The video quickly spread on social media, spurring global news
coverage of the fight against the oil pipeline, which saw activists clash with
police and security forces in tense standoffs last year. A few weeks later, the
Army Corps of Engineers halted construction of the pipeline, which had
encroached on Native American sacred lands and threatened water supplies near
North Dakota’s Standing Rock reservation.
It was another example of how drones have become a crucial
technology, allowing activists and journalists to document protests and hold
police accountable for abuses. But as a new era of civil resistance dawns
under the Trump administration, at the Standing Rock site and in anti-Trump
demonstrations across the country, drone experts say police and government have
made it unnecessarily difficult — sometimes impossible — for
civilians to deploy drones at large protests.
Just a few days after the video from Standing Rock went viral,
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave
permission to local authorities to effectively
ban all civilian drone flights in 4 mile radius above the Oceti Sakowin
resistance camp and drill site. The same thing happened two years earlier,
during the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri: Police were granted what is
called a Temporary Flight Restriction, or TFR, which legally restricts airspace
above a designated area to law enforcement and emergency aircraft. In Ferguson,
the explicit goal was to stop
news helicopters and drones from observing the Black Lives Matter protests,
where cops were firing tear gas and menacing protesters with military vehicles
and weapons.
While these ad hoc no-fly-zones are ostensibly created for air
safety reasons, like clearing the way for rescue helicopters during a natural
disaster, some drone journalists say law enforcement are abusing them as a way
to block news coverage.
“The main problem is the FAA is not supposed to grant TFRs to
law enforcement just because they ask for them, and yet that’s pretty much what
they do,” said Robert Levine, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based photographer and
drone pilot. “Once you put up a TFR over a news site like in Standing Rock,
you’re de facto criminalizing the drone pilots who were there covering news
events.”
Temporary Flight
Restrictions have been around forever, but it’s only recently that they’ve been
used at large protests and disrupted citizen drone users. Once a TFR
is in place, citizen pilots need to apply for a waiver before flying, in
addition to having obtained a license from the FAA under its rules for small
unmanned aircraft.
Last December, Levine was
the only civilian pilot to be granted a waiver to legally fly in the restricted
airspace over Standing Rock. At the time, Forbes
described the
waiver as a “dramatic reversal” by the FAA, which six months earlier had
released long-awaited rules for the commercial use of
small unmanned aircraft.
Even with the waiver, its restrictions made it practically impossible for Levine to
get any useful footage, he said. Rather than granting him access to the entire
4-mile restricted zone, Levine was limited to only a half-mile radius centered
around a pre-determined point. He also couldn’t fly over crowds or at night,
and needed to report in to local authorities before and after every flight.
“Even with a really
judiciously placed
center point for my waiver, I wouldn’t have been able to cover the two main
areas of news interest,” Levine told Vocative. Those two locations are the oil pipeline’s drill pad and
Backwater Bridge, where many clashes occurred between residents of the Oceti Sakowin
and Sacred Stone resistance camps and police and security forces.
The waiver also took
several days to get approval. And if Levine had applied to fly his drone after
dark, when the police had deployed water cannons, the process would have taken
even longer.
Matt Waite, a professor
who heads the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Drone Journalism Lab, said
Levine’s case is especially telling because it should be relatively easy for
drone operators to get access to a remote, sparsely-populated area like
Standing Rock.
Getting approval to fly
drones over protests in metropolitan areas, like at the Women’s Marches that
took place across the country following Trump’s inauguration, would have taken
weeks or months, he said. The pilot would also have to be much more careful not
to fly over crowds. And even if the area hasn’t been given a special flight
restriction, some cities are covered in large swaths of permanently restricted
airspace due to nearby airports.
“For breaking news,
that’s not workable,” Waite told vocative. “If a spontaneous protest were to break out, I’d have to
wait weeks.”
Waiting is also not an
option for activists, who rely on independent citizen journalists to hold
police accountable during demonstrations. That means more pilots will be flying
illegally in the future, and if the past is any indication, police will respond
with force — sometimes by shooting drones down. At Standing Rock, police fired
bean bag rounds to take down drones, Levine says. But several companies are now
offering “drone guns” that allow police to jam a drone’s radio signal, force it
to land, or take control of it outright.
“It was law enforcement
that was creating the dangerous situation out there [at Standing Rock],” Levine
says. “If the FAA is concerned about safety, wouldn’t it have been better to
send a representative out there to talk to those drone pilots?”
Not all pilots will play
by the FAA’s drone rules, which are still less than a year old. But Waite says
the agency must create a better system for drone pilots to get legal access to
restricted airspace – whether it’s for flying in a temporary “no drone zone”
over a protest, like Levine did, or for general news-gathering and recreation.
“What really needs to
occur is the process for granting access to airspace needs to become more
automated. Why shouldn’t I be able to pull up my smartphone, tap into an FAA
app, and get on-demand access to the airspace?” Waite told vocative. “It’s not gonna stay this way forever, but the basic
problem here is that the FAA’s system and their culture is still built around
manned aviation.”
opted from vocativ
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