What next? Peeping into Our Bedrooms?
In an alarming embodiment of George Orwell’s “1984”, the New York City police department has decided to employ drones on Labor Day weekend, not for life-saving missions or emergencies, but to intrusively monitor your backyard barbecues and private gatherings.
The unveiled plans hint at a disturbing trend where personal freedoms rapidly shrink in the face of unchecked governmental surveillance.
In a move eerily reminiscent of Big Brother’s overreach, Assistant NYPD Commissioner Kaz Daughtry proclaimed they’d be ‘utilizing our assets’ to peep into private parties.
This latest attempt to infringe upon the privacy rights of citizens immediately, and rightly so, ignited a blaze of concerns among civil liberty organizations.
The pretext? A security briefing on J’ouvert, an annual celebration marking the end of slavery.
In the past, these event has attracted crowds of jubilant celebrants flooding the Brooklyn streets, paralleled only by the imposing show of police force accompanying them.
A monumental event, no doubt, but does it warrant drones peering into private spaces?
Daniel Schwarz of the New York Civil Liberties Union didn’t mince words. He highlighted the evident violation of the POST Act, a 2020 city law obligating the NYPD to be transparent about its surveillance methods.
He lamented, “Deploying drones this way feels like a dystopian sci-fi plot come to life.”
Echoing this sentiment, Albert Fox Cahn from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project emphasized the unnerving lack of safeguards.
“One of the biggest concerns with the rush to roll out new forms of aerial surveillance is how few protections we have against seeing these cameras aimed at our backyards or even our bedrooms,” Cahn told the Daily Mail, stressing the NYPD’s evident overreach.
The unnerving statistics are there for all to see. NYPD’s reliance on drones has skyrocketed from a mere four instances in 2022 to a whopping 124 times this year. This significant increase is not just for dire emergencies but for trivial matters like giveaway events.
Mayor Eric Adams, previously in the police force, seems enamored by the ‘endless potential’ of drones, eerily drawing inspiration from Israel’s tech surveillance after a recent visit.
Yet, as technology gallops ahead, the regulations are far behind, leaving the gates wide open for invasive surveillance that would be downright unlawful if performed by a human cop.
The NYPD’s silence on its drone policies speaks volumes. Mayor Adams’ office, when approached, pointed to guidelines making it convenient for private drone operators, blatantly sidestepping the NYPD’s glaring absence of a surveillance policy.
With over 1,400 police departments in the US already harnessing drones and federal rules being lackadaisical at best, we’re on the precipice of a surveillance explosion.
In this unsettling dance between tech advancements and personal freedoms, one only hopes our rights don’t get trampled upon.
