Bubble of protection is 3000 feet laterally and 1000 feet vertically. From the article:
“Unlike traditional Temporary Flight Restrictions, the NOTAM does not provide geographic coordinates, activation times, or public notification when the restriction is in effect near a specific location. Instead, the restricted airspace moves with DHS assets, meaning the no-fly zone can appear wherever ICE or other DHS units operate.”
“In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is to have laws that are virtually impossible to not break.
I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional for being overly vague and arbitrary. For example, Montana used to have some maximum speed limits that were just "reasonable and prudent", but they were eventually rejected by courts as being too vague (what's prudent to you may not be prudent to someone else). This is similar, in that the FAA has a no fly zone but they don't actually publish what it is.
Catch-22 and 1984 weren't supposed to be instruction manuals.
> I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional
The rule of law has left the building. The SC is willing to rubber-stamp nearly anything right now.
Waiting and hoping for common sense to prevail is what allows authoritarian regimes to bulldoze through existing laws and norms. Even if the courts were an avenue for redress, they are being overwhelmed by the daily barrage of new illegal and unconstitutional actions. Once the courts get around to addressing these cases, the damage has been done and the precedent has been set.
Anything but an administration being able to manipulate the Fed, it seems. Most legal experts believe that will be a hard strike down on the administration
that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything
very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.
all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.
This is literally backed by data. 21 out of 25 emergency docker cases taken up with the Supreme Court were ruled in the Trump administration’s favor. Only one of the cases against the administration was unanimous.
At the appellate level, Trump appointed judges vote in favor of his policies at a substantially higher rate than any previous president at 92% of cases.
And the emergency docket is exactly where one should look for these very recent very blatantly illegal actions and lawsuits aiming to counter them.
So yes the data is in, and yes it’s bad, and emphatically yes it’s exactly what this thread is saying. In case anyone reading in good faith was wondering.
The emergency docket is a preferred method for blatant partisanship because it lets them immediately prevent lower courts from stopping the administration but doesn’t require them to set a binding precedent or even explain the ruling. If it looks like they might be losing power, suddenly those “emergency” decisions which were subsequently back-burnered can be dropped to prevent a Democrat from using the same powers.
If you think the SCOTUS has been arbitrarily rubber stamping the administration's goals, you haven't been paying attention. I'll fully agree with you it appears to have been fairly partisan, but less than a month again they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states:
>In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.
> they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states
That is not what the decision stated - there was even a quote from a justice saying that the administration could easily attain the same result with a different legal mechanism, all but encouraging such a change in behavior.
Edit: the ‘improperly’ portion of your quote is the operative term
Yes, and my point is exactly that a rubber stamping SCOTUS would have literally allowed it even though it was "improper." That's what rubber stamping means.
"Change this sentence, change the date and resubmit" is rubber-stamping - they just require a big-enough fig-leaf and are bold enough to publicly hint at the parameters of the fig-leaf they will accept.
They made that ruling while Biden was president. It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
John Roberts and other conservative members of the court do have an ideological commitment to the Unitary Executive Theory of the presidency (foolishly, in my view) but this has the potential to benefit both Democratic and Republican presidents.
That ruling[1] is even worse than rubber stamping. It's saying that no stamp is needed at all.
> It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
The Trump administration absolutely did exist, both in the past and the present (waiting in the wings) in July 2024 when the ruling was issued.
While it's true that all past and future presidents are affected by the ruling, there's exactly one former president and presidential candidate at that time that was likely to face criminal charges for actions taken while in office, in either first or second terms.
It's a bit much to claim that the ruling doesn't have at least the appearance of benefiting Trump exclusively, especially given the timing. The ruling caused many of Trump's trials to be delayed to be effectively concurrent with the 2024 election.
We went 235 years without clarifying that presidents had presumptive immunity; all previous presidents (even Trump) acted under the presumption that prosecution for official acts might be unlikely but was possible.
This is all highly commical considering the US has black bagged a foreign president.
That is going to be the court case of the century by the way. Maduro will have lawyers begging to represent him. It will be America on trial and I'm looking forward to the Trump administration absolutely bungling it.
And they will be perfectly happy to walk it back when (or if) a Democrat is elected president in the future. Stare decisis is no longer a thing with this bunch.
How so? The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties", which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
And notably, before any further disagreement pops up the other dissenting judges literally said as much. The relevant quote:
"When he uses his official powers in any way, under
the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from
criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official
power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one
day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as
bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the
majority’s message today."
Unless ordering assassinations and launching a coup are "core constitutional powers" of the president, then no the ruling does not give him immunity for that.
