The Amazon Drone Myth and Surveillance Paranoia

Pic CNN - Captions Me

On this past Sunday's 60 Minutes Amazon Chairman Jeff Bezos was allowed to give a 14 minute infomercial on how great his company was one day prior to so-called "Cyber Monday".

Fielding a few softball questions, none related to very recent reports on workplace issues at Amazon's distribution facilities, Bezos took the opportunity to present to the world his idea for drone delivery of items from his company in thirty minutes or less.  Of course FAA approval of this type of drone delivery is pending and I guess Bezos was just trying to get the PR ball rolling in favor of skies darkened with armies of delivery drones.

This is actually a real thing.  The FAA preparing rules and regulations regarding drones in our airspace.  What I think is not so real is the vision Bezos put forward.  There is a cute video Amazon put out of a package being delivered via drone to a happy customer who apparently lives in the middle of a pasture or perhaps a Versailles sized estate in Westchester County.  No worries about power lines, air traffic, etc.

Let's just think about this for a minute.  Imagine a drone delivery where you live.  Well I live in an apartment with a lot of trees around.  Beautiful crepe myrtles mind you so I'm not hating on my trees, but certainly those and the abundant power lines make drone delivery to me problematic to say the least.  So how many customers do actually live in a home where a drone could make a delivery?  How would it be determined ahead of time if delivery was possible?

Well certainly any delivery to meet Amazon's under thirty minutes guarantee would have to be very close to a distribution center, be clear of obstruction, be an order that would meet the weight restrictions of the drone, well, you see the point.  Unless Amazon starts keeping human organs on supply and a hospital with a helipad needs a fresh lung quickly there is probably zero demand for this idea.  Sure there could be some nominal deliveries to a very select few customers but this whole idea is nothing more than an opportunity to get the Amazon brand name out there in the media in time for Christmas shopping.

I'm pretty comfortable believing that nobody ten years from now will dig up this blog and say "Oh, look how wrong he was!  And now the skies are full of Amazon drones."  It's nothing more than a cheap, well free in the case of the 60 Minutes interview, marketing ploy.  But God bless Jeff Bezos because he sure as hell got a lot of bites off of it.

Now to the real world of drones in our country.  You may have been following the story over the past month about Phil Steel, some wingnut in Colorado, who is working to get a municipal ordinance passed allowing people to legally hunt drones.  I'm not going to post a link to the story; if you're really interested you can Google it or watch Fox News.  Suffice it to say that he's that same nerdy looking, gun toting, teabagger nutjob you've seen at all the protests over socialized whatever for the past five years.

Phil Steel on Guess Where

According to Steel, "If it is flying under a 1,000-foot ceiling, then it's trespassing."  The argument is that his airspace is sovereign property or whatever.  Look, I am totally understanding of some of the libertarian arguments out there about individual privacy and agree that the government can be too intrusive at times.  I understand individual privacy rights in theory.  I understand the arguments of the slippery slope of eroding freedoms and all of that.  I just have a problem with them in practice.

People don't like being watched in general.  This isn't an American phenomenon.  Throughout history man has only allowed that sort of thing for a short period.  Maybe what's different now is that the prying eyes of the government aren't as obviously intrusive as say a Gestapo or Stasi agent would be.  In England, for example, there are CCTV cameras all over the place.  If you think about it you know you're being watched, well possibly, but at least you know you're being recorded.  But then what?

I mean I guess I would be concerned if it was shown that our government or an ally's government was using this surveillance to clamp down on political dissent.  I don't mean revolutionary dissent but just something contrary to a government's policies.  Of course any government has a right to protect itself and its citizens from violent revolution because those don't always represent the majority.  But so far the problems have been with our government spying on our allies.

Surveillance of perceived threats to national security though I am fine with.  I honestly don't have a problem with text messages, emails, phone conversations being given some scrutiny if they look suspicious.  If they start detaining people on nothing but suspicion that's a different issue.  But they seemingly have only been detaining people based on a series of events that lead to more than just suspicion.  I haven't heard of any cases where Joe Blow citizen has been detained for anything.  Unless Joe Blow citizen has been in contact with known terrorists.  If so then any scrutiny is, in my opinion, warranted and necessary.

Googlestapo in Action

As a normal guy who only occasionally puts out anti-Semitic rants and anti-conservative screeds, I don't think I have much to worry about.  But what if I was being tracked?  What if I got on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center and was added to some kind of watch list?  Well I don't think it would effect me at all.  If a local synagogue was vandalized I could see me being on a list of suspects and maybe being questioned but I'm putting my stuff out there online for anybody to see.  Any person who knows me could put in a tip to the police that I should maybe be looked into.

The fact is that I'm an open book.  All of my stuff is out there.  Honestly the government is the least of my concerns.  I have to deal with potential employers who look up my criminal record and might want to snoop my Facebook account.  That's the real concern.  I mean what is a government drone going to get on me?  Why would they care?  What in the world does Phil Steel have to worry about?  Well he looks a lot like somebody I would suspect of Timothy McVeigh type sentiments so maybe his concerns are legitimate.  Maybe the government would get some helpful information if he were to be surveilled.  But that's the kind of work I want and expect my government to do.

Google and Facebook are already closely tracking me.  My girlfriend sent me a link to some boots she had online one day and for two weeks after, every page I visited on the internet was displaying an ad for that shoe company.  Similarly I did a search trying to find a catalytic converter and one of the pages I visited caused me to see ads for them for days.  Maybe that's the price for Google Chrome being free.  But at most it was just irksome to know I had been tracked like that and then advertised to with no benefit to the advertiser at all.  On Facebook I'm barraged with ads for "men over 40" with some crap Dr. Oz is hocking.  It's bothersome mostly because it makes me a little angry to see people misuse advertising dollars like they do.

But right now it's Google and Facebook that know more about me and my viewing habits than does the government.  If the government gets that info from one of them then who cares?  The government isn't going to try to sell me a pair of boots or a catalytic converter.  The only problem would be if they found out that I was doing something illegal.  I guess if I was doing something illegal and was stupid enough to be doing it online I kinda deserve to be caught.  Similarly if I'm using the internet or a cellphone to plot a revolution or plan a terrorist attack then I'm really not bright enough to deserve freedom or privacy rights.

Anyway, if you're legitimately concerned about drones being a threat to your privacy I can't really wrap my head around that.  If you're on the radar enough to be tracked by drone then you must be enough of a threat that I shouldn't care if you're tracked or not.  If you're not doing anything wrong then what would the government or police care about.  If they want to watch me grocery shopping then more power to them.  If they want to use my TV to watch me sitting on the couch looking back at them in my underwear then they must be mighty bored.  I hope I can bring them some joy.