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I wouldn't worry about maple-seed sized versions of these for awhile, there are plenty of issues around how to power it for more than a minute or so...range and airtime will be very short. ...
ADK,
Get yourself a nice Mossberg model 500. Then, go buy some buckshot. Drones are typically pretty slow, and will make for loads of fun when shooting them out of the sky.
"Where are the guys with guns hiding?" is the question they want to answer.
Charlottesville, Va., has become the first city in the United States to formally pass an anti-drone resolution.
The resolution, passed Monday, "calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court," and "pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones."
The resolution passed by a 3-2 vote and was brought to the city council by activist David Swanson and the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group based in the city. The measure also endorses a proposed two-year moratorium on drones in Virginia.
Councilmember Dede Smith, who voted in favor of the bill, says that drones are "pretty clearly a threat to our constitutional right to privacy."
"If we don't get out ahead of it to establish some guidelines for how drones are used, they will be used in a very invasive way and we'll be left to try and pick up the pieces," she says.
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This Isn't Hard, Mr. President: Do You Think You Can Kill Us on American Soil or Not?
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I can't think of any reason why the Obama Administration would keep dodging this question save one: It believes that, under certain circumstances, perhaps spelled out in a secret legal memo, it is empowered to kill American citizens or non-citizens with drones inside the United States.
And it knows the citizenry would be alarmed by that belief.
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This letter is a few days old, but is very important for every American to be aware of. Essentially, Rand Paul is threatening to filibuster Barack Obama’s nominee for the CIA, John Brennan, due to his refusal to answer a simple question:
Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial?
This should not be a complicated question to answer, yet it seems Obama, Brennan and pretty much every other little power consumed bureaucrat is incapable of doing so. Below is Rand Paul’s letter reprinted in full (my emphasis added).
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In a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Attorney General Eric Holder said that the President could theoretically order lethal strikes within American borders under "extraordinary circumstance." ...
And so it begins.....without due process........without discovery........without a chance to rebut or to face your accuser.......without a trial........and, for all we know, without any empirical evidence whatsoever.
Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster will inevitably fail at its immediate objective: derailing John Brennan’s nomination to run the CIA. But as it stretches into its sixth hour, it’s already accomplished something far more significant: raising political alarm over the extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year “war on terrorism.”
The Kentucky Republican’s delaying tactic started over one rather narrow slice of that war: the Obama administration’s equivocation on whether it believes it has the legal authority to order a drone strike on an American citizen, in the United States. Paul recognized outright that he would ultimately lose his fight to block Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief and architect of much of the administration’s targeted-killing efforts.
But as his time on the Senate floor went on, Paul went much further. He called into question aspects of the war on terrorism that a typically bellicose Congress rarely questions, and most often defends, often demagogically so. More astonishingly, Paul’s filibuster became such a spectacle that he got hawkish senators to join him.
“When people talk about a ‘battlefield America’,” Paul said, around hour four, Americans should “realize they’re telling you your Bill of Rights don’t apply.” That is a consequence of the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that did not bound a war against al-Qaida to specific areas of the planet. “We can’t have perpetual war. We can’t have a war with no temporal limits,” Paul said.
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*Update 5: After nearly 13 hours of filibuster, Paul yields the floor at 12:39am EST.
Rand Paul trending #1 on Twitter
Is this the turning point for America?
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HR: We are done for the night? We should come back tomorrow?
RP: If the President or the Attorney General say citizens won’t be killed by drones on American soil, I will be done talking…
HR: silence….
For those who missed it, Senator Cruz reading America’s #StandWithRand tweets:
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Paul’s comments from the Senate floor come after he’s raised objections in recent weeks. Paul first threatened to filibuster the Brennan nomination in late February, when he sent a letter to administration officials asking whether the U.S. government would ever use a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. responded to Paul’s inquiry Monday, saying the administration has “no intention” of carrying out drone strikes on suspected terrorists in the United States, but could use them in response to “an extraordinary circumstance” such as a major terrorist attack.
Paul called Holder’s refusal to rule out drone strikes within the United States “more than frightening.”
On Wednesday, Paul elaborated on his concerns: “When I asked the president, can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It’s an easy question. It should have been a resounding, an unequivocal, ‘No.’ The president’s response? He hasn’t killed anyone yet. We’re supposed to be comforted by that.”
Wyden agreed in part with Paul’s filibuster, even as he was mostly satisfied with Holder’s response: “I want it understood that I have great respect for this effort to really ask these kinds of questions … And Sen. Paul has certainly been digging into these issues in great detail.”
At 4:45 p.m., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the floor to see if Paul would say when he will end his filibuster so that senators could prepare for a vote to end debate and bring the nomination to a vote.
Paul dug in, saying he would be happy to end it, but only “if the president or the attorney general will clarify that they will not kill Americans on American soil.”
Reid informed senators before leaving: “Everyone should plan on coming tomorrow. We’re through for the night.”
Just after 7 p.m., Paul asked for Democrats to consent to vote on a non-binding resolution that would express opposition to the drone killings of American citizens on American soil. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) rejected it, promising a committee hearing on drone strikes instead, and Paul continued his filibuster.
Paul noted that he has voted for Obama’s previous Cabinet nominees, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and suggested that his cause was not partisan.
