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WaPo: "Privacy issues hover over police drone use"

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Privacy issues hover over police drone use by Peter Finn in today's Washington Post: The suspect's house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons, including high-caliber rifles. As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department's aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down. So the Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on January 23, 2011 (boomark / email).