Texas DPS launches drone flights in response to No Kings protest
By DRONELIFE Options Editor Jim Magill
The Texas Division of Public Security flew 16 drone missions within the state on Oct. 18 in relation to the No Kings protests, maintaining watch over such iconic Lone Star State websites because the Capitol Advanced in Austin, downtown Dallas and the Alamo.
The flights had been performed to make sure public security and supply tactical overwatch of a number of the large demonstrations that occurred throughout Texas and the remainder of the nation, in keeping with knowledge launched to DroneLife, beneath a Texas Public Data Act request.
In accordance with the DPS, the drones weren’t used to gather surveillance knowledge on people collaborating within the protests, as some civil liberties teams had feared is perhaps the case.
“The usage of UAS was for offering situational consciousness of the occasions, and to not receive any figuring out data of any members. Any photographs obtained as a part of these occasions will probably be retained for one yr. No photographs captured as a part of these occasions by UAS will probably be utilized to establish or conduct additional investigations on people,” the company stated in an announcement accompanying the discharge of the information.
A spreadsheet outlining all the No Kings-related drone deployments confirmed that the DPS principally flew drones made by China-based DJI, together with 13 flights deploying Mavic 3Ts and two flying Mavic 4T plane. The company additionally performed one flight with an American-made Skydio X10.
The DPS listed “Offering Safety at a Giant Public Occasion” as the first purpose for many of the flights, with the aim of 1 flight being listed as being to supply a fast response to a public security occasion.
Seven of the deployments had been targeted on the protest being performed within the state capital of Austin, together with maintaining watch on the State Capitol grounds and Auditorium Shores, a big park that served as a gathering place for protestors. One flight occurred at Tarleton State College in Erath County and two in Dallas.
One of many Dallas flights was performed in a joint operation with the Dallas Police Division’s UAS group “to supply overwatch and real-time stay feed to our respective incident commanders,” throughout protests held in downtown Dallas at Pacific Plaza. The DPS reported that in Dallas “UAS had been grounded as a result of intermittent rain.”
A drone flight performed overwatch and fast response operations for the No Kings demonstration within the metropolis of Pflugerville, and two UAV deployments had been performed within the metropolis of McAllen, together with one flight performed to help U.S. Marshals Service’s operations close to the Federal Courthouse in that metropolis.
No arrest or different vital incidents had been recorded on account of the drone overflights, though one of many flights over the Capitol Advanced in Austin helped find a warmth stroke sufferer.
Drones at protests elevate issues
The DPS’s drone response to the No Kings protests mirrored these of different police businesses throughout the nation.
In latest months, with the elevated use of drones by federal, state and native regulation enforcement businesses, some political leaders and civil liberties advocates have expressed concern over the likelihood that UAVs used to observe protest demonstrations may additionally could possibly be used as surveillance instruments to assemble knowledge on people, impinging on their civil rights.
On July 31, 5 Democratic U.S. senators despatched a letter to Division of Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem, complaining concerning the deployment of no less than two Predator drones over anti-immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles earlier in the summertime. The senators complained that the plane took video photographs of the protestors and that DHS then printed the collected footage on-line, in an try to induce native officers to crack down on protestors.
“Though extraordinary circumstances may justify drone flights over protests, these flights additionally elevate severe issues about particular person privateness and could also be supposed to intimidate the general public and chill free speech rights,” the lawmakers wrote.
The senators demanded that Secretary Noem reply to their issues and reply detailed questions concerning the division’s drone surveillance insurance policies. As of Oct. 30, DHS had not responded to the senators’ request.
In an announcement to DroneLife, a DHS spokesperson stated that the division has a two-year backlog of congressional correspondence, courting to the time of Noem’s predecessor, “one thing Secretary Noem has labored diligently to clear.”
The spokesperson additionally declined to reply DroneLife’s particular questions regarding using drones for surveillance by the Customs and Border Protections Air and Marine Operations’ (AMO), besides to say, “AMO will not be engaged within the surveillance of First Modification-protected actions.”
In an emailed assertion, Beryl Lipton a senior investigative researcher with the Digital Frontier Basis, stated technologic advances prior to now a number of years have dramatically elevated the power of regulation enforcement businesses to make use of drones to gather knowledge on people. “Surveillance, airborne and in any other case, can have an effect on folks’s need to protest, a First Modification- protected proper,” Lipton stated.
“In a giant change from the main BLM (Black Lives Matter) protests of 2020, drone footage and different sorts of police digicam footage are actually being saved and built-in into different surveillance knowledge,” she wrote.
“Any footage might be run by way of facial recognition or different biometric identification. It’s not but clear how police are utilizing this footage, however as half of the present surveillance, it’s greater than doable that this data is being built-in and paired with knowledge on people being taken from different locations, like cell units and knowledge breaches.”
There are few federal legal guidelines proscribing using drones over protests by regulation enforcement officers, though state and native laws range broadly. Some states require a warrant for police use of a drone. “Cleveland, Ohio, particularly, prohibits the use of drones over a protest,” she stated.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based author with virtually a quarter-century of expertise protecting technical and financial developments within the oil and fuel business. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P World Platts, Jim started writing about rising applied sciences, resembling synthetic intelligence, robots and drones, and the methods through which they’re contributing to our society. Along with DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared within the Houston Chronicle, U.S. Information & World Report, and Unmanned Methods, a publication of the Affiliation for Unmanned Car Methods Worldwide.
