Drones aren’t likely to be approved for commercial use for a fewmore years, but in the meantime hobbyists are free to purchase andassemble small unmanned aerial vehicles that can hoover close tothe earth and offer literally a bird's eye view of the ground. Onepolice department in Colorado has already logged close to 200 hourswith their search-and-rescue drones, and the Department of HomelandSecurity has its own personal fleet for border patrol. But asAmerica enters the dawn of the drone age, will law enforcementagencies be the only ones benefiting from unmanned aerialvehicles?
"In 2015, when the FAA is set to begin to relax itsprohibition on use and integrate civilian use of drones, then Iwould think the first folks in the door would be media becausethere's such an obvious use," Ryan Calo, a law professor at theUniversity of Washington, testified during a Senate hearing earlier this week. Congress iscurrently trying to put together guidelines for a domestic droneprogram that will be ready for the big UAV boom expected in just amatter of months, but commercial services and police departmentwon’t be the only ones that will benefit. As Calo explained toCongress, using a drone to gather news is an option not oftenconsidered.
Some would beg to differ. Take Bill Allen, for example. Allen, ascience and journalism professor at the University of Missouri, isalready making his j-school students use remote controlled dronesto help discover what they could do to the industry.
"We have a class here of journalism students who are learningto fly J-bots, for journalism robots, or drones," Allen toldABC News. "So they learn to fly them, andalso do what reporters do: brainstorm ideas, go out and doreporting, do drone based photography and video. We're trying tosee if this is going to be useful for journalism.”
By giving journalists controls over small light-weighted drones,reporters are allowed to have another set of eyes that can scourhard-to-get-to-places where a hit story might otherwise beunobtainable. One scenario described by the university’s radiostation content director to ABC exemplified exactly what a dronecould do in the hands of the right reporter:
“Scott Pham, director of content at the University of Missouri'spublic radio station KBIA, described the story of a drone hobbyistflying a camera-equipped helicopter over a field in Texas near hishome capturing images. When the man looked at the images later, henoticed a creek he had never seen before that was flushed red. Whenhe looked into it, he discovered a meat processing plant that wasillegally dumping into the creek”
"That's news gathering that can happen in your backyard,"Pham added to ABC. "That's where the real value is. From myperspective that's what actually expands journalism. Tools thatallow us to get new information and report it, and that's what Ithink a drone can do."
Matthew Dickinson, a system administrator and instructor for theInformation Technology Program in the MU Computer ScienceDepartment, explains to the school’s engineering departmentthat drones are indeed providing students with a powerful toolunmatched in their industry this side of a costly chopper.
“It’s giving the journalism people the chance to get whatthey could get with a helicopter at one-one thousandth of theprice,” Dickinson tells the department’s Marie French.
What so-called “j-drones” also do, though, is enough to raise afew worries. National discussion on domestic drones has alreadyfocused significantly on the potential privacy violations thatcould exist if the government is given the go-ahead to use smallsurveillance UAVs to spy on suspects. Privacy advocates call thelikely onslaught of drones an Orwellian nightmare that would renderthe Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution almost nonexistent.Such is the reason for congressional committees to investigate thematters now before privacy is pulverized forever.
“Rules are necessary to ensure that fundamental standards forfairness, privacy and accountability are understood,”Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Director AmieStepanovich testified before the Senate earlier this week. EvenSen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who has openly advocated fordrone use in the past, seemed unsure at the hearing of what theright thing to do would be to protect Americans from all-watchingaircraft.
“What altitude can they fly? What kind of facial recognitionare they capable of at various activities? Can they take picturesof individuals through windows of their home?” Feinstein asked.“Drones are hard to spot for the untrained eye, so your abilityto protect yourself is not great.”
But as Congress and the Federal Aviation Administrationaccelerate their studies on what drones should and shouldn’t do,hobbyists, educators and students can still operate small aircraft— some as inexpensive as only $300 — to play with what could be thenext generation of journalist’s most must-have tool. The Universityof Nebraska-Lincoln's has already joined Missouri by adding a DroneJournalism course of its own that is teaching other collegestudents not to necessarily be scared of flying, robot devices thatcan stream images anywhere on Earth.
“Drones tend to have a negative connotation in today’smedia,” University of Nebraska student Robert Partyka toldFast Company. “The public mostly hears theword drone when associated with war and destruction. However, dronetechnology can be used in many other aspects, including fieldreporting. Part of this project’s goal is to discover how best toutilize this technology in the field of journalism.”
