Michael Heise | FilmingCops.com
Police in Illinois will soon be using drones for photographing crash scenes and crime scenes from an aerial viewpoint.
According to them, that is ALL they will be using them for, but given the fact that some police departments are already secretly using highly invasive Stingray technology, many suspect they’ll be using them to spy on Americans.
In Illinois, according to the 2013 Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act, legislation designed to restrict the use of drones, actually already gives the police in IL the ability to use drones at crime scenes, for “high risk terrorist” situations, to search for missing persons, or persons with a warrant.
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Police are also asked to destroy any personal information they obtain with the drones within 30 days.
It looks to me to be a classic case of “they are given an inch, and they take a mile”.
Police are well aware of the fact that many people would be leery of them using drones in the area, so they have officially taken the position to not call them drones.
Instead they are “unmanned aircraft”.
According to state police, the word drone “carries the perception of pre-programmed or automatic flight patterns, and random, indiscriminate collection of images and information.”
And there is good reason to think that.
Overseas, the collection of metadata, such as that that is obtained with the use of stingray technology, has been used for targeted drone strikes, also killing civilians.
The potential for drones to be combined with other technology, such as thermal vision, night vision, various “riot control” weapons, LRAD and tasers gives police a frightening array of options to be even further militarized and to be ready to treat the American people like an insurgency rather then their boss.
But don’t worry, the political class in Illinois has already discussed this issue and decided that it’s no threat to privacy for the police to be able to use drones and that there is of course no way that police would ever abuse this new power, right?
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Watch the video below to see an example of local police flying drones over Americans: