so i think that the technology has come of age. when you look at the technology and within the existing drone -- they're now beginning to apply it to the economy in agriculture and they believe that the technology is sophisticated enough that it's beyond hobbies and recreational use, though it's captivating consumers as well. so it's a real advancement in the technology in the recent term. >> andrew, the long-awaited box has arrived, you signed for it, and you opened it up and connect the batteries and can you just walk out your front door and start flying it? >> no, the first time i opened up my first drone, there were no instructions on how to turn

it on, and it landed in the grass in the first attempt. >> and if you want to do it right, and play by the rules such as today, is it easy to find out what the rules are? >> it is pretty a. i would have to say, there are so many people out there going to barnes and noble and check out drone. some might find it interesting to have a drone. >> we're looking at video that you shot with one of your drones, and how high are you allowed to fly? >> they just put it up to a 500-foot see and unfortunately, a lot of the regulations currently out listed by the faa are reacting to incidents that had already happened previously with other

pilots. usually not ending too well. if i remember correctly the height ceiling was over someone who wanted to film and took it out of a hotel window to take off. and not the smartest idea. >> michael, is that true? a lot of the rule making reactive when you see what somebody can do with one of these machines uh-oh, we have to ban that. >>. i'm going to have to disagree with my colleague. this is not a reactive policy. this is long-standing airspace, which is 40500 below and there is no risk to existing aviators and commercial airlines. this is an area that the faa historically regulated. but because now, there are a number of companies getting involved in this for commercial purposes, because of the

interest by recreational users the faa is looking at it and saying do we need rules of the road? the various faa releases at the state level are entirely arbitrary and that's the problem. so many technologies are being used all over the world. and the u.s. is the only one that has the draconian rules. >> you say that it's not reactive, but it can't have helped to have one crashing into the white house lawn and one buzzing -- >> i don't know if that's true. the company's responses every technology invented in history has had instances where people have used it where it's not intended, and obviously purposes that are real purposes and purposes that are detrimental.

this is no different. the companies are now reiterating to the extent that they're baking in security measures so that you won't be able to fly near the white house and monuments and no-fly zones. so what's happening the community is responding by building technology into the devices so they can't go to various places, and now some people could change that technology and rework it to be abused. but your cellphone can be used for surveilling people unbeknown the to them. but that's not what we're going to do, we are not going to ban cellphones, so some of the things that come out where we see them in the exemption process where people try to use them commercially, you can get a saturday of authorization for under 200 feet. and it's totally arbitrary.

so the restrictions now being put in place nobody can explain, at least not in a way that's tied to the regulations. so i think we'll see a liberalization of this area, because as we say in the coalition, technology always wins. >> you built this drone and recently, there have been much ballyhooed announcements and the news business can use them, but here in washington, you're pretty limited with where this thing can fly. >> absolutely. in dc, because of the incident with the white house they enacted a ten mile no-fly zone around the center of reagan, so pretty much the entire city of washington d.c. is blocked off >> so when you say ten miles from that airport that means that you can't fly near the mall or near the capital or the executive office for the various federal deposits and so

on. >> yeah. >> it's limited use. and what could they be used for in news photography? >> in news, they're fantastically being used recently in napal, to get a lot of the videos of the disaster areas from the earthquakes, and they're really being utilized in the search and rescue department. in the past, they have been using helicopters and not everybody has accessibility to helicopters, and these can be almost given to a two-man team. and easily extend the search parameters of whatever the event may be. >> instead of a few million dollars, this costs a few hundred dollars. >> exactly. >> great to talk to you both, michael is the executive director of the coalition and barringer is a colleague of ours here at aljazeera. thank you for your insight. as we have been discussing, this is a fast evolving area of technology and law.

how do you build a rule book so that aviation is protected and people on the ground are protected and drones are not crashing into from the sky into the earth.

>> businesses make the most of new opportunities and the complex web of operations covering the machines that fly through the air mesh with a new class of controlled aircraft. along with jay standard. a senior policy analyst at the american civil lebties union. what falls into the am bit of the faa?

anything that flies through the air? >>s this a good question, ray. the faa has the ability to regulate aircraft. and there was a question of where they plu and fell. and congress has said that unmanned aircraft systems are aircraft, and all of the regulations that apply to aircraft apply to unmanned aircraft. >> there have been remote control hobbyists for a long time. i remember them buzzing with the hornet sound going through the parks and were they already regulated or was this an over sight? >> you're exactly right. model aircraft have been around here since the 1920s. and things started to change

when the faa became concerned about model aircraft, and they're all the same thing just a different name for the same thing. the faa in 2005 ban articulating a policy that model aircraft, used for recreational purposes, were not subject to the regulations but unmanned aircraft for any other purposes were subject to the regulations. >> some of these are pretty big, and they can fly very high very par and very fast. is there something intrinsically or extrinsically different about the craft if it's for commercial use versus hobbyists trying things out? >> no, it's just tradition. the model aircraft community has been permed to operate without faa regulation for many

years, and there's a strong feeling in the community that they have operated safely. and the record is very safe for model aircraft regulations. the faa has continued the approach of not regulating model aircraft. but i think that one of the questions is, where does the line end with respect to what is really a model aircraft and what is an unmanned aircraft? the congress, in 2012, passed legislation that tried to clarify that. and i would argue that they limited what comes under the category of model aircraft. but the faa's position has consistently been, since the 2005 time period, that if a model aircraft is used for my purpose except recreational or hobby use it falls under the faa's releases. >> if it it marches that the

area that has been unregulated historically, what are the concerns? what do you want to see go into law and. >> it's an area that's mostly privacy, and we think there should be basic ground rules so we can get all of benefits of drones without worrying that there's going to be an eye in the sky tracking us at every moment from when we walk out of the door to get home at night. >> that's a very good idea. because consent in the age of post-9-1-1 america has seemingly gone out the window. you walk through the streets of washington d.c. to get to your front door, you're probably on tv much of the time you're doing that, without your knowledge, without consent and without really much oversight into who sees those pictures and where you're going. >> it's true, there's a lot of surveillance out there, and there are a lot of cameras. and everybody is carrying a

video camera in their possible et now but when you look at air surveillance, it's particularly entrucive because it gives the ability to track everybody all the time. and when this was hashed out in the supreme court the government versus jones, the government said that you won't have any privacy in public. and the justice said no, this kind of tracking is not something that has ever been possible before without a team of agents following somebody around but now everybody can be tracked all the time. and that difference in quantity makes a difference in quality. >> i want to talk more about privacy. if someone in their town picks a private part of their yard to sunbathe in the nude or a condo grows a few marijuana plants outside, for personal use can they go without airborne

snoops? cheap cameras mounted to flying drones. game of drones is tonight's "inside story."

>> something that you've never seen before. a bird's eye view from a drone. welcome back to "inside story," i'm ray suarez. jay stanley of the aclu is with us, and jael is, aviation law. we were talking about privacy before the break. and let's say in water-short

southern california, the use of pools has been banned, for instance, and then they send up a drone in some small incorporated area, looking for all of the unregulated and unregistered pools. fair game? you wouldn't necessarily write in to admit that you had filled up your swimming pool without permission. >> well, drones have such a huge potential for all surveillance, we think that there should be regulations and some states have passed them regulating how the government and the police use drones requiring that they have a warrant. in other words, they can use a drone to collect information but if they have reason to believe that you have broken the law. if they have a swat raid on a house, they can use a drone to assist. and if they have evidence of a crime, but they can't survey

everybody, in case you did wrong. that's what we have been pushing in the states, and we have not been pushing commercial rights of drones. photography and we don't know yet what kind of privacy invasions you'll see in private sector drones, usage laws, and trespassing laws, and most states have peeping tom laws. >> ted allen does the law inevitably end up playing catchup when you have a technology that's moving as quickly as this one? the drone we had on the set earlier had a top of the line hd camera mounted and it could see anything. >> yes i think inevitably it does, and i don't know if you're relating to safety releases or regulations related to privacy. this is a very fast-moving

technology and i think at least with the faa regulation, the unmanned aircraft community is encouraging the faa when it does pass regulations to make sure that the regulations are flexible and allow new technologies to be incorporated and not impeded by those releases. >> who ends up with the trump card when there's a conflict between government and business in an argument? >> i think that inevitably the government does, and certainly the faa is empowered to regulate aviation safety. and the power is very pervasive. the federal government has preempted that, and the local governments are not permitted to regulate aviation safety. that's arrived to the faa but what the community is concerned about are regulations coming out of the faa that not only regulate to protect safety, but

go beyond that, and they're too restrictive. that would impede a very very important industry, a very important technology that's going to bring great benefits to all americans. >> trial and error, is that how we end up making rules in this area, jay? where there's overreach and pullback and negotiation and overreach and pullback and negotiation? >> that's a good summary, i think that we'll see an evolution between practice and law. it's interesting to see if they're falling out of the sky and falling on people's heads and injuring them and high profile terrorist incidents and if they are used in areas that are offensive with privacy, we will see them not coming to fruition. it's certain that there will be accidents and mischief, and businesses will be pushing for

greater freedom and others will be pushing for more safety. my organization doesn't care about -- doesn't have an opinion on the safety questions, but when it comes to the privacy thing, we don't want to see a radical change in the privacy of americans because of this technology. >> that's jay stanley from the american civil liberties union and he joins me, gentlemen thank you for joining me on "inside story." i'll be back with a final word on the constant footrace between technology and the law.

>> people hostile to government release off point out that shared interest would act as regulation. people who want to keep the government out of their business will self police as a group to make sure that bad actors don't ruin it for everyone else. and you can see the appeal in that idea. after all once you've gone to the expensive putting a drop in

the air, you would like to enjoy maximum advantage without people messing it up to you. he last month flew a drone too small to be decked by radar toward the white house from lafayette square. the president wasn't there. he asked them to land the tiny aircraft. and he did and them he was turned over to the u.s. park police for arrest. at the beginning of the year, another drone this one flown by a federal employee, crashed into the white house lawn. common sense is not as widely distributed as the ability to fly a drone and you wonder why we can't have nice things and fly them wherever we want. thank you for joining us for "inside story", and see you next time, i'm ray suarez.

>> more evidence of the growing arsenal of improvised weapons syria's government is accused of using on its own people. hello there welcome to al jazeera, live from our headquarters live in doha. also coming up. a protest in hong kong as politician debate how the city's next leader should be elected. >> the only thing that counts is have we stopped the boats and the answer is a res