The dawn of the age of the drones: an Australian privacy law perspective

Examines Australia\u27s privacy laws in relation to unmanned aerial vehicles, to identify deficiencies that may need to be addressed. Introduction Suppose a homeowner habitually enjoys sunbathing in his or her backyard, protected by a high fence from prying eyes, including those of an adolescent neighbour. In times past such homeowners could be assured that they might go about their activities without a threat to their privacy. However, recent years have seen technological advances in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (‘UAVs’), also known colloquially as drones, that have allowed them to become reduced in size, complexity and price. UAVs today include models retailing to the public for less than $350 and with an ease of operation that enables them to serve as mobile platforms for miniature cameras. These machines now mean that for individuals like the posited homeowner’s adolescent neighbour, barriers such as high fences no longer constitute insuperable obstacles to their voyeuristic endeavours. Moreover, ease of access to the internet and video sharing websites provides a ready means of sharing any recordings made with such cameras with a wide audience. Persons in the homeowner’s position might understandably seek some form of redress for such egregious invasions of their privacy. Other than some form of self-help, what alternative measures may be available? Under Australian law this problem yields no easy answer. In this country, a fractured landscape of common law, Commonwealth and state/territory legislation provides piecemeal protection against invasions of privacy by cameras mounted on UAVs. It is timely, at what may be regarded as the early days of the drone age, to consider these laws and to identify deficiencies that may need to be addressed lest, to quote words that are as apt today as they were when written over 120 years ago, ‘modern enterprise and invention … through invasions upon [their] privacy, [subject victims] to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.

Jettisoning the frame: strategies for designing at the threshold

Jettisoning the Frame: Strategies for Designing at the Threshold explores graphic design’s capacity for facilitating critique and understanding of accelerating systems of technological control and complexity. Working across archives, architectures, and infrastructures, designing at the threshold is an approach that takes the opacity of systems and subjects alike as a starting point from which new possibilities, configurations, and relations emerge. It is a loose methodology predicated on shifting, jettisoning, and reorienting the role and frame of the designer from objectivity to subjectivity. From neutrality to implication. From scientific to messy. From solutionism to something else

The social construction of the humanitarian health drone: socialising the UAV

As unmanned aerial vehicles become increasingly present across everyday domains and lives, understanding the social factors driving and shaping the form of these machines gains in urgency. Inspired by socio-philosophical frameworks, this thesis seeks to determine the social drivers and outcomes of this technology, exploring humanitarian health applications in added depth as an empirical example from which future research can derive. A discourse analysis explores recurring themes and phrases from primary and secondary sources which participate in the construction of drone-related narratives, which through the eye of visions and Utopianism can be seen to promote pro-drone conceptualisations of the future. This piece concludes that using a ‘visions’ framework may help frame narratives and guide balanced and considered regulation for the future

Persistent Surveillance

Persistent surveillance technologies grant police vast new investigative capabilities. The technologies both monitor targeted areas and generate databases of searchable information about people, places, and patterns that can be connected and accessed for criminal prosecutions. In the face of this growing police surveillance, courts have struggled to make sense of a fragmented Fourth Amendment doctrine. The Supreme Court has offered some clues that “digital may be different” when it comes to surveillance, but lower courts have been left struggling to apply old law to new technologies. Warrantless use of persistent surveillance technologies raises hard questions about when a “search” occurs and whether the Fourth Amendment should limit overbroad police collection. This Article attempts to solve the persistent surveillance puzzle. First, it defines persistent surveillance technologies and explains why these policing systems represent a different privacy and security threat— one constitutionally distinguishable from traditional policing tools. Second, the Article examines the legal questions courts must ask in evaluating the Fourth Amendment implications of new persistent surveillance technologies used without a warrant. This Part synthesizes lessons learned from recent Supreme Court cases on digital surveillance and offers a new framework for future analysis. Third, this Article examines the technological framing questions courts must ask in evaluating these networked systems. Revealingly, how courts choose to define the scope, scale, and capacity of the technology itself— what I call the unit of surveillance—will shape the Fourth Amendment answers. The long-term goal of this Article is to offer a Fourth Amendment framework for all future persistent surveillance technologies. The short-term project applies these principles to two vexing persistent surveillance puzzles recently before the federal courts involving aerial surveillance planes and long-term pole cameras