A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA, explains what these drones will be able to see and how they work. He also talks about the privacy and national security concerns raised by using drones for surveillance purposes.
Controlling the Herd
Drones Over America: What Can They See?
On Monday’s Fresh Air, John Villasenor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA, explains what these drones will be able to see and how they work. He also talks about the privacy and national security concerns raised by using drones for surveillance purposes.
On types of drones
“There are drones that are powered by jet. There are drones that could literally fit in a backpack or the palm of a hand. There are drones that are basically like balloons that sit up there in the sky in one place and can observe enormous swaths of territory.”
On drones that can stay in the air for weeks at a time
“These drones aren’t flying at 400 mph. They’re going very slowly and they have wings which are paper thin, which have solar panels which are mounted on the top, and they also have batteries that store energy collected during the day so they can continue to turn the propellers and fly at night.”
On whether drones can capture audio
“Drones generate some noise themselves, and so I don’t think a drone could sit 1,000 feet above and hear the conversation of two people sitting at an outside table at a coffee shop. I think it’s mostly imagery and then to a smaller extent, wireless signals.”
On drones helping traffic patterns
“Five years from now, you can probably imagine that in addition to having helicopters with people in them, you’ll have drones above the ground taking pictures of those things.”
On drones being used by terrorists
“Unfortunately, I think that is a legitimate concern, and honestly it keeps me up at night. I worry about that. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that a drone is very hard to stop. It flies low and it isn’t stopped by all of the infrastructure we have in place to make sure people don’t go to the places they’re not supposed to go to. Fences and walls and gates and barriers, it simply goes over those things. … As these drones get cheaper, more prevalent, easier to get, attract less attention, it raises the risks that they will fall into the wrong hands and be used inappropriately.”
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