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The Drawbacks Of Delivery Drones May Outweigh The Benefits

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The Drawbacks Of Delivery Drones May Outweigh The Benefits

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You might think I'm a Luddite, which is strange for a technology analyst. We're supposed to be all in favor of new technology, no matter what. Part of it is that our paying customers are technology companies trying to sell the stuff, and, by extension, we're supposed to be technology evangelists.

A number of my colleagues, whom I shall not name here, are quite good at putting on their galoshes and marching out into the muck in any weather. I'm a little more reticent. And perhaps that's a good thing. I'd like to think so. Because not all technological advances are good, and we often dive in without a thought for unintended consequences.

If, simply by saying no, I could save one client from entering a doomed market, I would earn my keep many times over. Be that as it may, I have looked askance at a number of new technologies. Not, I will note, 's iPhone or iPad, both of which made sense from the get go. But others, like Glass, which strike me as unfinished thoughts, experiments, perhaps, but not something that will make society a better place (and ultimately reward the company promoting it). This is not about Google, although I do object to the extent to which the company mines personal information. Google's Chromebooks actually seem like a good idea.

In any event, this was how the reveal last weekend of 's "octocopter" struck me.

I totally get how it was a great free-advertising moment for Amazon, championed by its energetic CEO, Jeff Bezos. And, of course, it will go through all sorts of modifications before it actually comes to market. All we've seen thus far is a mesmerizing video.

And I admit that the idea of 30-minute delivery is beguiling, and if Amazon is successful, and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. won't be far behind. But as I began to think about the implications, it occurred to me that it was an idea whose time may not come anytime soon and maybe not anytime at all.

Some of the issues have to do with structural changes underway in our society. The gap between rich and poor is opening day by day. A rich guy like Bezos can imagine a theoretically better way to do something, but ignore how this innovation will be received by the general public.

Let's paint a plausible scenario. Mr. Jones, who lives within the feasible 10-mile radius of one of Amazon's "fulfillment centers" and has a subscription to Prime Air (the octocopter delivery service), orders an item that weighs less than 5 lbs. The system derives his address's GPS coordinates, and off the item goes.

Only, Mr. Jones lives in a dicey neighborhood, where many fathers of family have been out of work since 2008, and the economy has turned rather "informal." He's concerned that his delivery might not make it. He lives on the fifth floor of a walkup. The octocopter is not going to land on his fire escape; it's going to come to earth somewhere near the front stoop.

But Amazon is clever and has played out this scenario in development labs, allowing Mr. Jones to click a box on his order that says to text him five minutes before the order is set to arrive. Thus, he has time to get downstairs before one of his neighbors makes off with his goodies. And Amazon gets to harvest his cell phone number.

Not bad. Except that there's a guy waiting downstairs with a gun, interested in either the goods or the drone or both. Checkmate. Mr. Jones creeps back up the stairs.

I perused the odious comments sections of several articles on the Amazon delivery drone, and there were many good ol' boys who couldn't wait to treat one of those drones like a skeet and shoot it right out of the sky for fun - or perhaps because it deserves to die, representing as it does a world of people who never have to get their hands dirty, but who themselves are out of range. There's a lot of anger in the land from which the techno-elite is for the most part insulated.

I tried to figure out how much one of these things might cost. Obviously, the first one has to carry all the R&D and probably tallies at tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. But once in production, they could be more reasonable.

An MQ-9 Reaper - a drone used in battlefields in Afghanistan and elsewhere - runs about $12.5 million. A Predator goes for $4-5 million. One site pegs the cost per flight hour of Predator and Reaper drones at $2,500-3,500. Their larger, more capable cousin, the Global Hawk, costs about $30,000 per flight hour, according to the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

I have to believe that Prime Air drones in production will cost less than that, but given all the redundancy and safety features that will inevitably be required, a number like $50,000 seems reasonable for acquisition cost. After all, these are not paper airplanes. Operating cost will likely be measured in hundreds of dollars per hour, but even at tens of dollars per hour, the margins on any goods delivered in such a manner would be wiped out - unless the package happens to contain a diamond necklace.

