NY police will use drones to monitor backyard parties this weekend, spurring privacy concerns

Maybe the police should focus on responding to noise complaints in a timely way instead of engaging in yet more surveillance? When I lived in NYC every noise complaint took at least 12 hours to get a police response. Sometimes they wouldn't come until days later.

Reminder that the NY police department is the only municipal police department in the world with detachments in foreign countries. To protect New York, of course!

When pigs fly.......

Looks like we all got a bunch of shit to do now.

Where does it end? Soon enough they’ll be using those wifi cameras that see through walls just to check up on noise complaints from a neighbor.

Since it's not inside a home, apparently they can get away with it:

What Does the Fourth Amendment Mean?

I wonder if you could file a complaint with the FAA?

A good cell phone jammer, I would think, would stop them being able to control it. Doubt it would crash, though, it'd probably hover till either the battery died or they show up to investigate.

Unfortunately you can't shoot it. If it's low enough, you might be able to use another drone to snag it with a net or hit it with a strong water gun, then leave it out on the sidewalk, wet and broken, for them to come get.

This is fascist bullshit. We should have something to knock every one of them out of the sky and smash them to a billion pieces.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The New York City police department plans to pilot the unmanned aircrafts in response to complaints about large gatherings, including private events, over Labor Day weekend, officials announced Thursday.

The plan drew immediate backlash from privacy and civil liberties advocates, raising questions about whether such drone use violated existing laws for police surveillance

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics.

The move was announced during a security briefing focused on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival marking the end of slavery that brings thousands of revelers and a heavy police presence to the streets of Brooklyn.

But as the technology proliferates, privacy advocates say regulations have not kept up, opening the door to intrusive surveillance that would be illegal if conducted by a human police officer.

Cahn, the privacy advocate, said city officials should be more transparent with the public about how police are currently using drones, with clear guardrails that prevent surveillance overreach in the future.

The original article contains 578 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

It's not illegal to laser pointer drones. Have everyone armed with laser pointers to light that fucker up.