On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a bill in the United States Senate that would prohibit the domestic warrantless use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly identified as “drones.”

Specifically, the bill states that other than given exceptions involving border patrol, “exigent circumstances,” and “high risk” of terrorist attack as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security, “a person or entity acting under the authority, or funded in whole or in part by, the Government of the United States shall not use a drone to gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a statute or regulation except to the extent authorized in a warrant that satisfies the requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

As usual, the bill will need to be met by its legislative counterpart in the House and signed by the president before it becomes law. The introduction of the “Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act of 2012” came the same day that Public Intelligence, a nonprofit advocacy group, released a map showing 64 current and 22 planned military drone bases around the United States.

The bill seems to have drawn some initial support from civil libertarians and other experts that have paid close attention to drone use.

“I think that the current legal framework is not sufficiently protective for observations from above in a world where UAVs are common and inexpensive," John Villasenor, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Ars on Wednesday.

Villasenor recently authored a piece for Scientific American, in which he described the pending landscape of drones in the stratosphere that could stay aloft for weeks or months at a time.

In February 2012, President Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which accelerates the domestic use of drones, whose use originated in foreign military war theaters. A new poll released Tuesday by the Monmouth University Polling Institute of New Jersey also showed that Americans are generally in favor of expanded drone use domestically, with 67 percent of respondents opposed to their use to catch speeding drivers, and more opposed to drone use as part of routine police activity.

Currently, American military forces are generally forbidden from operating on American soil without express consent from Congress or powers granted from the Constitution under the Reconstruction-era Posse Comitatus Act. However, there is no evidence so far to suggest that the military has been using the drones to conduct surveillance on Americans, but there is some concern that as part of their military missions that they may accidentally collect information.

In April 2012, a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that the Federal Aviation Administration has issued 300 current Certificates of Authorization, which allow for drone operation. That list included entities as diverse as the University of Colorado and the town of Otter Tail, Minnesota (population: 572) about 200 miles south of the Canadian border.

Beyond the presence of drones around the country, there is currently one criminal case in North Dakota involving the first use of drones in a criminal investigation. The bizarre case involves a search for missing cattle that had run astray in June 2011 on a neighbor’s ranch. Last summer, when the Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke and his men were sent with a search warrant to the Rodney Brossart ranch, they were chased off by three rifle-toting men. Janke then called in reinforcements from the highway patrol, the local SWAT team, and even a Predator B drone off of the Canadian border area. With the help of the drone, three arrests were made.

This week, though, the judge in that case said he’d rule within a month on a new motion to dismiss the case, which largely revolves around seemingly excessive government surveillance action.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that local police in North Dakota “say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June [2011].”

"We don't use [drones] on every call out," said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks, told the Times. "If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don't call them."

UPDATE: Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Ars on Wednesday that his organization applauded this new bill: “We do not want drones flying over willy-nilly with no predicate and we don’t want there to be an assumption that general surveillance is ok.”