Never mind just weapons, let the ACLU ask about "Stingray", an NSA-designed, CIA-built universal cellphone short-range intercept device loaned out to federal alphabet agencies, police, and anybody on the "friendly" side of government.
It overpowers the weaker cell-tower signals long enough to record both sides of a conversation on a hard drive, then retransmits the signal to the legitimate tower. Adds a fraction of a second to usually crummy cell service, and sucks up everything the cell tower would have gotten, but with one small side trip, first.
And nobody needs a warrant, because it officially does not exist. Try that with a Predator, which is considerably bigger, and is known to exist, but just not right over your head at that moment.
Thank you...Rand Paul needs to stage another filibuster because the real threat from domestic drones isn’t a Hellfire down your chimney, but their ability to collect/transmit vast amounts of information.
I had some experience with military drones, both as a military intelligence officer and later, as a civilian contractor. At the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force was responsible for up to 36 UAV orbits a day. Collectively, the intel “haul” from those missions was measured in terabytes, uplinked to satellites and downlinked to DCGS nodes around the world.
Within a few years, there will be dozens of daily drone missions across the U.S., run by local, state and federal law enforcement. As sensor technology advances, you’ll be able to hang an even wider variety of sensors on those platforms, and they will be gathering vast amounts of information and transmitting it God-knows-where. And don’t think for a moment that police at all levels will share this data, and with even more sophisticated data mining, video tagging and facial recognition software, your every move will be tracked and cross-referenced to media habits, financial transactions and personal relationships.
The perfect tools for a police state. Yet no one, not even Rand Paul, is talking about the real threat from drones.
BTW, I can almost predict one tactic that will be used. Law enforcement will stage some sort of event to stimuate cell phone and internet activity in a selected area. Meanwhile, an advanced version of Stingray, mounted on a drone will be sucking up all the cell traffic in that neighborhood. It will be instantly downlinked to a police fusion center, and available across law enforcement and intelligence networks.
Just like when the Air Force used to run an SR-71 along the edge of Russian or Chinese airspace to stir up air defense traffic, while an RC-135 orbited off the coast, recording all types of ELINT and voice traffic.