I don't get the hate. If government wants to spy on you, they'll spy on you anyways. Drones are more cost effective than planes or helicopters, but outlawing one doesn't outlaw the other, and there will still be an eye in the sky keeping watch.

Besides, if you don't do anything illegal, why do you care? Oh no, someone is going to watch me go to work, or grocery shopping, or taking a shit. I don't mind, they aren't going to see anything that will affect my daily life in any way.

If an inexpensive unmanned aircraft helps police catch murderers faster, helps firefighters stop fires sooner, helps the DEA keep drugs out of the reach of children, then I'm all for it. In the very least, I'd much rather have my tax money spent on that than more weapons to go fight wars in other countries.

The biggest thing that bothers me about the drone hate is the same thing that bothers me about any debate related to aviation. People that know nothing about it hate on it for stupid reasons, then laws are made by lawmakers that have no knowledge about how this stuff works and screws over those that do. I believe Oregon was trying to pass an anti-drone law that would have essentially made ANY remote controlled aircraft ILLEGAL, as illegal as owning a fully automatic gun. So if that law passed, and I lived in Oregon, I would be a criminal because I have 4 remote controlled aircraft in my home, and they are all big enough to carry a small camera (one of them could probably carry a GoPro without much effort).

It blows my mind that our government can be so two faced. On one hand they will push for more STEM jobs, for the US to be a science and engineering leader, yet on the other hand they go and try to pass laws to ban an entire technology segment that the US is dominating, and that has the potential for creating thousands of jobs. We need to stop stifling innovation for the sake of our perceived privacy.