So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/so-this-is-how-it-begins-guy-refuses-to-stop-drone-spying-on-seattle-woman/275769/
Back in October, Alexis wrote a piece asking what rights do we have with regard to the air above our property. Walk onto someone's lawn and you're trespassing; fly over it in a helicopter and you're in the clear -- "the air is a public highway," the Supreme Court declared in 1946. But what about the in-between space? Does the availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones, aka UAVs) throw a wrench in the old legal understandings?
Well, here's where the rubber meets the road for this abstract line of questioning. The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog is reporting a complaint it received from a resident in the Miller Park neighborhood. She writes:
This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing "research". We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.
The site adds, "The woman tells us she called police but they decided not to show up when the man left."
= new reply since forum marked as read
Except I'd go with Paintballs and not steel.
Safety first.
The last few weekends I've been flying a quadcopter like this with my daughters. We've flown it in our neighborhood and in some open space.
It is basically a radio-controlled toy but light-years ahead of where radio-controlled toys were when I was a child.
This model doesn't contain a camera but it is strong enough to lift a small one. For fun I had been thinking about velcroing a camera like this to the bottom so we could record a "birds eye view" of our flights.
With just a little more electronics (and maybe one step up to a bigger quadcopter) we could add a live transmission of what the copter was seeing, and maybe even try flying it via FPV (first person view).
All of the above is what hobbyists can do today using a handful of off the shelf parts. And when I look at what I'm doing with my daughters I just see a dad having fun with his kids and hopefully teaching them some knowledge about aerodynamics and electronics. I see nothing I'm doing that is even close to what should be banned.
I agree there is some line that shouldn't be crossed with these things. But putting a video camera on a radio controlled aircraft is not something new, and isn't something inherently suspicious. It is just that the technology is getting better and cheaper and more in reach of the average hobbyist.
