SALON

Jefferson Morley

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

Drones’ new weapon: P.R.

The industry's fighting back, determined to remake its image. "Change scares people," an industry rep tells Salon

By (Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)

Stung by mounting hostility from the left and right, America’s drone industry is fighting back.

“We’re going to do a much better job of educating people about unmanned aviation, the good and the bad,” said Michael Toscano, president of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the industry’s trade group in Washington. “We’re working on drafting the right message and how to get it out there.”

The P.R. blitz comes after drones suffered a round of negative attention last week. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called for a ban on drones in U.S. airspace, and two other conservative commentators endorsed the idea of shooting down unmanned aircraft flown by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Opposition to the U.S. government’s deployment of unmanned vehicles had previously come from left-liberal groups concerned about civilian casualties in the drone war in Pakistan and potential threats to civil liberties at home.) The nation also witnessed drone “scares”: An unidentified flying object nearly collided with a plane over Denver, and rumors circulated of a surveillance drone flying near the NATO summit in Illinois.

After issuing a statement denouncing Krauthammer’s remarks as “irresponsible” and “dangerous,” Toscano said the AUVSI would go on the offensive against critics. While the strategy is still being shaped, Toscano made it sound like something straight out of a crisis-management textbook — or Orwell. The AUVSI wants to bombard the American public with positive images and messages about drones in an effort to reverse the growing perception of the aircraft as a threat to privacy and safety.

“You have to keep repeating the good words,” Toscano explained. “People who don’t know what they’re talking about say these are spy planes or killer drones. They’re not.” He criticized Salon and other news organizations for using the term “drones,” saying “remotely piloted vehicles” is more accurate.

He said the AUVSI has hired a public relations firm to develop a media campaign to counter media coverage that he faults for emphasizing “sensationalism and the scare factor.” The campaign, which may include newspapers and print advertising, will seek to emphasize the benefits of a “revolutionary technology.” The use of unmanned aviation to inspect the damage at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are the types of story that the media campaign will highlight.

Toscano, formerly the manager of the Pentagon’s robotics program, said the campaign will focus on safety and public benefits.

“We need to get people to understand that with UAV [unmanned aviation vehicles] there is always a person in the loop and on the loop [meaning monitoring the aircraft's activities]. These systems don’t go in the air without being safe and reliable,” he said. (The FAA, however, has not yet issued rules for unmanned aviation systems in U.S. airspace.” Before this industry can really take off, we need rules from the FAA on how to safely operate alongside manned aircraft,” Toscano told Salon in a separate interview earlier this month.)

Toscano’s defense wasn’t limited, however, to domestic drone uses. He also stood behind the use of drones in foreign battlefields. ”If you want to say we shouldn’t be involved in those wars, that’s fine. But if our military has already been committed to do this and we are putting men and women in harm’s way, I want to do it with the least amount of risk to them. That means using unmanned vehicles. If you did it the old-fashioned way, you would have more risk to our people and more collateral damage.”

Toscano attributed criticism of drones to fear.

“Change scares people. There’s this natural reaction when you have revolutionary-type change, and that’s what these unmanned systems represent. But they’re not as scary as people say. They are an extension of the eyes, ears and hands of a person who knows how to do their job. If you can give them an unmanned system, they will do their job better.”

Domestic drones do not pose a new threat to privacy, he said, insisting that existing laws provide sufficient protection.

“We have so many more technologies that are eroding our ideas of privacy. If you have a cellphone and it’s on, somebody can follow you. If you send an email, somebody can read that email. The threat of unmanned vehicles is no different than that of helicopters,” he said. “If you use an unmanned vehicle to spy on someone and you don’t have a search warrant, it’s going to be thrown out [of court] or you’ll be prosecuted for violating the law.”

Toscano acknowledged the downside of the technology, but compared possible negatives about drones to automobiles. “Car crashes kill 35,000 people a year,” he said, “but we don’t talk about banning cars. We need to be honest about the costs and the benefits.”

