Libertarian GOP Member Sees Drone Privacy Risk
By Tom Curry Posted at 10:06 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2014
Wednesday’s House Aviation Subcommittee hearing on drones was dominated by members’ complaints about the Federal Aviation Administration’s lateness in issuing regulations that would allow the unmanned aerial vehicle industry to grow.
But one panel member, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., also had privacy on his mind.
While Massie is concerned that “the industry is being stifled” by the Obama administration’s slowness in issuing a UAV rule, he also worries that drones could violate Americans’ privacy.
Massie, one of the House’s outspoken libertarians, spoke in terms reminiscent of his fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who during his drone filibuster last year said he worried about drones snooping on a person “swimming in their pool in their backyard or in the hot tub.”
Massie said at Wednesday’s hearing, “In addition to a ceiling [on how high UAVs will be permitted to fly, so that they don’t hit commercial aircraft] one of the things I would like to see is a floor. What is a reasonable expectation on your property? If something is an inch above the ground, is it trespassing? If it’s ten feet above the ground, is it trespassing? You have the right to engage a trespasser.”
After he left the hearing, Massie told me, “If it’s at 10,000 feet, you’re probably not even going to know it’s there and you’re going to be powerless to stop it. But there is some answer here…. Clearly, if something comes hovering into your property, it’s trespassing.”
He added, “Maybe this is something that needs to be done at the state level, but somebody needs to establish reasonable expectations for where your privacy starts and ends on your private property.”
Massie added that he has seen no indication that the forthcoming FAA rule on small UAVs will put privacy limits on drone intrusions but “it’s something that I would like to see.”
In September the National Association of Realtors sent a letter to FAA administrator Michael Huerta saying that the potential of using UAVs to collect images of houses for sale is “a game-changer for the real estate industry.”
The Realtors letter urged the FAA to not make its regulatory framework “so burdensome and expensive as to prevent UAVs from being used by industries that can benefit from its use.”
But in an interview with me, Realtors senior regulatory representative Russell Riggs added that “privacy is absolutely a big concern for us and we want to make sure that privacy is protected. And if that’s something the FAA doesn’t want our members to do, then we’ll certainly follow whatever guidelines FAA recommends.”
