Technology: Eyes in the sky

Rodney Brossart, who owns a 3,000-acre cattle farm in North Dakota, is an unlikely trendsetter. In 2011, six cows from a neighbouring property wandered on to his farm. When he allegedly refused to return the cattle and barred law enforcement from entering his property, police asked that a Predator drone from a local air force base fly over his farm to see if Mr Brossart was armed.

Mr Brossart faces trial next month on charges of theft after a court threw out his claim that he had been subjected to a "warrantless search". But he has already made history as the first American to be arrested on US soil with the help of a drone.

Armed with Hellfire missiles, drones have become the symbol of the US global war on terror. Operating a drone in the US requires a special permit that is issued sparingly. However, Congress has decided that from 2015 drones should be given access to domestic airspace.

For supporters, the introduction of drones into domestic airspace is equivalent to the launch of the automobile or the internet - a powerful technology with the capacity to transform dozens of industries and reshape ideas about distance. They see drones, with a potential market value of $12bn by 2023, as the coming of age of robotics. "It is like the introduction of the computer in the 1980s - it is on that level," says Peter Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. "It has so many different uses, so many different applications but also so many complex questions."

To critics, the advent of domestic drones brings the threat of a new type of surveillance - an exaggerated version of the technology-led snooping that has been dramatised by Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency. "The greatest threat to the privacy of Americans is the drone and the use of the drone and the very few regulations that are on it today," says Dianne Feinstein, a leading Democratic senator.

Drones - or unmanned aerial systems as the industry calls them - come in all shapes and sizes. The Predators and Global Hawks operated by the military are almost as big as a jet fighter. By contrast, Aerovironment's Nano Hummingbird has a wingspan of 16cm, while Harvard has been developing an insect-sized flying robot called the Robobee.

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine who now runs 3D Robotics, a company that makes small drones, says the industry is in some ways a "spin-off from the smartphone revolution", which created new cameras, sensors and location-tracking devices that are both tiny and cheap. "The military invented the internet but the people colonised it," he says. "We want to demilitarise and democratise drones."

Law enforcement agencies are looking at drones as a much cheaper alternative to the helicopters they use for some operations. Boston police said they would like to deploy a drone to monitor the route of the city's marathon after bombs exploded at the finish line this year.

Don Roby, a Baltimore police captain and a leading proponent of drones, says the technology could be effective in search and rescue operations, for mapping crime scenes or monitoring traffic accidents. "Imagine you have a child missing in a small, confined area - that is the sort of thing we could use them for," he says. "Compared to helicopters, we are talking pennies on the dollar to operate."

Among the potential commercial applications, the cargo industry is one of the obvious candidates. For the past 18 months, US marines have used an unmanned helicopter called a K-Max to carry cargo of up to 6,000 pounds across Afghanistan, which has caught the attention of logistics companies such as FedEx and UPS.

Matternet, a start-up company, wants to use drones to deliver medicines and other essential goods to places with poor roads. Drones might be used to spot illegal marijuana plantations, but they could also cure the munchies: among the business plans that have been proposed are mini-drones that can deliver burritos and tacos to students.

Yet before these ideas have even got off the ground, the industry has raised intense political concerns about the impact of drones on privacy and the Fourth Amendment bar on "unreasonable searches and seizures".

Following the Snowden revelations, there is heightened concern about the risks to privacy from state surveillance. Domestic drones raise many of the same questions about when and where the state is allowed to monitor people and how the data are used.

"Drones coalesce a whole series of fears about real technological changes," says Daniel Rothenberg, a human rights expert at Arizona State University. "It has not happened so far but there is the potential for profound, scandalous intrusions."

Proponents of drones say that the same concerns were raised when helicopters and small aircraft were first used widely over urban areas but the abuses that privacy advocates warned about never materialised. Many states already have "peeping tom" laws and other statutes to prevent harassment that would apply to drones.

Industry executives believe drones are being singled out amid many other forms of surveillance. "On my way in this morning, I passed 32 traffic lights and 19 banks, each of which probably has a camera. I have GPS in my car and Bluetooth on my phone," says Michael Toscano, president of AUVSI, the drone industry lobby group. "You do not need a drone to track my whereabouts."

Yet some of the technological advances around drones make these concerns much more pressing. Boeing is developing a solar-powered drone that it hopes will eventually have the ability to stay aloft for five years. BAE Systems is developing an aircraft that operates a camera with 1.8bn megapixels that can film a medium-sized city. From 17,500 feet, it can spot a 6-inch wide object.

These technologies are still at an experimental stage but demonstrate the potential for drones to make permanent surveillance a reality. "Drones are a much more visceral reminder of the surveillance state than anything the NSA is doing," says Ryan Calo, a privacy law expert at the University of Washington.

Both sides of the debate about drones and privacy expect a flurry of cases to come before the Supreme Court in coming years. The court has ruled in general terms that police surveillance from the air does not infringe on a citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy. However, in 2001 the court ruled that police could not use thermal imaging equipment on small aircraft to monitor a house in which they thought marijuana was being grown. In a case last year, the court ruled that the police had trespassed by attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect's car.

For privacy campaigners, one of the most complicated issues could be the use of drones by private companies that would look to sell the data. Even if tight regulations were drawn up for law enforcement, those rules would not apply to companies that are not covered by the fourth amendment.

Just as Google probably knows more about many people than the NSA could ever hope, private drone operators could monitor and collect information in ways in which the state is not allowed to. The customers for such data could include branches of government but also private detectives and tabloid newspapers. "Any restriction on government surveillance will not be worth a hill of beans if the government can simply purchase the same information from a private party," says Catherine Crump, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has defended the first amendment right of citizens to photograph in public places.

There is already a considerable debate at the state level about domestic drones. Even before the Snowden leaks, 42 state legislatures had considered legislation about drones and interest is expected to grow. Seattle police abandoned plans to use two drones for search and rescue missions because of public opposition.

Just as in the NSA debate, opposition to drones is bringing together some strange bedfellows from the libertarian right and civil liberties left - a new strand of politics that unites outsiders against the establishment. The strictest anti-drone legislation has been passed in Virginia, which has instituted a two-year moratorium on any use in its airspace. The sponsor was Todd Gilbert, a conservative Republican delegate who had been accused by the ACLU of anti-gay bigotry. However, when it came to the anti-drone bill, Mr Gilbert and the Virginia ACLU worked together.

Given the thicket of political and legal issues facing the industry, some executives say the strongest demand for now for drones will come from agriculture. As farms become bigger, drones could monitor crops for disease and damage, allowing farmers to be more selective about using pesticides or irrigation. Re­searchers are developing sensors to identify disease on grapevines before it reaches the fruit. The drones industry says that farmers will account for 80 per cent of US sales in the next decade.

Steven Gitlin, an executive at Aerovironment, a company that makes small drones that could be used in agriculture, says: "Who could complain about farmers flying something over their own fields?"

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