Toscano said he didn’t know how much the media campaign would cost, saying AUVSI members would have to decide how much they want to spend. “This is like motherhood and apple pie for them,” he said. “They concur we need to act. We can’t stick our heads in the sand.”

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group Code Pink and organizer of last month’s drone summit in Washington, said the industry’s problem lies in the origins of drone technology in overseas war zones.

“There is a strong association in people’s minds with drones and killing, even though the majority are used for surveillance. It’s ingrained in people’s psychology. The industry is going to have to work hard to distinguish between spying drones, killing drones and humanitarian drones.

“They want to present this as the technology that fights forest fires and finds your lost grandfather who has Alzheimer’s, and not as the technology that can be used to read a license plate from 40,000 feet,” she said. While not objecting to humanitarian uses of drones, Benjamin said she does hope to foster “a negative image” of unmanned aviation.

“Seeing the militarization of our police forces, there’s real reason for concern,” she argued. “This technology can be used not only to spy on us but can be used for crowd control and control of protests. It can be used to profile communities — to spy on Muslims, for example, or on the black community, or on people involved in dissent. It could be used to kill people. If we don’t do something about it, all of those things could happen.”

Benjamin welcomed criticism from the right and said she was hoping to make connections with conservatives worried about drones.

“The industry is obviously extremely powerful,” Benjamin went on. “They’ve been able to write the legislation and get their lackeys in Congress to push it through and get the president to sign it. But they are going to have to work harder and harder as we ramp up our efforts to educate the public.”

Missy Cummings, a professor of aerospace engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the recent controversies about drones mark a new phase in public thinking.

“We’ve just reached a tipping point and now people are starting to think about and talk about these issues,” she said. “That’s a good thing.”

Friday, May 18, 2012 5:51 PM UTC

A drone near-disaster?

An airplane pilot reports a near collision with a "remotely controlled aircraft" over Denver

By (Credit: 9news.com)

The near collision of a corporate jet and what was described as “a large remote controlled aircraft” in Colorado highlights the challenges facing aviation authorities as they seek to fulfill a congressional mandate to open U.S. airspace to drones.

As reported by a Denver TV station this week, the pilot of a Cessna flying at 8,000 feet over Denver told air traffic controllers he had just seen an unidentified object pass by.

“A remote controlled aircraft, or what?” a nervous-sounding pilot said in conversation captured by LiveATC.net, a website that monitors air traffic control traffic. “Something just went by the other way … About 20 to 30 seconds ago. It was like a large remote-controlled aircraft.”

The station’s aviation analyst said the object could have been one of three things: “A military or law enforcement drone, a remote controlled aircraft, or a large bird.”

An FAA spokesman in Washington said, “We reviewed radar and audio communications but found no unidentified targets in the area where the Citation pilot was flying, and no other pilot reported seeing an unidentified aircraft.”

The only entity known to have permission to fly drones anywhere in the vicinity is University of Colorado’s Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, which has FAA authorization to fly drones over 59 separate 20 x 20-mile areas 50 miles east of Denver, according to a school website. (I have asked a university spokesperson for comment and will update this story as soon as I hear back.)

This week, the FAA announced procedures to  streamline the process through which government agencies, including local law enforcement, can receive licenses to operate unmanned aircraft at altitudes no higher than 400 feet. By mid 2015, the FAA must complete plans to open U.S. airspace to commercial and civil drones.

Update: A University of Colorado spokesperson told me that the school had no drones in the air on Monday and only flies unmanned vehicles in FAA approved airspace.

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Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:15 PM UTC

Obama’s broken immigration promise

ICE said it would target dangerous immigrants, but it's actually deporting a higher percentage of non-criminals

By A man in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, stands next to the border fence as two U.S. law enforcement officers look on from the U.S. side of the fence. (Credit: AP/Raymundo Ruiz)

The Obama administration claims that it is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants while focusing on those with criminal records. But new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the number of deportation orders has declined dramatically since last summer and non-criminals comprise a growing percentage of those expelled from the country.

