Military Drones Might Start Phasing-Out Police Helicopters by 2025
California drone manufacturer General Atomics is working diligently with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to put military drones in the domestic skies by 2025.
People sometimes ask me why I care about U.S. military activities in countries thousands of miles away from my home. Besides the fact that the majority of our tax money goes to foreign wars, there’s plenty of other reasons to care. One reason is that our domestic police force routinely receives surplus military equipment. This includes tanks, grenade launchers, high caliber machine guns, and other gear.
But these future military drones won’t be returning foreign wars; but rather specifically designed and produced for domestic police surveillance. General Atomics manufactures the Reaper aka Predator drone used for surveillance purposes in Afghanistan and along the U.S.-Mexico border.
This new drone, MQ-9B, won’t be very different from the Reaper style but it will have longer wings and be able to fly farther. General Atomics hopes to see the MQ-9B in the U.S. and European skies by 2025.
Related: Police Body Cams and Smart Weapons Will Soon Have Facial Recognition
The FAA has many guidelines in place when it comes to drones and basically all flying objects. You even need to register your toy drone with the FAA if it weighs over a half-pound. For domestic use, General Atomics must design a drone that can withstand all weather including lightning strikes and ice.
This is something General Atomics has never had to deal with when creating drones for overseas military usage. If there was any question, I guess civilian safety really doesn’t matter when it comes to other countries.
For people living in many major U.S. cities, police surveillance helicopters have become a regular part of life. In fact, Ice Cube even wrote a song about them back in 1993. But these new drones will take police surveillance to an entirely new level.
Many police departments already have cars equipped with whats called a Stingray in their trunks which is used to spy on civilian phones. The new drones could come with new and specially designed spying equipment. They could also come equipped with electronic-jamming technology to shut-down civilian phones and internet access.
“Drones make indiscriminate and persistent aerial surveillance feasible and can easily be equipped with technologies like facial recognition. Without proper restrictions, drone surveillance will become the norm of public space, undermine our constitutional rights and chill First Amendment activities. Although many states have passed laws restricting the use of drones by law enforcement, there is no federal law providing baseline privacy protections,” said Jeramie D. Scott, the director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
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Randi Nord lives in Pontiac, Michigan. She is the co-founder of Geopolitics Alert Independent World News.