California Sheriff Faces Loud Privacy Protests Against Drone PlansParker Higgins The hearing comes after a number of inauspicious false starts for an Alameda County drone program. In October, documents obtained in the EFF/Muckrock 2012 Drone Census revealed a significant discrepancy between the Offices proposal to the County Supervisors and its request to another agency for funding. In particular, while the Sheriffs Office had told the County that it intended to use the drone only for emergency purposes, its funding request named surveillance on suspicious persons, large crowd control disturbances, and counter-terrorism applications. When that discrepancy came to light, the Sheriff agreed to revisit his proposal, this time seeking input from the ACLU and other organizations to write a policy governing drone use. But while the public interest groups provided feedback, the final proposal failed to incorporate some of the most important suggestions. ACLU outlines some of the problems with the new proposal in a letter to County Supervisors Scott Haggerty and Richard Valle [pdf]: In yesterdays hearing, the Sheriff showed a sample unit of the model he is seeking to purchase, and stressed its technical limitations. However, as EFF outlined in our testimony, privacy protections that come through limits on the current state of technology are cold comfort. The state of the art for unmanned aerial surveillance units is rapidly advancing, and current limitations on flight time, camera resolution, data storage, or analysis like facial recognition wont last long. A comprehensive privacy policy is essential now, before technology enables truly invasive practices. In the words of one of the dozens of speakers to give a brief public comment at the end of the hearing: We, Alameda County, should not be a leader in technology that will infringe upon our civil rights. Thats at the heart of the widespread public uneasiness with the Sheriffs proposed drone program: the possibility for an expansion of the surveillance state into our airspace, not only capturing footage and data for local law enforcement, but also feeding it into Department of Homeland Security Fusion Centers, as outlined in the current Alameda County plan. While the Sheriff clearly hopes to avoid that associationhe even asked that the County Supervisors not use the word surveillance at all, a request with which they, oddly, attempted to complyhe has so far refused to incorporate the protective language we advocated for into his proposed policy, and even demurred from limiting the surveillance of criminal activity to felonies. EFF will continue to follow the developments of Alameda Countys drone program, and other programs around the country. There are certainly valuable applications for unmanned systems in law enforcement and distaster response. But as the outpouring of public concern in California and elsewhere has shown, these benefits must not come at the cost of privacy breaches. 