That wasn’t supposed to happen under a policy of “prosecutorial discretion” announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare “longtime lawful residents” from deportation and to focus on criminals.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”

The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.

“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina.  ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”

In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez  said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”

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Thursday, May 17, 2012 1:16 PM UTC

Conservatives turn on drones

Right-wing writers, from Charles Krauthammer to Matt Drudge, join the left in criticizing domestic drone use

By Charles Krauthammer, drone critic

Opposition to the use of drones in domestic airspace is spreading from the Code Pink left to the Fox News right. While conservatives laud the use of drones against suspected militants overseas, the sudden and vehement criticism of domestic drones this week by three right-wing commentators suggests that Congress’s rush to open up U.S. airspace to unmanned aviation vehicles now faces an unusual left-right chorus of critics.

Admitting that he was “going ACLU,” conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called Monday for a total ban on the use of drones in U.S. airspace. As reported by RealClearPolitics, Dr. K said:

I don’t want regulations, I don’t want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didn’t like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country.”

A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys but not in America. I don’t want to see it hovering over anybody’s home. Yes, you can say we have satellites, we’ve got Google Street View and London has a camera on every street corner but that’s not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you’re always under — being watched by the government. This is not what we want,” Krauthammer said on the panel portion of FOX News’ “Special Report.”

In fact,Krauthammer has outdone the ACLU, which has invoked a “nightmare scenario” of drones without calling for an outright ban. Krauthammer even predicted that some Americans may try to shoot down a surveillance drone, while adding he did not want to encourage the idea.

On Tuesday, Fox News contributor Anthony Napolitano seconded Krauthammer’s prediction, minus his scruples. “The first American patriot that shoots down one of these drones that comes too close to his children in his backyard will be an American hero,” Napolitano said, much to the consternation of anti-vigilantes at Media Matters. Conservative impresario Matt Drudge also wondered about the legality of shooting down drones, tweeting Tuesday, “Question for The New Age: If one shoots down a fed/police drone while it’s invading one’s privacy, does that make one a terrorist?”

Later on Tuesday, CNN’s resident conservative Jack Cafferty worried that, “as more and more of these unmanned aircraft pop up over U.S. soil, they may be used to spy on Americans.”

There is an Air Force document that says if unmanned drones accidentally capture surveillance footage of Americans, they can keep the information for up to 90 days and analyze it. Where is that in the Constitution?

The U.S. military and the government aren’t supposed to conduct surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil without their consent, but if they accidentally capture you on video, that’s OK.

While political unity can be heartwarming, the differences between liberal and conservative critics are not negligible, reflecting very different cultural and ideological impulses. While conservatives fantasize about shooting down drones, liberals dream their moral arguments can control the skies. But it is striking that these conservative critics, while supporting the drone wars overseas, do not see security benefits at home. Like liberals, they see mostly an incipient civil liberties threat.

Whether a coalition of the libertarian left and libertarian right can influence U.S. domestic drone policy remains to be seen. A similar coalition has opposed the Patriot Act for a decade without visible effect.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2012 4:04 PM UTC

Susana Martinez’s veep suicide

The New Mexico governor is an unlikely running mate for Romney after speaking out on immigration

By Susana Martinez (Credit: AP/Susan Montoya Bryan)

While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.

“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez  told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”

With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration agenda that President Obama promises to pursue if he defeats Romney in November. Second, the reforms the 43-year-old first-term Republican favors are opposed by every Republican member of the Senate (even those like John McCain, who used to support it) and a solid majority in the House. (In case there was any doubt, the same day Martinez’s interview appeared, Politico reported that the Romney campaign was seeking a “boring white guy” as a running mate.)

Martinez had previously said she wasn’t interested in a place on the Republican ticket. Her comments certainly indicate she isn’t interested in the public posturing necessary to achieve it.

