What you need to know about police drone surveillance at protests against police brutality

Technology writer Faine Greenwood has a great piece inSlate about the expansion of police drone surveillance fleets. While there are still many,many reasons to worry about abuses of drone technology and mass surveillance in general, Greenwood takes a look at the legal, technical, and practical limitations of these policing methods. Greenwood essentially argues that, as much as American police officers love to think of themselves as special military tactical forces (often treating normal-ass citizens like enemy combatants), they're really just cosplaying, and their use of drones is part of that:

Unlike a Predatorwhich is capable of staying aloft for more than a daythese small drones usually have short battery lives, from as little as 16 minutes, when carrying a very heavy camera, to 35 minutes when carrying a lighter sensor. (Drone evasion tip: If you think youre being followed, duck under a shelter or a convenient tree. You can probably wait the drones battery out.)

Police drone users are largely not exempt from the same rules that other drone users must abide by, which include restrictions on flight over people, at night, and beyond the pilots visual line of sight.

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While a police drone can certainly chase someone for a bit, that doesnt mean police can readily use drone-collected imagery to identify who that person is. In my research for this piece, I couldnt find a single example of U.S. law enforcement using facial recognition technology and drone imagery to identify someone in the real world. This almost certainly isnt because police dont want to, or because theyve been legally barred from doing so.