Cities and Drones: What Cities Need to Know about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

NLC's municipal guide, Cities and Drones, is designed to serve as a primer on drones for local officials, providing insight into the recently released federal rules relating to drone operation, as well as offering suggestions for how local governments can craft their own drone ordinances to encourage innovation while also protecting their cities.Drones have the potential to revolutionize many industries and city services, particularly as their technology advances. There are many applications for drones within the public sector at the local and state level. Drones can be used for law enforcement and firefighting, as rural ambulances, and for inspections, environmental monitoring, and disaster management. Any commercial arena that involves outdoor photography or visual inspection will likely be experimenting with drones in the near future, as will retailers who want to speed up package delivery.However, drones also present challenges. There are some safety issues, for instance, when operators fly their drones over people or near planes. City residents often have privacy concerns when any small device hovering nearby could potentially be taking photos or video. The FAA's final rule on drones left some opportunity for city governments to legislate on this issue. Rather than ban them outright, city officials should consider how this new technology might serve residents or enhance city services

Local Government Policy and Planning for Unmanned Aerial Systems

This research identifies key state and local government stakeholders in California for drone policy creation and implementation, and describes their perceptions and understanding of drone policy. The investigation assessed stakeholders’ positions, interests, and influence on issues, with the goal of providing potential policy input to achieve successful drone integration in urban environments and within the national airspace of the United States. The research examined regulatory priorities through the use of a two-tiered Stakeholder Analysis Process. The first tier consisted of a detailed survey sent out to over 450 local agencies and jurisdictions in California. The second tier consisted of an in-person focus group to discuss survey results as well as to gain deeper insights into local policymakers’ current concerns. Results from the two tiers of analysis, as well as recommendations, are provided here

DRONE AMERICA: THE END OF PRIVACY?

Cutting-edge technological innovations have enabled law enforcement agencies to collect data over a geographical area in relatively short amounts of time. Drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles) are becoming increasingly acceptable and employed by state and local law enforcement to become force multipliers. While the Federal Aviation Administration has addressed the integration and safety of flight requirements for law enforcement agencies to utilize drones, federal privacy and data collection regulations are unresolved. This thesis argues that federal regulation is required and attempts to highlight the distinction between surveillance technology and delivery platforms to understand how to approach the regulation of data gathering. In doing so, this thesis uses a political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological (PEST) analysis to examine Title III and relative jurisprudence dealing with both surveillance and aerial platforms. The PEST analysis aims to bring forward the salient points in crafting recommendations and expansion in current legislation that support an increase in citizens’ safety and security, but remain within the bounds of constitutional liberty and the Fourth Amendment.Lieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release. distribution is unlimite

Regulating Drones Under the First and Fourth Amendments

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 requires the Federal Aviation Administration to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into the national airspace system by September 2015. Yet perhaps because of their chilling accuracy in targeted killings abroad, perhaps because of an increasing consciousness of diminishing privacy more generally, and perhaps simply because of a fear of the unknown, divergent UAV-restrictive legislation has been proposed in Congress and enacted in a number of states. Given UAV utility and cost-effectiveness over a vast range of tasks, however, widespread commercial use ultimately seems certain. Consequently, it is imperative to understand the constitutional restraints on public flight and constitutional protections afforded to private flight. Unfortunately, although there are a few Fourth Amendment precedents in manned aviation, they are mired not only in 1980s technology but also in the 1980s third party doctrine, and therefore do not reflect more recent Fourth Amendment developments and doctrinal fissures. There is also considerable uncertainty over First Amendment protection of information-gathering—for example, is there a right to record? Further, there is no judicial or scholarly analysis of how UAV flight fits within contemporary First Amendment forum doctrine, a framework that provides a useful starting point for analyzing speech restrictions in government-controlled airspace, but that comes with some uncertainties of its own. It is into this thicket that we dive, and fortunately some clarity emerges. Although the Fourth Amendment third party doctrine hopelessly misunderstands privacy and therefore under-protects our security and liberty interests, the Supreme Court’s manned flyover cases can be mined for a sensible public disclosure doctrine that seems agnostic as to the various Fourth Amendment conceptions: we do not typically require only law enforcement to shield its eyes. Of course, both constitutions and legislation can place special restrictions upon law enforcement, and sometimes doing so makes good sense. But as a general Fourth Amendment matter, the officer may do and see as the citizen would. Hence to understand Fourth Amendment regulation, we must understand how the First Amendment limits government restraint on speech-relevant private UAV flight. Here we analyze the developing right to record and apply contemporary forum doctrine to this novel means of speech and information-gathering. If navigable airspace is treated as a limited public forum, as we propose with some qualification, then the Federal Aviation Administration will have significant—though not unlimited—regulatory leeway to evenhandedly burden speech-related UAV activities where doing so would reasonably promote safe unmanned and manned flight operations. The Agency, however, would likely need further congressional action before it can restrict UAV flight based on privacy rather than safety concerns. As the legality and norms of private flight correspondingly take shape, they will inform Fourth Amendment restrictions on government use

Robots, Regulation, and the Changing Nature of Public Space

Robots are an increasingly common feature in North American public spaces. From regulations permitting broader drone use in public airspace and autonomous vehicle testing on public roads, to delivery robots roaming sidewalks in major US cities, to the announcement of Sidewalk Toronto — a plan to convert waterfront space in one of North America’s largest cities into a robotics-filled smart community — the laws regulating North American public spaces are opening up to robots. In many of these examples, the growing presence of robots in public space is associated with opportunities to improve human lives through intelligent urban design, environmental efficiency, and greater transportation accessibility. However, the introduction of robots into public space has also raised concerns about, for example: the commercialization of these spaces by the companies that deploy robots; increasing surveillance that will negatively impact physical and data privacy; or the potential marginalization or exclusion of some members of society in favor of those who can pay to access, use, or support the new technologies available in these spaces. Laws that permit, regulate, or prohibit robotic systems in public spaces will in many ways determine how this new technology impacts public space and the people who inhabit that space. This begs the questions: how should regulators approach the task of regulating robots in public spaces? And should any special considerations apply to the regulation of robots because of the public nature of the spaces they occupy? This paper argues that the laws that regulate robots deployed in public space will affect the public nature of that space, potentially to the benefit of some human inhabitants of the space over others. For these reasons, special considerations should apply to the regulation of robots that will operate in public space. In particular, the entry of a robotic system into a public space should never be prioritized over communal access to and use of that space by people. And, where a robotic system serves to make a space more accessible, lawmakers should avoid permitting differential access to that space through the regulation of that robotic system