On immigration reform, Martinez said she favors:

an approach “with multiple levels”: increased border security; deportation for criminals; a guest-worker program for people who want “to go freely back and forth across the border to work”; a DREAM Act-style pathway to citizenship, through the military or college, for children brought here illegally by their parents; and a visa (coupled with a “penalty” or a “tagback”) that allows rest of the illegal population to remain in the U.S. while they follow standard naturalization procedures.

In conversation, Martinez slagged Romney’s advocacy of “self-deportation” for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.

“‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” she snapped.

Martinez is not the only person asking. As articulated by Romney during the primary season,”self-deportation” means making life so miserable for the undocumented that they will “voluntarily” leave the country. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and Romney advisor, told me he thought the United States could remove 5.5 million “illegal aliens” by the end of the first Romney administration.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, a GOP campaign promise to forcibly evict millions of Americans from their homes is neither attractive nor practical as an appeal to Latino voters, the fastest-growing group in the American electorate.

Martinez suggested Romney needed a more attractive message.

“I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. “But now there’s an opportunity for Governor Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why.”

Impolitic to the end, Martinez expressed skepticism about Sen. Marco Rubio’s much-hyped but still vague idea of GOP variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, with Romney’s tacit blessing, is seeking to moderate the Republicans’ reputation on immigration by developing a DREAM Act-style measure that would protect undocumented young people from deportation without giving them citizenship.

Politicians, Martinez said, cannot “fix [immigration] by saying, ‘Here’s the DREAM Act and we’re done.’ It has to be part of a larger plan.”

In other words, the New Mexico governor is that now-rare national Republican figure who favors comprehensive immigration reform, otherwise known as amnesty. Martinez would open the illegal immigrant’s path to citizenship that Marco Rubio avoids and that most Republicans seek to block. She probably won’t be Mitt Romney’s running mate. But Susana Martinez will be heard.

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Tuesday, May 15, 2012 8:51 PM UTC

Coming soon: Bigger drones

The FAA has decided to allow larger drones to fly in U.S. airspace

By Public safety agencies are cleared to fly small drones under 25 pounds. (Credit: Aeryon Labs, Inc.)

Public safety agencies can now get expedited permission to fly drones weighing up to 25 pounds in U.S. airspace, according to new rules approved Monday by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The size of the craft was the most significant change made by the FAA in responding to a congressional mandate to integrate unmanned aviation vehicles into domestic airspace. In February, Congress passed legislation calling on the FAA to expedite approval for law enforcement and first responder agencies that want to use drones smaller than 4.4 pounds.

FAA officials decided to boost the size of the largest permissible public safety drone after meeting with federal, state and local law enforcement representatives, a spokesman said. The officials “determined that small unmanned aircraft systems under 25 pounds would be the most cost-effective, easiest to manage and overall most appropriate to carry out the various first responder missions.”

The decision opens up the market to American drone manufacturers seeking customers in the public safety sector, according to  Ben Gielow, general counsel for Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group. An industry survey of drones under 4.4 pounds found 79 different models for sale by 54 companies, Gielow said. Now public safety agencies shopping for North American-made drones to fit the FAA regulations will be able to choose from 146 models  manufactured by 69 different companies. The larger drones will be able to carry more sensors to improve “situational awareness,” he said.

Missy Cummings, professor of aeronautics at MIT, says the larger vehicles “will be more maneuverable and stable in high winds. They’ll be able to get a clearer and steadier picture of whatever they’re looking at.”

But don’t expect to see a law enforcement drone overhead right away. Public safety organizations must first apply to the FAA for approval to establish a drone training and performance evaluation program. Only when the agency has shown proficiency in training and evaluation of unmanned airborne vehicles will it receive a certificate of approval to fly drones.

Other congressionally mandated conditions will remain in effect. The drones must stay under 400 feet while flying and must remain in sight of the operator at all times.

In February, Congress ordered the FAA to develop plans to open up U.S. airspace to “small” drones for commercial purposes by mid-2014. The legislation defines a “small drone” as one that weighs less than 55 pounds.

So as drones grow more common in U.S. airspace, they are likely to grow larger.

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