“I have allowed the president to pick his political appointees,” Paul said. “But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution. … I would be here if it were a Republican president doing this. Really the great irony of this is that President Obama’s opinion on this is an extension of George Bush’s opinion.”
Paul also said that he was “alarmed” at the lack of definition over who can be targeted by drone strikes. He suggested that many college campuses in the 1960s were full of people who might have been considered enemies of the state.
“Are you going to drop … a Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda?” Paul asked.
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What began as a one-man crusade to delay the Brennan nomination ended as a team effort as Wednesday turned to Thursday in the nation's capital. Even Paul's Kentucky colleague, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, took part in the discussion, announcing that he would not only vote against Brennan's confirmation, but would vote to block the Senate from even considering the nomination when a procedural vote occurs, probably later this week.
McConnell was one of a cast of Republican reinforcements who came to the Senate chamber in the filibuster's 12th hour. In all, 15 senators joined Paul – 13 Republicans and two Democrats. The cast included two senators who hours earlier had dined with President Obama at a nearby restaurant. Several freshman Republicans who had yet to deliver a speech in the chamber made their first in support of Paul's filibuster.
Hours earlier, Sen. Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois, still impaired as he recovers from a stroke, came to the chamber to deliver an apple and green tea in a Thermos his office had just purchased for $35 from a nearby Frager’s Hardware store.
"I think most Americans think about that scene out of 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' " Kirk explained as he left the Senate, referring to the 1939 film that boosted the career of star Jimmy Stewart. “There was a lot of caffeine in that green tea to get him going.”
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Paul talked alone until about three hours into the filibuster, when two Republicans – Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas – came to allow Paul to rest by yielding so they could pose questions to him. Cruz compared Paul with the heroes of the Battle of the Alamo, which ended on this day 177 years ago.
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Related: Earlier Wednesday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz did manage — after a bit of a struggle* — to get Eric Holder to admit that the Constitution does not allow a drone strike on a U.S. citizen on domestic soil who is not posing an imminent threat.
Update: The White House is remaining silent on the Rand Paul filibuster. The optimist in me hopes that’s because Jay Carney has been furloughed due to the sequester, but unfortunately I doubt it.
Wildly rhetorical question: Will the Democrats who criticized the Bush/Cheney drone policies #StandWithPaul tonght? A liberal actor is asking the same question.
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I don't know, in case of such small things, the amount of power required to get them airborne is not that big, so things like remote powering, using radio frequencies, maybe some resonance thrown in the mix (something like that remote gadget charging, that has been announced by TI maybe year-two ago), plus some narrow band antenna (one thing to remotely charge stuff in your living room, another power the "bug" drone few hundred meters away or so), and who knows... OR - who says, that these micro-drones cannot use something like micro fuel cells? After all, insects are capable of flying some significant distances without "refuelling", and they are not using anything nearly as energy dense, as chemical fuels that we have at our disposal...I wouldn't worry about maple-seed sized versions of these for awhile, there are plenty of issues around how to power it for more than a minute or so...range and airtime will be very short. The military is lusting for these kinds of things,(...)
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles...ny-to-sell-drone-defense-technology-to-publicOregon Company to Sell Drone Defense Technology to Public
The company says it won't knock drones down, but will stop them from 'completing their mission'
Do you want to keep drones out of your backyard?
An Oregon company says that it has developed and will soon start selling technology that disables unmanned aircraft.
The company, called Domestic Drone Countermeasures, was founded in late February because some of its engineers see unmanned aerial vehicles—which are already being flown by law enforcement in some areas and could see wider commercial integration into American airspace by 2015—as unwanted eyes in the sky.
"I was personally concerned and I think there's a lot of other people worried about this," says Timothy Faucett, a lead engineer on the project. "We've already had many inquiries, a lot of people saying 'Hey, I don't want these drones looking at me.'"
Domestic Drones Countermeasures was formed as a spin-off company from Aplus Mobile, which sells rugged computer processors to defense contractors—though the company won't discuss its specific technology because it is still applying for several patents. Faucett says that work has helped inform its anti-drone technology.
The company will sell land-based boxes that are "non-offensive, non-combative and not destructive." According to the company, "drones will not fall from the sky, but they will be unable to complete their missions."
Though Faucett wouldn't discuss specifics, he says the boxes do not interfere with a drone's navigation system and that it doesn't involve "jamming of any kind." He says their technology is "an adaptation of something that could be used for military application" with the "combat element replaced with a nondestructive element."
"We understand the nature of the equipment drone manufacturers are using and understand how to counter their sensors," Faucett says. "We're not going to be countering Predator drones that are shooting cruise missiles, but we're talking about local law enforcement drones and commercial ones that people might be using for spying."
For now, Faucett admits the technology is "expensive," but the company is already ready to design custom anti-drone boxes for customers.
"We envision it could be cheap enough for residential use very soon," he says. "It's quite possible to deploy it if you were shooting a movie and wanted to protect your set, or if you had a house in Malibu and wanted to protect that, we could deploy it there. If a huge company like Google wanted to protect its server farms, it can be scaled up for a larger, fixed installation."
As drones become more commonplace, Faucett says more people will begin searching for a way to protect their privacy.
"The thing that brought it home for me was Senator [Rand] Paul doing the filibuster, there's a lot of unanswered questions," he says. "We think there might be as much business for this counter drone stuff as there is for the drones themselves."
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