Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Laws to limit drone use waste of time

Clovis’ planning and zoning commissioners talked about drones last week. More specifically, they talked about whether they should try and control them.

They can’t. And they should not.

P&Z Commissioner Carolyn Spence said she’s heard complaints about the small, remotely controlled aircraft from area residents. One person told Spence he saw a drone take a picture of him while he was sitting on his porch.

“We don’t have anything in place to address whether that is trespassing,” Spence said at a meeting on Wednesday. “That’s why the issue is here.”

The concept of someone using a remote-controlled device to take your picture or spy on your backyard activities may be disturbing ... until you remember those things have been happening forever without benefit of 21st Century technology.

A man with a camera can stand on a public sidewalk and take your photo while you relax on your front porch.

A woman in a two-story house can look down on her drunken neighbor’s pool party and sell video to a trash-TV show.

And somewhere between the time we all bought a zoom camera lens and some of us bought drones, satellite images from space began providing panoramic views of our streets and our houses.

Anybody with a computer can see them.

The technology is good enough that a geeky peeping Tom can look through the window in your bedroom.

We can argue all day whether the gadgets we all have to make our lives easier and more enjoyable are worth the problems they can cause in the wrong hands. But there is no disputing they exist and there is little anyone can do about them.

Laws to limit their use are a waste of time.

Let’s say we make up a law forbidding drones from photographing you without your permission.

• How will you even know when this happens?

• And if you catch one of them in the process, then what? You can’t catch it because it’s too fast and too high and its operator may be in Nebraska for all you know.

• Call police? Unless they have a fleet of drones and drone operators trained to chase down law-breaking drone operators, your picture will remain in the hands of another.

We understand the ultimate issue isn’t really about somebody taking your photo without permission.

The concerns the P&Z Commission probably wants to address involve far more sinister uses: drones with weapons, paper-thin drones that can slip in under your door and rummage through your house, drones with audio equipment that can listen in on your private conversations without you knowing.

But it’s important to remember most of us don’t have those kinds of drones. And there are already laws against shooting people and stealing their stuff and even invasion of privacy. So why do we need new laws specific to drones?

Maybe instead of a bunch of new regulations to try and keep up with modern technology, we should try a simpler approach:

Go inside the house to do things you don’t want anybody to see.

Don’t forget to close the curtains.

Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Clovis News Journal’s editorial board, which consists of Publisher Rob Langrell and Editor David Stevens.