Drone pilot makes US rescind no-fly zones around unmarked, moving ICE vehicles
arstechnica.com220 points by Bender 12 hours ago
220 points by Bender 12 hours ago
Unmarked no-fly zones at unannounced times and locations are a remarkable innovation. Hopefully they will tell you when and where you shouldn't have been when they charge you for it, but that may be classified.
Ambiguous laws (which in this case are by definition impossible to comply with) which are capriciously enforced are a hallmark of authoritarian and fascist regimes. Sadly ironic, the US government used to highlight this fact:
"Authoritarian regimes’ unclear laws make anyone a suspect" - https://ge.usembassy.gov/authoritarian-regimes-unclear-laws-...
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” ― Oscar R. Benavides, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides
Of note, the article seems to mention 3 things: 1) Vague laws 2) Arbitrary Enforcement 3) Lack of due process
All three seem to be important facts for an Authoritarian Regieme
I point this out, because I believe the US has long had vague laws, and our Due Process helps kick out arbitrary enforcement. I also believe that our Checks and Balance system (part of Due Process) is currently broken
Given the astronomically high legal cost to individuals, the sheer presence of arbitrary enforcement can already cause a lot of fear and damage.
There was a recent high profile of a case where a woman in Tennessee was accused of a crime in North Dakota. She spent months in jail, where she lost her car, home, and her dog. She was not even in the right state, and her life was destroyed.
And this is the norm that prosecutors/defense attorneys have been OK with. It's just in this case AI added enough of a twist to gain public interest.
It's like the sudden concern with shipping ICE detainees to play 'jurisdiction' and 'standing' games. This has been going on forever and isn't novel, it's just suddenly defense attorneys care because of the immigration/deportation angle instead of just someone losing their home, job, car, life.
Our system of 'checks and balances' doesn't work when prosecutors/defense attorneys are indifferent to this kind of life destroying consequence simply from an accusation. If they are apathetic to this, what other injustices in the judicial system are all of the lawyers apathetic to?
Vague laws were/are a hallmark of racist American law enforcement. It's what the US has always done.
Reminds me of this:
"They devise laws that are broad and vague, but then they apply them like a scapel against those that they deem a threat" - William Dobson
If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws.
When combined with a comical inability to secure government systems, it's honestly super cute that any federal agency thinks engaging in such dark patterns is in any way, shape, or form going to achieve their goals.
If the goal is chilling dissent, then it sounds like it would be working perfectly.
Your point only holds if the government is trying to act fairly on behalf of the people and actively uphold justice.
> If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws
Well, yeah, but that's the goal. People will correctly conclude that their ability to act unmolested is entirely contingent upon remaining in the good graces of local and remote authority figures. This produces extreme chilling on dissent or disagreement and promotes deals, bribes, and bootlicking. The law is transformed into a transparent legitimization mechanism for what the powerful wanted to do anyway, applied and ignored according to the real power structure adjacent to the legal bureaucracy. This is the default state of human civilization when the rule of law is not proactively defended.
But to "chill dissent", you must be capable of tracking it down before it hangs you from a gas station. I don't think you're fully grasping how sudden and forceful change could come if just small number of folks decided to stop giving a fuck about the spirit of the law and do whatever they feel they can get away with.
In my experience, folks from a legal/court context who think they can get cute playing the "you can't prove I broke the rules" game will literally void their bowels in fear when the same is done to them by just one skilled hacker, let alone a group of them all focused on a singular task.
being specific is the essence of lawmaking and the whole difference between having a Congress and having a mom
~ P. J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
[flagged]
What a retarded take
Your children are already minorities. How retarded do you have to be to support such a state of affairs?
For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think these rules would stand under the APA. Which means any criminal convictions would be thrown out.
Losing your licence and many fines are FAA administrative processes so they don’t care. No courts involved.
> Which means any criminal convictions would be thrown out.
and in the meantime people rot in jail but i guess no harm no foul :shrug:
Not to mention the monetary costs of defense
Against all that it seems miserly to complain about the costs of destroyed, seized, lost drones, equipment, gates, doors et al that will never be reimbursed.
> in the meantime people rot in jail but i guess no harm no foul
Nobody claimed no foul. Constraining a problem isn't the same as saying it's not one.
Heck if they do tell you, ICE swaps plates and tries to hide in various ways.
