Be afraid, be very afraid

Actually, this is pretty scary. While the usual caveats apply about how many there will be (presumably not many) and how much ground they will actually cover (presumably not much), the implications are quite unsettling.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the notion that perfectly law-abiding citizens - and yes that includes protestors - will, because these things fly so high, be under surveillance without knowing about it. Although I guess they might now suspect it.

Freedom from covert state surveillance should be a corner stone of a free society and this plan, on the face of it, appears to fundamentally undermine this precept. Overt surveillance at demos and so forth is bad enough, although in the interests of balance I should probably say that it is probably neccessary at least some of the time.

The big unanswered question is, of course, why? What are these things suppose to do? The argument that they are needed in the light of the Mumbai terrorist attacks is pretty weak, unless we think that Al-Qaeda is going to be invading from France aboard rubber dinghies. At the other extreme, I've yet to see convincing evidence that the mass use of CCTV cameras has had much of an effect on crime, although I'm open to persuasion that they may have made a bit of a difference.

Overall, it seems unlikely that even this level of surveillance will be of much use in actually stopping a crime which is about to happen or is already underway. Either the patrols will be random, in which case they will have almost zero chance of catching a crime in progress, or they will be targetted, in which case why not send, you know, a person to do the job and who might actually be able to arrest someone? Because you're going to have to do this anyway, and if they're not already at the scene it'll probably be too late. Unless we're going to be sending multi-million pound robots out to shadow kids who've just vandalised a bus shelter until someone on the ground can catch up with them.

So presumably the actual argument is about intelligence, although this doesn't come out much in the article. But as so often in these things I suspect the real reason why is 'because we can'. This stuff exists, there must be something we can do with it, so let's go for it! Especially since it's shiney, hi-tech, expensive and they probably use it in 24.