Remote-control Drones to Report Antisocial Behavior and Public Disorder In U.K.

Somewhere, Winston Smith is nodding his head knowingly.

Smith, the antihero yet hero of 1984, would recognize the "spy drones" now hovering around Merseyside in the U.K. as the vanguard of a whole new depth of reporting on the populace at large, not just the "antisocial behavior and public disorder" that the police say they're looking to track.

Smith would find familiar the fact that the remote-control drones will also be used to track traffic congestion, reporting on jams and thefts and all manner of other backlogs to a central police computer and control room. To the discovery that these drones can capture reliable images from 500 meters up and also function fully in the dark using onboard GPS systems and night-vision cameras, Smith would rear back his head and howl, crying "bloody murder of privacy," or something like that.


The fact that these drones are the product of a military experiment would come as no surprise to Smith, who wouldn't even bother to decide whether it was an experiment worth pursuing because the debate wouldn't be worth it since the device already existed. And finally, to the assertion that the exercise was only a three-month trial, Smith would be heard to utter "Yeah, right" just before he went into hiding—again.




Written by Tom Charity
Published in Other Tech