The evidence could be just some regular looking vehicle you can't find anything about and it's just "trust me bro those were feds" and you're out of luck.
Before you know it, they'll be detaining people without legal representation, shipping them to overseas black sites, and murdering citizens in the street. Oh, wait that's been the entirety of this treasonous administration.
> Oh, wait that's been the entirety of this treasonous administration.
That's been the case for at least 25 years. Still bad, but not new or unique to Trump. I'm too young to have a good idea of what the pre-Patriot Act American military/intelligence/secret police was like, but the historical stuff that comes to light from time to time doesn't lend much confidence that they were all that much better - they just did it illegally and ashamedly whereas now it's quasi-legal and fully acceptable.
"The authoritarianism is getting worse and more accepted" is not a great response here.
It's the truth. Would you prefer I lie and tell you everything will be okay after Trump?
Up next, secret interpretations of laws to do things with zero accountability or public overaight. Oh wait we already have that.
Congratulations you found the key to fascism: Create vague laws that could apply to anyone, then you can pick the people who broke it. Of course you try to only pick your enemies.
Only: the person in charge of that decision is the meanest, most stupid idiot you have ever met and they envy you for your wife and want to live in your house once you have been dispossessed.
The brother of my grandfather was in jail in Germany during WWII because he offended the original Nazis. He said what roughly translates to: "Nazis are all just dumb plebs." And the thing is, he was right.
Couldn't it be used to identify/track the ICE vehicles? Observe where drones suddenly become enclosed in a no-fly zone (do I understand correctly that operators get notification that they should land immediately)?
The problem (which I've had happen) is that a no-fly zone suddenly popping up might prevent your drone from coming back to you.
Not that a government that just pops up no-fly zones would care about your drone, but just saying.
Are you suggesting that the system is efficient enough, and the users of it are competent enough, that a live moving no-fly zone would be placed somewhere that a drone in the immediate vicinity would be informed and be disabled?
I have my doubts. I would guess one "popping up" would at least be delayed such that it's pretty pointless by the time the drones are notified. Annoying indeed, useful (even to the ne'er-do-wells trying to enforce this crazy stuff) not so much.
DJI has (or, at least, had, a few years ago) a no-fly system that was updated via the Internet. Maybe it's not live, but then what would be the point of these no-fly zones? Just so ICE agents can shoot your drone down with impunity? If they didn't need license to execute people in the streets, I don't see why they'd need license to shoot down a drone.
> the order extended no-fly zones to ground vehicles belonging to the Department of Homeland Security. Even while the vehicles were in motion. Even if they were unmarked. And even if their routes had not been announced.
I want to know the genius who wrote this, and the mastermind who approved it.
This is exactly how corrupt, authoritarian governments have always operated.
Do no-fly zones extend indefinitely upwards? If so, can you build a no-fly wall out of cars?
The federal government doesn't need a row of cars to make a no-fly wall.
As we learned in El Paso in February, if the federal government wants a no fly zone, it can just create one.
But if the no-fly zones are arbitrarily mobile, the drivers can create a no-fly wall without intervention from the federal government.
The article states 1,000 vertical feet. Obviously this is targeting small drones and not commercial aircraft or even general aviation.
Someone who doesn't get that we're supposed to have a representative government with enumerated powers in this country.
Or maybe they do get that, but find it incredibly inconvenient to their own aspirations.
[flagged]
Drones are already regulated. You aren't allowed to fly higher than 400' AGL without ATC authorization, an altitude chosen because it has special significance in the National Airspace System. Nor are you allowed to fly in the vicinity of an airport without authorization.
This particular restriction we're talking about was completely unjustifiable. But the regs exist, and they aren't just made up nonsense. They're the result of systems engineering and a real risk management process.
Why wouldn't you? There are moving vehicles everywhere. If a drone who's weight is measured in grams is a problem being near moving vehicles, what do you think about 200 pounds of person and bicycle riding around moving vehicles?
[flagged]
[flagged]
> Do better or just don’t waste others’ time.
One of the nice things about HN is that we treat each other respectfully, even when someone posts a comment we may disagree with.
What are you talking about. Read part 107. Flying a drone is almost as hard as flying legally a private plane. Fines are huge. They are enforced.
> Flying a drone is almost as hard as flying legally a private plane
What universe are you in?
The FAA can’t even find and identify most of the dickheads flying drones around restricted airspace. You think they give a shit about drones in rural areas around smaller airports? Drones are cheap and easily accessible, orders of magnitude easier to get than an airplane in terms of actual acquisition and the license (spoiler: most drone users aren’t licensed). Compare both of those things with the cost of getting a PPL, to say nothing of how expensive even a small plane is. It isn’t just the US, either - I’ve flown small planes in both America and Australia, and drones are something that both the FAA and CASA clearly aren’t equipped to deal with. Regulations and laws don’t matter if you can’t enforce them because you can’t identify the perpetrator.
[flagged]
Not really. The FAA revised the rule, but that was their choice, not the result of a ruling or even the reasoned application of a general principle.
The very broad power of administrative rulemaking held by that agency is unchanged -- and the power of agencies generally, to make law without legislating, without accountability to the electorate, actually has nothing to do with this administration, does it? It actually has nothing to do with any of them. It's something the legislature has allowed to grow and grow over successive administrations, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.
I am not sure what is a better alternative. Laws can set the broad guidelines, but the people in those administrative roles have to make explicit decisions when gray areas inevitably arise. The legislature is free to codify the exact rules it wants when they disagree with the current setup.
They are free to do it but don't. That's exactly the problem. They also don't respond to overreach in rulemaking by revising the grants they have made, so it has been a cumulative process.
Interesting points, glad to have started this conversation.
Re this being the FAA's choice, I was reacting to this line in the reporting: "On April 10, Levine and his lawyers pressed ahead by filing an emergency motion [... which... ] may have expedited the government’s next move [to replace] the sweeping flight restrictions with a “national security advisory” [and dropping] all mentions of flight restrictions and criminal charges." Maybe Ars is being too rosy-viewed about the causality there, idk. I have no partic feeling one way or the other though I do want to take whatever comfort I can in the notion that the "system of checks and balances" is working. I'd rather go to bed thinking it is, than tell myself cynically that this was just another whim of an agency, with no real principled attitude.
I believe that the Trump administration in particular - not Republicans as opposed to Democrats - has abused agency independence in a manner unprecedented in recent American politics. I think agencies SHOULD act autonomously to determine specifics just like this one - what vehicles/devices, with what capabilities, can fly where and in what manner, and that we SHOULD value "expert advice" in such situations instead of using that phrase as invective. I think the American people should celebrate that we grant such freedoms because it lets us all benefit from expertise - but they should also understand that there is a price to pay in vigilance, of having to challenge the legality of agency actions if the particular implementation of regulations infringes on constitutional rights. But it's not just litigation that will prevent abuse - the first line of defense against it should be the expectation that administrations will consider themselves beholden to certain social norms of cautious use of power. Do you believe that there is no daylight between this administration and previous ones in terms of how they view what norms they ought to consider themselves bound by? That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one - if you don't believe that, I am curious to know more.
I don't think legislatures can possibly identify a priori all the ways in which rights could possibly be infringed and make their grants so granular that agencies can't possibly find abusive interpretations. Those can only be determined in specific, real, cases, when fallible individuals attempt to meet the legislated objectives by taking concrete action. I don't understand this idea that federal agencies have become "unaccountable" merely because they issue intepretations every day as and when they encounter real-world situations. The Chevron doctrine seemed a perfectly fine compromise to me - how this court thinks the legislative body can magically divine all the future possibilities and encode them into the acts that govern the agencies is just beyond me.
[flagged]
To answer your edit, I'd say your framing of those questions is likely considered antagonistic.
- No one is saying they need to know what vehicles contain ICE agents
- Not sure your meaning exactly, but there's no expectation for plainclothes officers to be locatable by the general public
- Concern for whom? Whose mistaken identity?
- This isn't about "knowing" a vehicle contains ICE agents.
- Government officials *should* be held to higher scrutiny than the general public.
- Their objective was to prevent *legally permitted* public recording of these operations
- Here you are delving into a fraught space. Given that many people in that status are guilty of *civil* infractions and the level of force being deployed is highly disproportionate, many people are understandably upset. There's a ton to discuss in just this one line item.
Journalists documenting the behavior of law enforcement. One needn't report live streaming information for use of a drone to be valuable in a civil society. Law enforcement officers are granted power to perform their jobs, but that power should remain in check lest it be used to deny citizens their rights.
Is the general public in the USA is supposedly entitled to know whether a given vehicle contains ICE agents? By what legal theory?
This is an inversion of the problem. The general public is entitled to fly drones in many areas and should not be punished just because ICE claims they are operating in an area.
Is there a similar nationwide prohibition on, say, plainclothes police officers?
This is not a valid comparison.
Is there no concern for what would happen in case of mistaken identity?
What does this mean? Why do you think the government should be able to arbitrarily restrict drone operations?
Knowing that a vehicle contains ICE agents, is there a reason that someone should be able to pursue it with a drone? Does this accomplish a legitimate purpose other than tracking the vehicle's position (again, presumably to disseminate the information "this is an ICE vehicle")? Is there a reason why this would not reasonably be seen as harassment from the agents' perspective?
Again, this is an inversion of the problem. If the general public is allowed to operate drones in certain areas, that use should not be subject to widespread, unjustified restrictions.
re ICE agents American citizens, entitled to the same rights as other American citizens?
Most of them probably are citizens.
Do people here believe that the purpose of enacting such no-fly zones is something other than preventing drones from following the vehicles for surveillance and information-sharing purposes? Especially given the idea that the zone moves with the vehicle?
The motivation isn't the problem, the problem is that the implementation infringes on the rights of citizens.
Is there a reason why the government of the USA should not be permitted to enforce its own immigration law? In particular, is there a reason why people who have illegally entered the country per that law, and who have what I'm told is called a "final order of removal", should be permitted to remain within the country?
People opposing the current immigration enforcement regime are not protesting the existence of law, they disagree with the formulation and implementation of the laws. Is it your position that questioning the formulation or implementation of a law should not be allowed?
You've been in plenty of other threads justifying the murders of American citizens by government agents, so it's doubtful that any of your questions here are in good faith. Nobody owes it to you to pick out the nuance from coy questions that culminate at the same old nonsensical refrain that any of the major outrages here are due to "enforcing immigration law".
This is pretty ironic given that the government can and absolutely does track American citizens everywhere without a warrant. I've known people who were harassed by police because they were near a crime that happened and the police used it's surveillance tools to find likely people in the area.
It has never been the case in America (at least not since any of us have been alive) that warrants are always required. There are plenty of situations where they are not.
It's not about the warrant (which was mentioned just to reinforce the lack of oversight law enforcement has when it invades people's privacy) but the massive assymmetry here and the person I'm responding to compared this situation to the rights Americans have.
Normal citizens can't get full no fly zones and are subject to even more invasive tactics. The comparison to normal citizens highlights that what was done here was far in excess of what is done for normal citizens and seems counter to their overall argument.
I can take the last ine:
If a stranger told you your baby was ugly, you would think the stranger was an asshole even if everyone in your family agreed that the baby is hideous.
Enjoy living in your country.
Get this bullshit political hit piece off my feed.
"Muh safe space! My privilege! My entitlement! Won't anyone think of me?! The victim here is me!"
Do you feel hurt when reality exposes the nonsense of your almighty dictator?
This is not your feed.
I appreciate the fact that HN does not have personalized echo chamber aka feeds.
Government overreach is a concern for a lot of HNers; hence this was voted up.
This is shit writing.
> On April 15, the FAA removed the no-fly zones by replacing the sweeping flight restrictions...
This should have been in the FIRST paragraph, not 24th.
You can give me all the background you want AFTER you tell me the most important point.
In no way is that the most important point of the article, especially when you are cherrypicking that sentence and deleting part of it and still don't include how the updated guideline is still ambiguous. You are the "shit writer" here and commenter.
"On April 15, the FAA removed the no-fly zones by replacing the sweeping flight restrictions with a “national security advisory” titled NOTAM FDC 6/2824. The revised notice dropped all mentions of flight restrictions and criminal charges. It instead “advised” drone pilots to avoid flying near “covered mobile assets” belonging to the Department of Homeland Security and several other federal agencies."
"The new FAA advisory wording is “a lot better than it was,” but it still comes off as “too ambiguous,” according to Moss at the Drone Service Providers Alliance. He suggested that the Department of Homeland Security could handle any potential drone concerns rather than making it an FAA issue."
> You are the "shit writer" here and commenter.
Your comment is just as good w/out this. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )