Until recently the deployment of sophisticated drones was pretty much limited to the military, but prices have fallen so much that battlefield tech has come back to the homeland. For example, as at the end of last year, agencies such as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration now own or have access to drones such as the and have used them in law enforcement operations on American soil.

Along with these platforms comes increasingly advanced surveillance subsystems such as the which will eventually provide real-time monitoring of areas the size of entire cities!

Along with this "big boy" gear there's been an explosion of drone-type products in the civilian market. Consider the , a complete and very sophisticated remote control helicopter system already in fairly wide use by law enforcement. This system is capable of hoisting a variety of cameras and other devices, can be easily transported and launched, and in operation is as loud at 3 feet away as the dial tone on a phone ... all for around $25,000.

What concerns many people is that having these kinds of surveillance systems without any kind of defined policy as to what constitutes acceptable use will almost certainly lead to abuse. In a Stanford Law Review article titled "", M. Ryan Calo, Director for Privacy and Robotics, Center for Internet & Society commented:

"Citizens do not generally enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, nor even in the portions of their property visible from a public vantage. In 1986, the Supreme Court found no search where local police flew over the defendant's backyard with a private plane. A few years later, the Court admitted evidence spotted by an officer in a helicopter looking through two missing roof panels in a greenhouse. Neither the Constitution nor common law appears to prohibit police or the media from routinely operating surveillance drones in urban and other environments."