The right way to regulate drone privacy
2013/08/14 Leave a comment
On August 6th, I had the honor of testifying in front of the California State Assembly Public Safety Committee on regulation of drones, by the state of California. The committee is considering several bills that have been introduced on the regulation of drones particularly with respect to privacy and law enforcement use.
The committee discussions, hopefully indicative of the general tone of legislators everywhere:
The committee seemed to be wrestling with several questions about where to start. Several wondered what exactly is a drone (Good luck! If anyone figures out a clear definition let me know) and what the capabilities of this class of technology are. I hope that the message that came through from the witnesses was the “drones” are not distinct from other vehicle and sensing technologies, but are just a subset of the flying class of these technologies and that the capabilities are similar to manned platforms of the same class. I was also very pleased to see that the committee was eager not to foreclose beneficial uses of the technology. Some of the committee members specifically cited my company, TerrAvion, as an example of they type of application they wanted to avoid regulating.
The committee and the witnesses all recognized that air safety is regulated by the FAA, but that the states can impose additional regulations on privacy, particularly in law enforcement. If we are to live in a democracy, there have to be limits on the government’s ability to collect information on citizens. However, I think that the thoughtful testimony of Sheriff Geoff Dean of Ventura County pointed to the fact that law enforcement agencies are ready for the challenge of using new technology under the supervision of the courts and elected officials in a way that is focused on creating real community benefits and is not generally invasive–even to people who might be kind of sort of breaking the law, like speeding or possessing marijuana here in California.
Principles for regulating drones:
Uniformity: I believe that greater regulation of surveillance by the government is required. Some of the things western intelligence agencies are doing are terrifying. As a patriot and a veteran, I am dismayed at how our government relates to collecting data on its own citizens. As a drone operations leader, who has participated at the pointy end of the intelligence spear in Afghanistan, I can tell you that cellphone and e-mail monitoring represents an exponentially greater threat to democracy than having a whole fleet of drones at the government’s beck and call. When we make privacy regulations, let’s regulate what, not how, individuals and the government can collect information. The platform that is used to collect the information should not matter. If I can’t collect information with a plane, then I shouldn’t be allowed to collect it with a cellphone camera either.
Moreover, private individuals ought to have the same right to collect information that the government does. In practice this might mean that if the government can fly a drone, I as a private citizen should be able to fly a drone. If the government can issue a subpoena (or national security letter), I as a private citizen should be able to discover those same records in litigation for things that have nothing to do with national security. There should be uniformity, no institution should be sitting in privileged position, if there are extra steps for government uses of data, I’m okay with that.
Regulate Late in the Information Cycle: A corollary to the idea of regulating uniformly, is to regulate late in the information cycle. One of the key ideas of modern information networks is the idea that the information cycle is being modularized. This modularization means that instead of a single organization that delivers “the answer” through all the steps, a decision maker can change one part of the process at time to deliver better results. The implication of this, is that collection is likely to be used in many unanticipated ways. Regulations that are targeted “upstream” in the data cycle are likely to become obsolete and have unintended effects very quickly. If legislators are looking curtail specific negative effects of data collection, they should target them later in the information cycle, most importantly at taking actions.
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I love the United States’ robust take on personal freedom. Taking our cherished rights and freedoms into the digital age is going to require hard, thoughtful work from legislators, voters, and public and private officials. I hope the robotics community wakes up to the fact that data collection and privacy are not just drone issues, but issues that we share across domains and with other data-rich technology sectors. I am heartened by my participation thus far in our democratic process, it seems like people are really working to accommodate each other’s concerns and arrive at future that we will all be happy to live in.
Do you know anyone thinking about the future of aviation?
2012/10/29 by Robert Morris Leave a comment
If you do, please make an introduction for me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of aviation lately. I’m trying to write a major piece for Patrick Egan at sUAS News and also thinking about this for reasons related to my business. I’m not sure that we in the unmanned aviation community have done enough to think about what the future of the aviation industry is like. Clayton Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next has a great discussion of disruption in aviation, but even though it was written in 2004, it makes nary a mention of unmanned aircraft. Steve Morris at MLB Company also was kind enough to have lunch with me last week and talk about what he sees coming.
Photo Credit: DARPA / DTIC.mil
Hypothesized Developments in Aviation from Unmanned Aircraft:
-Aircraft building, particularly on the low end will approach a commodity industry more analogous to PCs or cellphones than current aircraft building paradigms.
-Unmanned aircraft companies (both builders and operators) are going to look more like software or networking companies than they are going to look like industrial companies, this has implications for both human resource practices and the capital structure of the companies.
-Scheduling, routing, and planning will be done according to the new paradigm. Currently in aviation, everything is optimized around getting the most out of any particular flight hour or unit of plane time. Unmanned flips this on its head and allows for the aircraft to be treated like other tools that wait on the main job. Don’t know when you’ll need the plane up? That’s okay, we’ll park it in the sky (maybe doing a lower value mission) until you need it. Want to go from point A to B? Great we’ll take you there, directly, when you want to go. We will not worry about crew duty cycles, hubs, or returning the plane to its home base.
-Large airports will loose their centrality to the system–this is not to say they will experience a decline in traffic, but rather, they will not be the key limits on a network-like system of small airfields and ad hoc landing or operating sites (think more like a heliport than an airport).
Predicted Market Effects:
-Differentiation and customization will likely become the norm in unmanned aircraft operations. Most airlines are pretty undifferentiated, but when the business customer is going to tie their ERP system to their aerial service provider’s dispatch system and automatically task aerial missions based on orders, sustained relationships and differentiated services are going to be much more meaningful.
-Data gathering / reconnaissance is likely to switch almost entirely to unmanned systems after the FAA changes the rules.
-Air Cargo is going to be significantly changed, mostly at the interface between trucking and air, with more work being done by air and less by trucking.
-In the long run personalized aviation, whether that is passenger aviation or other types of aviation consumption is going to be the big development. Aircraft of today are like mainframes of the 70’s. Only anointed experts who get to go into the restricted area can operate these machines. Unmanned aircraft are going to be like PC’s, so cheap and easy to use that anyone can have one. The possibilities here are quite remarkable. Data collection, aerial work, cargo, and passenger transport are likely to feel the effects of this shift.
-Long haul, passenger, mass transportation will be the last segment to be effected. The first segments to be effected will be small, light-weight, short duration applications.
So what else?
I don’t really have a clear idea of how this effects incumbents. It will definitely be change. On the one hand, I think that the big guys at the top of the market will be fine. I don’t expect Boeing or the airlines to disappear. On the other hand, I don’t think that axis will have the control over aviation that they do today. They will be more like bus companies and builders in the large automotive industry.
The cult of the pilot will be diminished (as it already is in military aviation) and air travel will continue to be democratized. I believe that we are witnessing something akin to the introduction of the automobile. Prior to the automobile, mechanized transportation had been too expensive and hard to use for anyone that was not an expert. Prior to aerial automation, aircraft were too expensive and hard to use for anyone but an expert. That’s changing, if we can hurry up the FAA, we have an amazing industrial explosion ahead of us.
Filed under Aircraft, Commentary, Economics, Policy Tagged with air carrie, airbus, aircraft, airport, automation, aviation, boeing, carrier, economics, FAA, future of aviation, regulation, robot, UAS, unmanned, unmanned systems