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Syracuse, Home to an Air Force Drone Squadron, Banned Drones

Neither the feds nor the state of New York has come up with ironclad rules around drones and civil liberties.
An Air National Guard MQ-9A Reaper drone at Hancock Air Field, located a few miles from Syracuse. Via Wikipedia

The city council of Syracuse, New York yesterday passed a resolution to bar its police department and other city agencies from using drones until state and federal regulations are put in place that “adequately protect the privacy of the population.” While Syracuse is now part of a growing group of cities that have banned drones, it stands out because of its neighbor: An Air National Guard attack wing that exclusively flies drones.

The resolution, whose full text is shared below, passed by a unanimous vote of the nine councillors, and makes Syracuse the fifth municipality in the country to pass legislative restrictions on drone operations. Peer cities include Charlottesville, Va., St. Bonifacius, Minn., Evanston, Ill., and Northampton, Mass.

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Now, a municipality has little to no control over airspace. The nation’s skies lie almost exclusively in the hands of the Federal Aviation Administration. What city councils and state legislatures can govern, while they wait for the FAA to figure out how to tackle drones, is the money and operational approval for agencies to purchase and fly drones in carrying out their missions.

This ground floor approach to reining in drone use by law enforcement was catalyzed last year by the revelation that the Seattle Police Department had purchased two drones under a federal grant without notifying the mayor or city council. SPD bought its drones in 2010, but the purchase did not come to light until the FAA released its list of drone waivers in early 2012. After vocal protest at city council meetings about this two-year lapse in notification, the mayor directed police to send the drones back to the manufacturer.

Syracuse police have not expressed any particular interest in drones. Last year and again in October, the department emphasized this point in response to MuckRock records requests, saying that “the Syracuse Police Department does not use ’drones.’”

But activists like the Syracuse Peace Council, which sponsored the recent resolution, are trying to get ahead of the curve to avoid a repeat of the Seattle debacle. Syracuse has a special relationship with drones, as it's just miles from Hancock Air Field National Guard Base. Hancock is home to the 174th Attack Wing, which made headlines in 2010 for transitioning completely from F-16 manned fighter jets to MQ-9A Reaper armed drones. In 2011, 38 demonstrators were arrested outside Hancock for staging a "die-in" protest of drone usage.

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With that in mind, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Syracuse moved to ban drones. Until the issue gets a bit clearer at the federal level and privacy protections given greater weight, there will be no drones “purchased, leased, borrowed, tested or otherwise utilized” by Syracuse government bodies. In the meantime, the 174th will continue operations, as the air wing is under federal jurisdiction.

As this most recent resolution emphasizes, neither the feds nor the state of New York has come up with ironclad rules around drones and civil liberties. The Department of Justice and FBI have made clear that they don’t believe surveillance-by-drone requires any warrant (as long as it’s in the visible spectrum), but privacy advocates contest these provisions pretty hotly.

Because the debate is so polarized, regulations are likely to be contentious when they do arrive, which means challenges to those regulations are likely to wind their way through the courts. In simple terms, we're still years away from clear regulation and legal precedent for drone use, leaving drone rules up to municipalities like Syracuse—even if the drones keep flying nearby.

The full text of Syracuse's resolution is below: