Society needs laws, not mere guidelines, to limit the power of the police.
The Grand Forks Sheriff's Department deserves great credit for, early on, spotting not only drones' potential but also the machines' privacy implications.
The department remains the only nonfederal agency in North Dakota operating unmanned aircraft, as Sheriff Bob Rost notes in his column on this page. Moreover, the department and a UND committee have developed model guidelines for unmanned aerial vehicle use that treat privacy concerns with care.
Unfortunately, not every law-enforcement agency can be counted on to act with such restraint. Predictably, when some police chiefs and sheriffs get ahold of a UAV, a powerful surveillance tool, they'll deploy it first and worry about setting limits later.
As the headlines about the National Security Agency's voracious data-gathering show, when it comes to protecting privacy, relying on high officials' good intentions isn't enough.
lt's to make sure that all departments in every corner of the state are on the same page that the House approved HB 1328. Among its other provisions, the bill prohibits police from using drone-gathered information in court unless a search warrant had authorized the surveillance.
The second reason why HB 1328 rightly restricts drone use is that drones are very different from other technologies.
It's true that the Supreme Court has authorized warrantless helicopter searches if the chopper flies higher than 400 feet, as Sheriff Rost writes.
But it's also true that helicopters are not drones. For example, helicopters are big and expensive. People can see them when they're flying overhead, and they cost so much to operate — say, $600 an hour — that they're not flying overhead very often.
In contrast, drones are small and cheap, and they're getting smaller and cheaper. So they're likely to be deployed much more often, and they're already hard to spot when they fly.
Then there's this: As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in 2012, "I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment's goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent 'a too permeating police surveillance.'"
Sotomayor was talking about GPS tracking devices. But she might as well have been talking about drones, a technology whose threat of begetting "a too permeating police surveillance" is obvious for all to see.
©2015 the Grand Forks Herald (Grand Forks, N.D.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
