In the News

Last year, the FBI flew a fleet of drones (a.k.a “unmanned aerial vehicles”) over Seattle and other cities. They were equipped with cameras capable of snapping thousands of high-resolution photographs, and may have carried devices that could capture emails, phone calls, texts and location data. One focus of the agency’s surveillance was the protests over the Ferguson, Missouri, police killing of an unarmed black teenager, which helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement.

This news, reported last June by The Associated Press, didn’t get much play in the local media. Neither did the expiration, last summer, of a moratorium preventing Washington state and law enforcement agencies from buying drones. Gov. Jay Inslee established that temporary ban in 2014, after he vetoed a bill that would have established parameters for the use of drones. He believed this legislation was too broad, and that better regulations could be passed before the ban expired.

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