Which gets us back to people stealing the drones, the goods, or both.

But (with apologies to Dr. Seuss) that is not all, oh, no; that is not all!

These things are proposing to fly at low altitudes. Low-level airspace may at first appear to be something equivalent to unregulated spectrum, the type that's used for WiFi signals in hotspots at . But in fact, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is quite interested in this hotly contested layer, which must be shared with all sorts of things: birds, wind farms, flagpoles, buildings, kites, and power lines, not to mention the hot-air balloons of Albuquerque and Phoenix.

Then, there's a scaling problem. If Prime Air were to become popular, traffic density at the fulfillment center would likely become overwhelming. The air-space right around these depots would be black with unmanned aerial vehicles all vying to get in or out of the hanger.

In the 60 Minutes segment during which Bezos revealed the drone, he said it would be years before Prime Air would be ready for prime time, but he indicated that the gating factor was not development but regulatory approval, which is at minimum two years away.

But the government, represented by the FAA, ought to be all in favor of Bezos's plan because, once the citizenry is used to seeing these things in the sky, it's that much easier for the National Security Agency (NSA) to put one up there that mimics the Amazon drone. After all, mimicry is established kit for the NSA. Field agents mimic journalists and diplomats every day.

So, keep an eye on that ol' government approval. If it comes through super fast, well ... welcome to the new age.

Twitter: RogerKay

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The Drawbacks Of Delivery Drones May Outweigh The Benefits

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You might think I'm a Luddite, which is strange for a technology analyst. We're supposed to be all in favor of new technology, no matter what. Part of it is that our paying customers are technology companies trying to sell the stuff, and, by extension, we're supposed to be technology evangelists.

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Since drone operators can view a target for hours or days in advance of a strike, they can identify terrorists more accurately than ground troops or conventional pilots. They are able to time a strike when innocents are not nearby and can even divert a missile after firing if, say, a child wanders into range.

Clearly, those advantages have not always been used competently or humanely; like any other weapon, armed drones can be used recklessly or on the basis of flawed intelligence. If an operator targets the wrong house, innocents will die.

Moreover, any analysis of actual results from the Central Intelligence Agency's strikes in Pakistan, which has become the world's unwilling test ground for the new weapon, is hampered by secrecy and wildly varying casualty reports. But one rough comparison has found that even if the highest estimates of collateral deaths are accurate, the drones kill fewer civilians than other modes of warfare.

AVERY PLAW, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, put the C.I.A. drone record in Pakistan up against the ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths in other settings. Mr. Plaw considered four studies of drone deaths in Pakistan that estimated the proportion of civilian victims at 4 percent, 6 percent, 17 percent and 20 percent respectively.

But even the high-end count of 20 percent was considerably lower than the rate in other settings, he found. When the Pakistani Army went after militants in the tribal area on the ground, civilians were 46 percent of those killed. In Israel's targeted killings of militants from Hamas and other groups, using a range of weapons from bombs to missile strikes, the collateral death rate was 41 percent, according to an Israeli human rights group.

In conventional military conflicts over the last two decades, he found that estimates of civilian deaths ranged from about 33 percent to more than 80 percent of all deaths.

Mr. Plaw acknowledged the limitations of such comparisons, which mix different kinds of warfare. But he concluded, "A fair-minded evaluation of the best data we have available suggests that the drone program compares favorably with similar operations and contemporary armed conflict more generally."

By the count of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, which has done perhaps the most detailed and skeptical study of the strikes, the C.I.A. operators are improving their performance. The bureau has documented a notable drop in the civilian proportion of drone casualties, to 16 percent of those killed in 2011 from 28 percent in 2008. This year, by the bureau's count, just three of the 152 people killed in drone strikes through July 7 were civilians.

The drone's promise of precision killing and perfect safety for operators is so seductive, in fact, that some scholars have raised a different moral question: Do drones threaten to lower the threshold for lethal violence?

"In the just-war tradition, there's the notion that you only wage war as a last resort," said Daniel R. Brunstetter, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine who fears that drones are becoming "a default strategy to be used almost anywhere."

With hundreds of terrorist suspects killed under President Obama and just one taken into custody overseas, some question whether drones have become not a more precise alternative to bombing but a convenient substitute for capture. If so, drones may actually be encouraging unnecessary killing.

Few imagined such debates in 2000, when American security officials first began to think about arming the Predator surveillance drone, with which they had spotted Osama bin Laden at his Afghanistan base, said Henry A. Crumpton, then deputy chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, who tells the story in his recent memoir, "The Art of Intelligence."

"We never said, 'Let's build a more humane weapon,' " Mr. Crumpton said. "We said, 'Let's be as precise as possible, because that's our mission - to kill Bin Laden and the people right around him.' "

Since then, Mr. Crumpton said, the drone war has prompted an intense focus on civilian casualties, which in a YouTube world have become harder to hide. He argues that technological change is producing a growing intolerance for the routine slaughter of earlier wars.

"Look at the firebombing of Dresden, and compare what we're doing today," Mr. Crumpton said. "The public's expectations have been raised dramatically around the world, and that's good news."

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united states defense and military forces

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Since drone operators can view a target for hours or days in advance of a strike, they can identify terrorists more accurately than ground troops or conventional pilots. They are able to time a strike when innocents are not nearby and can even divert a missile after firing if, say, a child wanders into range.

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Privacy advocates criticize border patrol drones in Senate immigration plan

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Privacy advocates criticize border patrol drones in Senate immigration plan

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Drones are going to turn People into Chickens in Cages

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Drones are going to turn People into Chickens in Cages

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Drones over America: public safety benefit or 'creepy' privacy threat?

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Drones over America: public safety benefit or 'creepy' privacy threat?

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Shortly after Alan Frazier became a part-time deputy sheriff in Grand Forks, N.D., the police began looking into the possibility of buying some aircraft to boost their law enforcement capabilities. They wanted some help doing things like finding missing people or carrying out rescues in a region dotted by farmsteads threatened by flooding that wipes out access to roads.

Buying a turbine engine helicopter, however, would cost $25 million, a prohibitive price tag even with 11 law enforcement agencies - eight from North Dakota and three in western Minnesota - willing to share the cost.

So Mr. Frazier, also an assistant professor of aviation at the University of North Dakota (UND), began looking into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a possible alternative.

But what appears, on one level, to be a sensible, practical, and affordable solution for local law enforcement - the price tag for a small UAV is about the cost of a tricked-out new police cruiser at $50,000 - has run smack into public concerns about yet another high-tech invasion of privacy and the popular image of drones as stealthy weapons used against terrorists.

Nonetheless, the technology's potential benefits in pursuing a raft of public safety measures at relatively low cost have enormous appeal for law enforcement agencies across the country, since President Obama signed a bill last year directing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to further open US airspace to drones for both public and private use.

Even before that, the number of permits, known as certificates of authorization (COAs), that the FAA issued to organizations to fly UAVs more than doubled from 146 in 2009 to 313 in 2011. As of February 2013 there were 327 active COAs.

The bulk of these permits go to the US military for training, and the Pentagon expects their numbers to grow considerably in the years to come. According to a March 2011 Pentagon estimate, the Department of Defense will have 197 drones at 105 US bases by 2015.

The US Border Patrol has the country's largest fleet of UAVs for domestic surveillance, including nine Predator drones that patrol regions like the Rio Grande, searching for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Unlike the missile-firing Predators used by the Central Intelligence Agency to hunt Al Qaeda operatives and their allies, the domestic version of the aircraft - say, those used by the border patrol - is more typically equipped with night-vision technology and long-range cameras that can read license plates. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also complain that these drones have see-through imaging technology similar to those used in airports, as well as facial recognition software tied to federal databases.

