Drones Come Home

In April of 2011, I posted a comment here on the implications and consequences of drone warfare. My basic concern was (and is) that targeted killings represent a drift from the rule of law. The United States arrogates to itself the authority to identify wrong-doers and to kill them without any transparent or even vaguely public process. Such actions may seem fine when the targets are foreign evil-doers in the "war on terror," but they still indicate a certain attitude about law and the use of force that troubles me.

In the latest New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten describes the ways in which drone technology is moving into the civilian sphere. "Police tend to have a fetish for military gear," he says, "which the purveyors of [drone aircraft] seem to recognize." Though most drones are too expensive for most law enforcement budgets, cops (and others) relish the prospect of using eyes in the sky to find and capture bad guys just like their buddies in Pakistan do. "Still," Paumgarten notes,

military innovation usually assimilates itself into civilian life with an emphasis on benign applications. The public proposition, at least at this point, is not that drones will subjugate or assassinate unwitting citizens but that they will conduct search-and rescue operations, fight fires, catch bad guys, inspect pipelines, spray crops, count nesting cranes and measure weather data and algae growth... Of course, they are especially well suited, and heretofore been most frequently deployed, for surveillance.

In other words, drones don't have to do bad stuff. Like guns, they are tools to be used by moral creatures, as Paumgarten points out.

But that, precisely, is the problem. If our moral and political framework comes to embrace the unilateral killing of bad guys -- if we are no longer governed by a strict sense of the value of the rule of law -- we are far more likely to behave in ways I don't like. The fact that we have shrugged off drone use overseas indicates that we are inclined to accept it elsewhere. I am not reassured that hovering clouds of bee-like drones are not likely to come into existence for a long time because the technology is too far off.

I'm not worried about the machines. I'm worried about us.