$HALB   Guidelines on drone usage get support

10 September 2012

By Press

BY KEITH ROGERS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Civil rights groups and law enforcement agencies often clash when privacy rights are pitted against police searches.

But Dane Claussen, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, generally agrees with guidelines from the International Association of Chiefs of Police for using drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, equipped with high-tech spy cameras.

“I’m not necessarily pleasantly surprised but relieved that the police chiefs association recommended a whole bunch of measures that would preserve Americans’ constitutional rights,” Claussen said last week from his Reno office.

The Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Last month, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, which sponsored a recent drone conference in Las Vegas, announced that two FBI associations had endorsed drone-use guidelines adopted by the aviation committee of the police chiefs association.

Basically, those guidelines said police who use UAVs for gathering evidence of criminal wrongdoing need a search warrant before drone flights intrude on someone’s “reasonable expectations of privacy.”

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