The growth in drones is big business. Some 50 companies are developing roughly 150 systems, according to The Wall Street Journal, ranging from miniature flying mechanical bugs to " Battlestar Galactica"-type hovering unmanned airplanes. It's an industry expected to reach some $6 billion in US sales by 2016.

Those forecasts notwithstanding, neither the FAA nor the association of UAV operators says it knows how many nonmilitary drones are operating in the United States. The ACLU is seeking that information.

The growth in the development of UAVs by both private companies and the US government has not gone unnoticed, creating a backlash in some communities.

In Seattle last month, community members quashed their city's drone program before it even got started. The program was being considered for search-and-rescue operations and some criminal investigations, but was referred to by protesters as "flying government robots watching their every move."

Mayor Mike McGinn spoke with Police Chief John Diaz, "and we agreed that it was time to end the unmanned aerial vehicle program," the mayor wrote in a statement. The drones were returned to the manufacturer.

Just days earlier, Charlottesville, Va., had become the first city in the country to pass a "no-drone zone" resolution, putting in place a two-year moratorium on the use of drones within Charlottesville limits.

"The big concern for us is that they're going to be everywhere," says John Whitehead, an attorney and president of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization in Charlottesville, which launched a preemptive fight against drones before the city council.

The move followed an Obama administration memo justifying the use of drones overseas to kill US citizens suspected of taking part in terrorist activities. "The president says you can take out American citizens in foreign countries," Mr. Whitehead says. "Well, if you can do that, you can take out somebody here as well."

On March 6, Attorney General Eric Holder may have reinforced such fears in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee when he refused to rule out the use of armed drones on US soil in an emergency "to protect the homeland."

If it all has an air of hysteria about it - Mr. Holder said there are no plans for the domestic use of armed drones and called the scenario "entirely hypothetical" and unlikely - privacy groups point to California's Alameda County, where officials insisted they wanted drones for search-and-rescue missions. An internal memo that surfaced from the sheriff's department, however, noted the drones could be used for "investigative and tactical surveillance, intelligence gathering, suspicious persons, and large crowd-control disturbances." The county dropped its plans.

The first and only known use of a drone in the arrest of a US citizen occurred in December 2011 in North Dakota, when the Nelson County Sheriff's Department asked to borrow one of the US Customs and Border Protection UAVs. The drone provided a good view of the three sons of the owner of a 3,000-acre farm who were involved in a standoff with law enforcement officers. As a result, police were able to tell that the brothers were unarmed, allowing them to enter the farm and arrest the brothers without the confrontation turning into a shootout.

Whitehead imagines a day when drones equipped with sound cannons, which release painful high-decibel sound waves that cause crowds to disperse, could be dispatched by the government to political protests and used as well to "effectively stifle free speech."

The concern that such technologies can be misused to invade privacy and suppress free speech "is a legitimate fear," says UND's Frazier. "Anytime we increase the technological capabilities of the government there's a justifiable concern there. But I think these fears can be offset by the fact that the drones we're using have very limited capabilities."

Nevertheless, privacy concerns are what have prompted groups including the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain hundreds of documents from the FAA outlining who has been requesting to use drones in America's skies, and why.

Roughly 40 percent of the drone flight requests submitted to the FAA are from the US military. "They are flying drones pretty regularly - eight hours a day, five days a week - to train pilots so that they will be able to fly drones," says Jessica Lynch, a staff attorney for EFF.

These drones are equipped with infrared scanning capabilities and other surveillance gadgets. "Drones have quite a number of technologies on board, including thermal cameras and the ability to intercept communications," Ms. Lynch says. "If they are training pilots, they are training them in these surveillance tools."

