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New York police will use drones to monitor backyard parties this weekend, spurring privacy concerns (apnews.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The New York City police department plans to pilot the unmanned aircrafts in response to complaints about large gatherings, including private events, over Labor Day weekend, officials announced Thursday.

“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner, said at a press conference.

The plan drew immediate backlash from privacy and civil liberties advocates, raising questions about whether such drone use violated existing laws for police surveillance.

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

The inverse square law will ensure that anything you have that's powerful enough to disable a drone in flight will be at least the size of a semi truck.

Electromagnetic radiation is great for communication, not so much energy transfer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The military already uses such devices. They look like bulky sci-fi rifles and are quite man-portable. They aren't frying the drone, they just need to send a signal stronger than its control signal so the inverse square law works in its favor.

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