The impending FAA rule is alarming some privacy advocates. The rise of unmanned aerial vehicles?

When you’re out in your backyard this summer, smile — you might be on camera.

A camera mounted on a drone flying overhead, that is.


That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration is drafting a rule that would allow local governments, and even private companies and regular Joes, to use small unmanned aerial vehicles for pretty much anything they want.

The impending rule is alarming privacy advocates and also has the potential to clog up the already congested aviation system. But it also promises to usher in an entirely new market for businesses and applications that can only be imagined, and deep-pocketed interests such as the aerospace industry are pressing for the rule.

For the most part, when people think of UAVs, they imagine the enormous Predator drones that stalk the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the rule the FAA is drafting — which is being vetted by the Office of Management and Budget for release possibly this spring or summer — would allow only craft of less than 55 pounds to be operated inside the United States. The rule is also expected to require that those small vehicles be operated within sight of the person behind the control stick, severely limiting their range.

Still, there’s plenty that small UAVs can do, and industries and governments of every stripe are bullish on the pending rule.

“We envision this as really the next big revolution in kind of all of aerospace,” said Ben Gielow, government relations manager and general counsel for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. “We are aware of a couple dozen current potential [civilian] uses of these things.” But probably, he said, “it’s one of those technologies where we haven’t even thought of the potential market out there.”

Witness the case of the Los Angeles Police Department, which recently warned real estate agents to stop hiring UAVs to take sweeping aerial high-definition video of their tonier sales listings.

At present, the FAA bars anyone from operating a UAV without obtaining an experimental operating certificate. A few law enforcement agencies have obtained those kinds of waivers, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses UAVs along the U.S.-Mexico border. The FAA allows radio-controlled planes, but only when they are used in designated areas, and even then only for recreational purposes.

If the technology becomes widespread, police departments can use UAVs to replace or supplement costly and dangerous helicopter surveillance, companies can use them to watch far-flung interests such as oil fields, and utilities can use them to monitor mile after mile of power lines.

“You would want an unmanned aircraft to do the dangerous, the difficult, the dull missions that manned aircraft can’t do. Or you’d want to use an unmanned aircraft if a manned aircraft is just kind of too expensive,” Gielow said.

In advance of issuing the draft rule, the FAA on Friday began taking comments on the agency’s selection process for six congressionally mandated UAV test sites. The FAA will use the sites to gather data on what works and what doesn’t in integrating UAVs into populated areas.

“Unmanned aircraft can help us meet a number of challenges, from spotting wildfires to assessing natural disasters,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. “But these test sites will help us ensure that our high safety standards are maintained as the use of these aircraft becomes more widespread.”

The FAA’s rule, though, will focus only on ensuring that operating UAVs won’t jeopardize safety. The agency has no role to play in safeguarding privacy — and that’s just what worries advocates.

Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, said though small UAVs may sound innocuous, they can contain high-powered spying equipment, including cameras with zoom lenses so strong that they can see things not perceived by the human eye, along with thermal-imaging equipment that can peek through walls, and night-vision cameras.

“We are particularly concerned with the use of this technology by law enforcement,” Crump said. “Ordinary Americans should be able to walk around without being concerned that they’re being surveilled by police departments.”

Crump said the strongest imaging technology can be carried by the smallest of drones. How small? The tiniest is the size of a hummingbird, with the ability to hover in front of a window and shoot video through the pane. It’s an image straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” in which people live under constant surveillance.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), co-chairman of the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, said UAVs can have many benefits for society, including for law enforcement, firefighters, agriculture, research, science and even archaeology.

But he said privacy concerns associated with the rule are real and will need to be monitored by Congress.

“Privacy is extremely important to me, and I don’t want to get caught up on the technology at the expense of the privacy rights of individuals,” Cuellar said. “We’ve got to make sure technology works for us and that we don’t work for technology.”

Gielow of the unmanned vehicle association dismissed privacy concerns, saying UAVs as vehicles may be new, but the imaging technologies they’re using aren’t — they’re already being employed on manned aircraft, for instance. Further, Gielow said the law already contains a framework to handle privacy concerns.

“Those rules and procedures are already in place today and so they will also be applicable to unmanned systems,” Gielow said. He rejected the notion of UAVs constantly spying on people.

Crump of the ACLU, however, challenged that notion that current laws provide adequate protection, calling it “patently false.”

“I would love for those individuals to identify what privacy rules are in place that provide adequate or any protection,” Crump said. She asserts that Congress needs to conduct a soup-to-nuts review of privacy laws to ensure that they are adequate at the time the rule becomes operational.

Cuellar, who like many politicians has a background as a lawyer, said in all likelihood Congress will need to adjust the laws to deal with UAVs. “Like anything else, anytime there’s emerging technology there’ll be tinkering of the law and fine-tuning of the law,” he said.

Privacy concerns aside, the market for UAVs is projected to grow so much as the government approves more and larger models that it threatens to make an already crowded airspace even worse.

Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation for the Aerospace Industries Association, said the rule expected to be released later this year is just “the first step in what we hope over time will be full integration” of all types of UAVs into the civil airspace.

Elwell acknowledged that there’s some question about whether UAVs can share the sky with commercial and business aircraft without the FAA having completed an upgrade of the nation’s antiquated radar-based air traffic control system. The new, satellite-based system the FAA is transitioning to is known as NextGen.

“I can unequivocally say that having NextGen as our new air traffic control system will make accommodating [UAVs] into the system much easier,” Elwell said.

And he acknowledged that realizing the aerospace industry’s ultimate goal of full integration assumes the government can successfully implement NextGen — which is far from assured. “That has to happen,” Elwell said.