FAA regulations stipulate that weaponized drones cannot fly in unrestricted US airspace. The agency also has specific parameters for law enforcement drones. Law enforcement groups, for example, must maintain visual contact with the drone at all times and must also fly at relatively low altitudes.

These are regulations with which the Grand Forks Sheriff's Department has become familiar in the three years since it began looking into using drones, first establishing an Unmanned Aerial Systems unit as part of the department and then applying for COAs to use the drones. The unit, which went fully operational Feb. 1, has conducted 250 simulated missions, but has yet to use a drone in an operation.

Certification tends to be a lengthy and arduous process, Frazier says, adding that there are also some parameters for usage that are meant to promote safety, but can make it tricky for law enforcement to do its jobs.

One provision, for example, is that the drones can fly only by day. Another early rule was that the police had to give 48 hours' notice if they were going to use the drones.

"It's tough to predict if there is going to be a fire tomorrow, or a bank robbery the day after tomorrow," he says. The department was able to convince the FAA to let it fly the drones on one-hour notice instead.

That said, Frazier understands the public's concerns about the use of drones. For that reason, Grand Forks established a 15-member committee - made up of one-third public safety officials, one-third UND faculty, and one-third community residents - to evaluate the use of drones and to troubleshoot questions and concerns of the public. Every law enforcement action involving the drones is to be reviewed by the committee.

Frazier told committee members that the department did not intend to ask for the ability to use the drones for covert surveillance. "We will not use them to, quote, spy on people," Frazier says. Even if that were the intention, he adds, "These small drones are not particularly robust platforms for covert surveillance. I think the public can't understand that my little UAV can only fly for 15 minutes, can't fly out of my line of sight, and can't fly in greater than 15-knot winds."

Out of concern that average citizens could be filmed by sensors on the aircraft, one of the committee's first acts was to instruct police to post road signs warning the public when UAVs are in use.

Yet some of the conversations EFF's Lynch has had with other law enforcement agencies haven't been as reassuring about privacy, she says. "We've talked to police about this, and they've said, 'Well, we're going to fly the drones in public airspace, and if you walk around in public you don't have an expectation of privacy in your movements.'

"While that might be true for a police officer following you down the street, I don't know if that applies when a drone can fly over and surveil everybody walking down that street for an extended period of time," Lynch says.

"You can make the case that drones are helping law enforcement better do their jobs for less [cost] and we should incorporate it," she adds. "As technology becomes cheaper and easier to use, it's tempting to use it all the time."

That is the fear of Texas state lawmaker Lance Gooden, who in February proposed some of the toughest anti-drone legislation in the country. It would prevent drone operators from collecting images, sounds, and smells - or hovering over any home - without permission.

"Two to four years from now, it'll be impossible to get legislation passed because every law enforcement agency will want drones," says Mr. Gooden. While the drone lobby is growing, it is not as powerful as it will become, he adds.

Currently, his bill has the support of 101 of the 150 members of the state Legislature. But some longtime drone experts say such laws are overkill and could impede growth of technology that is useful and relatively inexpensive.

"The ordinances that have been passed are absolutely absurd," says retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the first deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Reconnaissance, and Surveillance for the US Air Force. "And what's precluded are the very valuable civilian applications in terms of traffic control, firefighting, disaster response, border security, the monitoring of power lines - the list goes on and on."

As for privacy concerns, "I can't think of another way of saying it, but that they are unfounded," Deptula adds. "All you have to do is look up in any major metropolitan city and see the cameras all around. And have they ever heard of satellites? Where do they think Google maps come from?"

Frazier concurs. People with a good zoom lens have better cameras than do his small drones, he adds, pointing out that one of the Grand Forks Sheriff's Department's drones has a simple off-the-shelf Panasonic.

The average GPS-enabled cellphone can now track people and their movements to within a few feet, he notes.

That said, "I understand what people mean when they say it's 'creepy,' " Frazier says. "I value my privacy as much as anyone does - it's very sacred in this country." Even if they could do it legally, law enforcement agencies would be making a big mistake using drones for covert surveillance - for the time being, he adds.

