Privacy, intrusion issues dog rollout of unmanned drones by police

The use of domestic surveillance drones is in its infancy in Canada but a new study is warning there need to be clear policies on how they're used before any large-scale rollout by police and other agencies.

The Canadian Press obtained a copy of the study, to be released next week, prepared by Block G Privacy and Security Consulting.

The report, entitled Watching Below: Dimensions of Surveillance by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in Canada, was compiled by culling existing academic articles on the subject.

"It responds to the questions of how and why Canadian authorities are adopting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and provides an outline of the current Canadian policy network that is investigating the privacy issues linked to authorities’ uses of UAVs," says the synopsis on Block G's web site.

"In particular, the goal of this report is to contextualize the current uses of UAVs in Canada, and to consider the drawbacks, laws, and politics that are influencing the adoption of UAVs by Canadian authorities. The report considers where work is needed to develop democratically accountable and privacy-protective UAV policies in Canada, and issues a set of policy recommendations concerning safety, privacy, policing, and governance issues linked to UAV-based surveillance operations."

[ Related: RCMP expands its drone fleet as watchdogs worry Canadians may face aerial snoops ]

UAV's, popularly called drones, mostly have made headlines for their use by the military and the CIA to track and attack terrorists.

But the drones, which can be small enough to fit in a briefcase or as big as a small aircraft, are seen as versatile civilian tools, doing everything from searching for missing people to hunting criminals, surveying accident scenes or monitoring crowds, CP noted. They can be fitted with a variety of devices, including cameras, licence-plate readers, laser radar and thermal-imaging devices.

The RCMP said earlier this year it is expanding its fleet of drones, buying several from a U.S. company that also supplies the American military. The Mounties' UAVs would be used in search-and-rescue and at crash scenes and not to spy on people, the force says.

[ Related: The many uses for flying drones ]

You and I can buy drones, too, some equipped with built-in cameras, opening the door to private misuse, which the Block G report apparently doesn't address.

Report authors Christopher Parsons and Adam Molnar say law-enforcement agencies, while expressing keen interest in using drones, have not "sought feedback from the public on how UAVs should or should not be adopted as a tool to serve the public interest."

The study made several recommendations, including public consultations by police on the privacy implications of the devices, setting up a federal-provincial working committee to establish a drone policy and creation of policies that spell out what information UAVs can gather, how long it is kept, who gets to see it and how people can learn if they've been spied on.

"The time for such well-balanced policy making is now," the study says, according to CP.