Drones are taking to the skies in the U.S.

...is the headline at The LA Times. I do not like the idea of the government flying over my airspace, monitoring whether I'm having a Tea Party meeting, or digging in a wetland (the bottom of my property is kinda boggy). Of course, we have satellites taking high resolution pictures of us all the time now.


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Zoom in to see my son's red car parked in our driveway. I wonder why he wasn't at school. Is that me in the back yard, smoking a joint? No, I don't do that. But the EPA hauled one hapless citizen in our county up before a committee for digging a ditch on his property. Oh no! A ditch?! If he was only cooking meth, or burying dismembered corpses, I could look the other way, but a ditch is just too much. He should be punished for selfishly modifying his own property to suit his needs like that.

But another thing that gives me pause about these drones is that they're imperfect mechanical devices, designed and maintained by imperfect humans. They're going to crash if their controllers lose control of them, because of a bird strike, or if an engine fails, or the fuel runs out (or whatever it is they use to stay airborne -- I don't see solar panels). If these aircraft come down, I can see them leaving a trail of death and destruction.

Of course the regime probably dismisses this as merely a liability issue, the cost of doing business, and not as any kind of an imposition on our life, liberty or pursuit of happiness.