"It would be a fatal mistake at this point. We really need to take a crawl, walk, run approach. To go to covert surveillance brings us to a run," Frazier says of the law enforcement community. "If that means we're not Buck Rogers in the 21st century, we're comfortable with that."

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Drones over America: public safety benefit or 'creepy' privacy threat?

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Shortly after Alan Frazier became a part-time deputy sheriff in Grand Forks, N.D., the police began looking into the possibility of buying some aircraft to boost their law enforcement capabilities. They wanted some help doing things like finding missing people or carrying out rescues in a region dotted by farmsteads threatened by flooding that wipes out access to roads.

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Flying Robots 101: Everything You Need To Know About Drones

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Flying Robots 101: Everything You Need To Know About Drones

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Flying Robots 101: Everything You Need To Know About Drones

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It's not terribly surprising that news outlets would default to an image of the Reaper; it's perhaps the most widely recognized drone in operation. But as more details of the incident surfaced, this simplification proved incredibly wrong.

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Drones are coming to a police station near you, prompting lawmakers to craft legislation designed to limit what they see as the potential for a previously unthinkable level of Big Brother-style surveillance by the government.

Four states - Florida, Idaho, Montana and Virginia - have already passed laws to control the use of drones by law enforcement. The first three have barred police from using drones without a warrant in most cases; Virginia has barred their use by law enforcement (with exceptions) for two years. According to a tally by the American Civil Liberties Union, legislation to limit drone use has been proposed in 41 states and remains active in 32 states.

There is also a push to limit domestic drone use on a federal level. On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations is holding a hearing called, "Eyes in the Sky: The Domestic Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems." It is the second congressional hearing on domestic drones this year; at the first, Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, warned that "the domestic use of drones to conduct surveillance and collect other information will have a broad and significant impact on the everyday lives of millions of Americans."

Three bills from the current Congress have been referred to the subcommittee for consideration. The first, called the Preserving American Privacy Act, would require a governmental entity operating a drone to minimize the collection or disclosure of identifying information. Another bill, the Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act, would prevent government officials from using a drone to gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct without a warrant. A third would prohibit the use of drones to kill citizens of the United States within the United States.

On the Senate side, both Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., are preparing to introduce legislation. Paul's bill, which his office says will be released in the coming weeks, is a reintroduction of his "Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act" from last year, which bars the use of drones by law enforcement without a warrant in most cases. The freshman senator gave the issue of domestic drone use national prominence when he filibustered over what he considered a lack of clarity from the White House over whether it had the authority to use drones to kill U.S. citizens on American soil with drones. (Attorney General Eric Holder eventually said the answer, when it came to Americans not engaged in combat, is no.)

It is an open question whether many of these laws are necessary. Catherine Crump, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the organization would like to see legislation on a federal and state level making clear that law enforcement cannot use drones without a warrant (except in emergency situations) because there is not yet case law on drones and "courts move very slowly."

But she acknowledges that the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, would seem to protect Americans from having lawmakers monitor them with a camera-enabled drone without cause.

"There are good reasons to believe that drones can't be used to peer into peoples' houses, or to take thermal imaging of those houses, unless law enforcement gets a warrant based on probable cause," she said. "Because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy against those forms of surveillance."

"Without a warrant, I think it's clear that if the police fly into a backyard to look into the window of a home, that's unconstitutional," adds John Villasenor, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and UCLA professor who is testifying at the Friday hearing. "The Fourth Amendment has served us well since 1791. It can continue to do so in a world where unmanned aircraft are widely used."

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Drones are coming to a police station near you, prompting lawmakers to craft legislation designed to limit what they see as the potential for a previously unthinkable level of Big Brother-style surveillance by the government. Four states - Florida, Idaho, Montana and Virginia - have already passed laws to control the use of drones by law enforcement.