the CBP has been testing drones in US/ Canada border regions (Canwest News Service, 2007). CBP officials

credit

their drones with helping bust 15,000 lbs of pot and 4,000 illegal immigrants ( Gilson, 2010). In the words of a
defense executive: It is quite easy to envision a future in which (UAVs), unaffected by pilot fatigue, provide
247 border and port surveillance to protect against terrorist intrusion Other examples [of possible uses] are limited
only by our imagination (McCullagh, 2006).

Surveillence in the US most directly affects and targets

marginalized people. Drones only serve to exacerbate this.
Cyril 15
(Malika Amala, reporter, April 2015, Black Americas State of Surveillance,
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance)
As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies,
they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to
observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police
departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three . They will use technologies like
license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be
disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They
will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by

They intend to use body and dashboard

cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and
archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone
interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone
towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When
used to track a suspects cellphone, they also gather information about the phones
of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic
drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine
aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are
considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber
bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration
local police departments for any criminal justice purpose.

for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to
Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used
suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational
planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive
databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a
federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true .

Predictive policing doesnt

just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial,
unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime,
suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports

This is the future of policing in

America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is
collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color.

at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of

One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of

those it disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and
electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training
materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat
mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by
Muslims as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death
Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained . From New York City to Chicago and
beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and
religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national
security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities
power.

throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly.
Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including

of the more than 2 million people

incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic
illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project,

minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone
represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the

a 2012 study confirms that

black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites
for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as
intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of
cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As
surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law
enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media
environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of
structural racism.
Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality,