On The Ethics of Drone Cameras — Why They Must Remain Accessible to the Public
I am a filmmaker. It is all I have wanted to be since I turned fourteen and my parents’ marital issues first erupted in our household. It is all I have wanted to be since I started watching movies under thick blankets in my bed to distract myself from all the yelling going on in the house on a daily basis. It is all I have wanted to be. And it is what I am, and what I would like to make a living doing. As such, I hold strong opinions on the tools afforded to the filmmaker, both for artistic purposes — such as self-expression — and as means of public record, such as recording someone else.
This essay will specifically focus on perhaps the most controversial filmmaking development now widely accessible for public consumption: the drone. The purpose of this piece is to make plain to the general public that while it is important to acknowledge the problematic history of the tool, it is ultimately more important to refute all attempts to suppress the power of the camera for the public and embrace its liberational capabilities. This is because the camera is crucial in exposing and educating the public on oppression that happens both domestically and internationally.
The camera can expose and educate on what the government refuses to. It can act as a source of knowledge that goes beyond what a unified formal bureaucracy may want us to know about the world and indeed can act as a great equalizer of knowledge. Information generated by people for the people, provoking conversation, shedding light on what we do not see in our day-to-day or on what we choose to ignore. This is even more important in the contemporary world — one that is so information-driven that many do not have the patience to rely on the written word for education. The camera can indeed act as a powerful tool to provide alternative and necessary means of cultural debate. This is evidenced in a 2014 Hayes-directed documentary in which Yale black American students with no filmmaking experience travelled to Cuba to shed light on racial inequity that continues to exist in both Cuba and the United States. As Hayes’ words tell us “the documentary fills a void in knowledge that is due to the US government’s ban on most unlicensed travel and trade with socialist Cuba since 1962” (43), and urges the viewer to consider the camera to be “an instrument of critique” (56).
Most cameras — though — are not drones, only some are. And they tend to only be used in specific situations — chiefly when carrying a ‘top-down’ shot with a God-like perspective. Historically, the intention behind the need for a top-down perspective was for the benefit of the military. In the US, their basis in warfare is to maximise destruction with minimal personnel loss to the US by disregarding a country’s sovereign borders and furthering US interests. “Top-down” shots were key in providing a sense of geography towards military targets, as well as to elude the need to cross a border via land, blatantly disregarding national sovereignty.
Many will argue that the drone is steeped in the same blood that the Western world has had on its hands through much of the 20th Century and the 21st Century, and its use should be utterly denounced for the murders it has caused. Such is acknowledged by Brian Tice — a Captain in the US Air Force — who wrote an argumentative piece in 1991 in favour of its expansion by the US military to exert control over “politically sensitive areas” (Airpower Journal). It has been seen time and time again, from the US selling drone technology to Israel against Syria in the Galilee Campaign of 1982, to the dramatic expansion of their use under President Obama, where drone strikes are predicted to have killed up to 20,000 in the Middle East, 10–15% of which are estimated to be civilians.
The technological benefits to drone cameras specifically go beyond the limitations of mere non-drone cameras in their capabilities to liberate. This is because the very use of the aforementioned “top-down” shot, made possible by placing a camera in the sky, grants the drone-user the ability to go largely unnoticed. Though one can use this for military purposes, when used by a member of the public, the drone can record footage while going relatively unnoticed by the state. This can help in what scholar J.D. Schnepf labels “counter-surveillance” tactics, citing the use of drones by indigenous people in “Standing Rock” (748). Here, local indigenous water protectors deployed “aerial imaging” using consumer drones to counter surveillance military vehicles and military drones, environmentally damaging actions that tried to remove indigenous homeland to build a pipeline (Schnepf 748). This is very proof of how the public can use the military’s technology against them, successfully defending their rights and demanding better from those who govern.
A more cynical argument — but one that is equally reflective of reality — is that there is also no reversing the technology. The drone market is estimated to be worth over $11 billion, with military drone sales by the United States making up nearly half of the market (Globe News Wire). They are here and they will be used. Thus, in facing that fact, do we not believe that their access should be extended in some capacity to the public? After all, it is not the public that uses this technology for military purposes; it is the military. Technology should be in the hands of the right people who may use it for good, not just the wrong people who may not.
Naturally, if I am to be truthful in my argumentation, I must assess my subjectivity. I come into this with great bias. Though I write this for the general public — after all, I believe that the general public is the party who would most benefit from drone access as a necessary tool against government tyranny — I am a filmmaker. I argue in favour of reinforcing the power of the camera for our community and necessitating that the public use of drone cameras is not stifled. But, of course, my gut reaction is to defend the tools that we, as filmmakers, are granted. As this essay makes plain, I believe such tools are precious, have the capacity to liberate, even if that is not their only use.
I further acknowledge that I have lived my life in a position of immense privilege on the drone issue: I have never lived in war, I grew up in an affluent white family, attending private schools and ultimately studying a tertiary sector creative profession in Los Angeles — one of the wealthiest parts of the world. I am fortunate that it is the life experience that I know; I do not know what it means to be on the other end of a drone strike. But in my filmmaking experience, I must argue in favour of the tools that I believe may be used to liberate those in need. Particularly if such tools will remain in use by the Western governments to kill those abroad, regardless of whether camera drone technology remains publicly available or not.
However, as a filmmaker — an individual who works with imagery, rather than words — I also understand that there is no substitute for the accuracy a moving picture provides. It cannot substitute the sense of sight, merely supplement it, or attempt to recreate it. One of the camera’s benefits is precisely that it can capture time, exposing it for public viewing and public benefit. No such example is perhaps more infamous of late than the use of a smartphone camera to capture the brutal and unjust murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, the video for which sparked million to protest in favour of ending explicit and systemic prejudices within Western police forces against black people and helped open cultural conversations on police’s role, its funding and conscious and subconscious violence in the individual psyche. It was precisely because the public was granted means to access camera technology that George Floyd’s death created a movement. In this sense, the camera is a tool for public conversation and ultimate social liberation.
Yes, military drone use has led to atrocities and long-standing instability that cannot be understated and must always be acknowledged, but it does not mean that cameras cannot act as abundant sources of liberation. The drone camera goes a step beyond this by allowing the public to exercise the power with greater geographical freedom, and to go largely unnoticed against their oppressors. And put simply, if drone technology’s military and surveillance usage is here to stay — which its multi-billion dollar market suggests it is — then it is important that the public also has the latest tools to keep the government in check.
SOURCES CITED:
Fact MR. “U.S. Drone Market to Reach US $82.9 Billion at CAGR of 22.2% by 2032 — Fact MR Report, GlobeNewswire, 12 Sept. 2023, www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/09/12/2741594/0/en/U-S-Drone-Market-to-Reach-US-82-9-Billion-at-CAGR-of-22-2-by-2032-Fact-MR-Report.html#:~:text=Key%20Takeaways%20from%20Market%20Study,with%2049.8%25%20share%20in%202022.
Hayes, Robin. “Black and Cuba: Liberation, African American Studies, and the Tools of Third Cinema.” Black Camera : The Newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 42–59, https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.7.1.42.
Schnepf, J. D. “Unsettling Aerial Surveillance: Surveillance Studies after Standing Rock.” Surveillance & Society, vol. 17, no. 5, 2019, pp. 747–51, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i5.13480.
Tice, Brian. “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.” Airpower Journal (Spring 1991). https://web.archive.org/web/20090724015052/http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj91/spr91/4spr91.htm
