Michigan Supreme Court Ponders Privacy Limits for Drones

The Michigan Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday about whether the government can use drones to surveil private property without a warrant and use that evidence in court for zoning disputes.

For two years, Long Lake Township zoning officials flew a drone over Todd and Heather Maxon’s property in northern Michigan near Traverse City, taking photographs and videos as part of a zoning dispute that he was running an illegal junkyard.

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Smugglers Are Using Drones to Spy on Agents, Border Patrol Says

The U.S. Border Patrol said that smugglers are using drones to spy on its agents along the U.S.-Mexico Border between San Diego and Tijuana.

“They’re gathering intelligence, they’re doing counter-surveillance on our agents, they’re trying to see our work patterns, how many agents and what they’re doing,” said Border Patrol Agent Diana Ibarra in a recent bulletin published by the federal agency. “They’re working to try and find any possible vulnerability and exploit those.”

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Commentary: People Are Fighting Back Against the Government’s Use of Drones to Spy on Americans

Americans have long been concerned about government surveillance, and rightly so. Being watched by the government is incredibly disconcerting, especially when government agents are probing into your private life.

The rise of drone technology has not helped on this front. Whereas before a government would need a plane or helicopter to get aerial views of you or your property, now they just need a small remote-controlled device.

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Ohio Law Enforcement Agencies Add Eyes in the Skies with Drones

Several counties in Ohio are looking to use drones to respond to calls for critical injury, surveillance, security, accident reconstruction and measuring, evidence gathering, and fatal crashes.

Drone Pilot, Helicopter Pilot, and Supervisor of the Traffic Unit, Sargent Steven Poff with Butler County Sheriff’s Office, told The Ohio Star that there is a time and place to use a drone.

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New Jersey City Is Deploying a Chinese Firm’s Drones to Enforce Social Distancing

by Chris White   Elizabeth, New Jersey, is using a Chinese company’s drones to police citizens who fail to employ social distancing guidelines. Past reports suggest the drones are feeding China data. Elizabeth Mayor J. Christian Bollwage is deploying drones from Chinese-based company DJI to warn Elizabeth citizens who are walking outdoors not to get too close in physical proximity to other people. The drones blare sirens and issue this warning: “Stop gathering, disperse and go home.” Bollwage is dismissing critics of his approach. “If these drones save one life, it is clearly worth the activity and the information that the drones are sending,” the mayor said Friday in an MSNBC interview. New Jersey is considered a coronavirus hotspot — more than 3,000 in the state have died from the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, before skipping across the globe and landing in the United States, where it has killed more than 30,000 people. The drones might not be benign. Past reports suggest DJI poses a substantial security threat to U.S. infrastructure. A 2017 memo from the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau said officials had “moderate confidence” that DJI’s commercial drones are giving critical U.S. “infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese…

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Migrant Smugglers Used a Drone to Sneak Illegals Through the Border at Night

by Jason Hopkins   Illegal migrants were spotted using a drone for the first known time to help them cross the U.S. southern border. U.S. Border Patrol agents near El Paso, Texas, monitoring the area with an infrared camera spotted a small airborne object traveling over the U.S.-Mexico border in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The object flew about 100 yards north, entering U.S. soil, then returned back. The object, which was determined to be a drone, repeated this pattern three different times. Ten illegal immigrants were spotted passing the border in the same vicinity the drone had monitored roughly two minutes after the drone retreated back into Mexico territory for the third time. “This is the first known time in recent history that a drone has been utilized as a ‘look-out’ in order to aid in illegal entries in the El Paso Sector,” Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a press release. The Border Patrol agents were able to “quickly” apprehend the migrants and take them into custody. Beyond encountering a drone, agents in the El Paso Sector dealt with an “unprecedented number” of illegal migrants at the border that same day. El Paso Sector officials made…

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Drones Can Help Farmers Grow Better Crops

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by Elizabeth Lee   The tools available for farming have come a long way since Dale Cope was a boy. “One of my chores for my parents is to go weed the garden with a hoe. Now, I’m not going to send a hoe out there, I’m going to fly out there with my drone, and I’m going to take care of the weeds that way,” said Cope, associate professor of practice, Texas A&M Department of Mechanical Engineering. He and a team of researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, are studying how unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, can be used in agriculture to help farmers. Researchers said within the next 10 years, drones can become an important tool in precision agriculture for farmers around the world. “You can know where to apply pesticides, fungicides (and) fertilizer in specific areas of the field instead of doing the entire field,” said Cope. Conventionally, crop consultants would walk the fields looking for problematic weeds, insects and diseases, which is time-consuming, expensive and not completely accurate. “If drones can be employed, it would save a lot of time. It would be a lot more effective and accurate,” said…

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