As a practical matter, if the president is ordering the military to do those things and the military is obeying those orders, we are far beyond the point where concepts like legal immunity matter.
Ordering violence orchestrated by the military is a core constitutional power. It's called being "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces.
The ruling makes it very clear that core constitutional powers have conclusive and preclusive (absolute) immunity.
Other official acts have presumptive immunity.
In all cases, the motive is above question. If Trump has a fight with Melania, he can order the CIA to rendition and disappear her. He doesn't even need to claim that she's a spy. It can never be questioned in court. He can then pardon everyone involved, so even the underlings face no court.
In all cases, the official acts are explicitly not admissible as evidence. Using the example above, the District of Columbia can try to prosecute for murder, but is unable to introduce the fact of the order as evidence. If Trump receives a bribe, the official act that he undertook at the briber's behest is similarly inadmissible.
> Ordering violence orchestrated by the military is a core constitutional power. It's called being "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces.
Incorrect. The commander in chief, same as all military officers, has the authority to issue lawful orders to the chain of command below him. He does not have the authority to issue unlawful orders, and if he does, his subordinates have the legal obligation to disobey them. The president does not have constitutional power to order arbitrary violence.
> If Trump has a fight with Melania, he can order the CIA to rendition and disappear her
No he can't because this is against the law, and it is therefore not a presidential power. The president has no constitutional authority to order agencies to violate the law.
> He can then pardon everyone involved, so even the underlings face no court.
This is, unfortunately, true. But it has been true as long as the US has existed.
> If Trump receives a bribe, the official act that he undertook at the briber's behest is similarly inadmissible.
This is true, but the act of taking the bribe is not an exercise of presidential power so he can be charged with accepting a bribe. This is not new to the recent SC decision.
You’re a student of history, thus I think you understand how “commander in chief of the armed forces” is a constitutional duty without needing further explanation of why.
I think you intended to communicate the Supreme Court would balk at it happening.
Yes.
Much like Kavanaugh balking at ethnicity-based stops after allowing language + skin color based stops. By then, it’s too late.
> Two survivors of the initial attack later appeared to wave at the aircraft after clambering aboard an overturned piece of the hull, before the military killed them in a follow-up strike that also sank the wreckage. It is not clear whether the initial survivors knew that the explosion on their vessel had been caused by a missile attack.
> The Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war describes a scenario similar to the Sept. 2 boat strike when discussing when service members should refuse to comply with unlawful orders. “For example,” the manual says, “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
It seems extremely relevant. Your argument suggests the president need only appoint a subordinate who will themselves give the desired illegal order without the president's public command. In the unlikely event the subordinate is called to account, the president can simply pardon them.
This is certainly not a hypothetical "parade of horribles", since Trump has already pardoned military officers convicted of war crimes.[1]
War crimes sounds scary as a whole mess of badness, but which one is kind of material. Eg Obama's drone strikes and CIA torture likely count as war crimes, though no court has actually tried him for them, so it's hard to get worked up about Navy Seals (whos job it is to go into war zones and do war-type things) having generically having committed war crimes. Did they rape women and babies, or did they shoot the wrong person in the dark of night who it turns out wasn't actually a threat.
> Gallagher was the subject of a number of reports from fellow SEAL team members, stating that his actions were not in keeping with the rules of war, but these reports were dismissed by the SEAL command structure.
> Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.
Murdered a prisoner, and was shitty enough his fellow SEALs were uncomfortable enough to complain. Pardoned eventually, by Trump.
> Unless ordering assassinations and launching a coup are "core constitutional powers" of the president, then no the ruling does not give him immunity for that.
Just to be clear: you are disagreeing with a dissenting Supreme Court justice on how much the law protects the president. Are you a lawyer? Do you know more about how much the law binds the president than the literal office that has the final say on the law?
Are you disagreeing with all 6 concurring Supreme Court justices on much the law protects the president? Are you a lawyer? Do you know more about how much the law binds the president than the literal office that has the final say on the law?
No, they aren't, because the concurring justices have not said that those acts are not covered. All we have is what the majority wow, which notably did not include any exceptions
If you think Roberts, Alito, and especially Thomas have actually been following the law as it was intended, then I have a beautiful bridge in New York to sell to you.
Make no mistake, I fully believe the Supreme Court is complicit in this manner and has long since abdicated their duties to uphold the law and the constitution. But my point is that when the Supreme Court comes out and says that the President is immune to all actions they take, it seems like a folly to try and pretend that they don't mean what they say, at least as long as Trump is President. The 'law' is what the Supreme Court says it is, and they've decided Trump is the law.
> The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties"
Yes. This was basically agreed upon before that the president has legal immunity for exercising his constitutional powers, but was never explicitly ruled on by the court. If the president does something outside his legal authority, then that isn't his presidential duty, and he can be punished.
> which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
Trump claimed repeatedly and vigorously that whatever the President does is by definition legal. He also repeatedly and vigorously claimed that Obama had broken the law by spying on then-candidate Trump in 2016. I don't know if he himself noticed the contradiction but blustered on anwway or was too dense to notice.
[BTW, Trump wasn't spied on -- Russian assets were spied on and it turned out that some of those communications were with Trump's team. There are ~100 pages of these communications captured in the Mueller report. ]
One time I was racing across the country in a moving van because my wife was injured. The truck was speed-governed to 75 mph, which I was sitting at for most of the trip. I have a picture of the back of a school bus that handily passed me by on highway 90 :-)
The gun free school zone act has been upheld even though you could be within 1000 ft of one with no real indication there is one there. Supposedly you can only be convicted for doing it knowingly, but IIRC knowingly has been interpreted to mean as little as you live near the area so reasonably should have known.
Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.
So there is not necessarily any need for mens rea in the US legal system.
But your examples are markedly different to me. Yes, those examples do put the onus on the individual to ensure there are no schools around or that an individual is of legal age, but those are at least discoverable things - school locations are public info, and I think for any adult it's not that difficult to steer clear of anyone who looks mildly close to underage.
But in this instance, the movements of ICE are specifically hidden by the government - heck, they've even threatened to prosecute people who publish this information!! It is the literal definition of a Catch-22.
>> Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.
You had me up to the "selling the services" part.
If you are 'engaging' with someone in a criminal enterprise it's probably reasonable to assume they might misrepresent certain facts to make the sale.
Speed limits are biology and physics derived. The eye has a max speed, over which it starts to rewrite the history of what you saw. Everytime you have been "frozzen in fear" the first few milliseconds are just the eye rewriting the logs.
So you take that the saccade speed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) + speed of visual buffer reaction + reasonable time to break and you get a max speed for that.
Same goes when you have two points of attention, like traffic in front of you and merging traffic, the speed gets reduced to compensate.
Weird that when you're in Nevada the eye moves fast enough for you to react when going at 80 mph but in Arizona your eyes can only move fast enough for 75 mph, and in California no ones eyes move fast enough to react over 70 mph.
I'm guessing that's entirely the idea. There will be even more cameras on them after yesterday, and they're trying to be proactive in having the authority to arrest all of them. They want the authority to arrest someone who was just out flying a drone and happened to film them as they moved.
IDK, it's probably more a matter where they don't want people to be flying RPGs into their windscreens and this is the first step for them to carry around frequency jammers. The last time I was in Iraq they used them to stop the cellphone detonated IEDs and all the convoys has one or two.
Coincidentally, folks won't be able to live stream their encounters but I'm sure that's totally unrelated...
> “In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” ― Oscar R. Benavides (Peru)
This is a useful measure to point the law as a weapon against drone operators who may be recording what’s going on by accident or on purpose. Any drone made in the last few years is going to be emitting its ID, which likely has been registered with the pilot’s name and contact information.
They can then after the fact come down on that person without having to get facial recognition, grab cellphone beacons, or other similar steps.
You should. It's not meant for your vanity and it represents and extreme overreach by the government. It doesn't make you "cool."
> But you couldn't pay me to go there.
Of course we could. Aside from that this mentality always shocks me. There are more civilians in the US than government agents. What were you expecting when you got here? It's madness..
> One man's terrorist...
Is another mans freedom fighter. Sure, fine, if you want a civil war. Perhaps a more civilized approach is called for? Unless you particularly enjoy digging graves for your friends.
DHS flagged my passport on a list for literally fighting against terrorist in a US sanctioned anti-terrorist militia. When I returned they interrogated me as if I was a terrorist.
So if you are against the terrorists, you are also a terrorist.
The Americans who fought against the Francoists in the Spanish civil war faced enormous scrutiny back home for what was later described as “being prematurely anti-fascist.” The state worries about people willing to take up arms to protect their ideals without being told to do so (or what those ideals are).
This is the administration of the same FDR who stayed in power for 4 consecutive terms, which imprisoned nearly 150k ethnic Japanese, most of them US citizens, without any due process, and which executed one of the biggest power grabs by the federal administration. In a way, FDR was much more impudent towards law than Trump, but he was not publicly arrogant or silly, and WWII has been won under his rule, so he is considered a good guy.
FDR and the US were actively at war against Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. These were two of the worst, period, regimes to ever exist and they carried out absolutely abominable war crimes that are still studied in history books today.
Trump and ICE are at war with a middle aged mother and a VA nurse. And they're doing all this in Minneapolis because the gangs in LA scared them off.
Many of the interned Japanese were second or third generation US citizens. It was racism and economic competition, and also pandering to important voter constituences, pretending to have something to do with military circumstances. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
This was done despite multiple reports of the military officers who studied the problem and stated that the Japanese pose no threat, are often US patriots, and need not be isolated.
Imagine Russia interning everyone of Ukrainian descent up to third generation because of the war, and everybody be like "Well, fine, they are doing a reasonable thing, let them go on".
How is an operator supposed to recognize these “MOBILE ASSETS”? For the case of ICE, ICE is reputed to try fairly hard to make it challenging to recognize their mobile assets. But the NOTAM says nothing about ICE per se, and there are lots of things that seem like they would qualify. On multiple occasions, I suspect that I have personally transported “DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY … MOBILE ASSETS”, and any drone flying nearby would have seen this as … a rental car with a couple people in it. All the DOE assets would have been in the trunk or maybe the back seat. Definitely assets and definitely mobile, but I suppose a court would need to determine whether they were MOBILE ASSETS or whether they were sufficiently associated with the DOE.
(Also, had this been in effect and if a drone had been a part of the project, which would not have been unreasonable [0], it would have been really annoying if I was carrying a portable do-not-fly zone and needed to get permission from the agency to take some photos of the equipment I was carrying.)
[0] To be fair, part of this project was in a location where operating a drone would have been inappropriate for reasons that have nothing to do with the FAA or national security.
This is the real danger of religion. When you train people from birth to turn off their brains and submit to authority without question, this is what happens.
Not quite. Religion, when taught properly, can serve as an innoculant against corrupt states, as it ingrains a kernel of understanding that man, and all his works are flawed, falling short of the perfection only attainable by the divine. There is always something higher worth maintaining loyalty toward. Like most things though, practicing that doesn't make you super popular with "leaders of worship" who wield their position in a human institutions as a tool to their own ends.
I agree wholeheartedly. Religion, practiced as designed, is extremely positive in my experience. I think the issue is that religion is and has been abused throughout history. I’m really not sure how to deal with this issue though. It seems the Abrahamic religion are quite vulnerable to this kind of abuse, likely because a core part of the doctrine is submission to authority.
I’ve never seen a Buddhist led genocide for instance, and I think a big part of that is the emphasis on looking inward for answers instead of outward.
The common thread is groups of people = atrocities. Religion and government are two common properties that emerge from groups of people, but there are also countless examples of atrocities that involve neither.
Each time that Obama expanded a domestic policing organization that then went to American cities and executed citizens, the same thing was said about him, yes. All zero times.
That's because this is a pretty mainstream opinion now. I'd say... a quarter to a third of the population holds such beliefs.
If you ever shook your head at theocratic regimes such as Iran, well maybe look a little closer to home. "But... the people in charge of Iran are hypocrites, they do nasty stuff at home behind closed doors."
Again, may I point to Mom: "we have mullas at home".
People believing the president of the United States has been ordained by God, and can therefore do no wrong, should be extremely concerning to EVERYONE, no matter what team your rooting for.
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
Barry Goldwater
He had a few more pertinent quotes on the issue, but he recognized the very problem he was courting. You cannot have a debate with God.
The preachers lost control of the Republican party in 2016. And if me from 10 years ago could hear me from today saying that I wish they were still in control, he would have a stroke, but I do.
Correction: you cannot have a debate with people who have set up their politics as a God.
In the scriptures God is depicted as someone who sometimes is willing to have a debate, and reason with people, of course not to learn anything, but to explain why things are (or must be) the way they are.
In some instances, God is even depicted as willing to listen to man and do things he otherwise would not have done, so long that they don't deviate from his fundamental purpose.
This has been the case for a long time. What's new and weird with this "sports" game is that the side with the umpire in their pocket has suddenly decided the game is bloodsport.
Oh from their point of view it always was. You can't explain the last decades in any other way. It's been brewing over time and as long as the blood spilled was mostly foreign blood on foreign soil it was all fine. Now the masks are dropping and suddenly it is plain to everybody what was plain to outsiders looking in for a long time.
> ALL UNMANNED ACFT ARE PROHIBITED FROM FLYING WITHIN A STAND-OFF DISTANCE OF 3000FT ... LATERALLY AND 1000FT ABOVE ...
> TO: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DOD), DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE), AND DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (DHS) FACILITIES AND MOBILE ASSETS, INCLUDING VESSELS AND GROUND VEHICLE CONVOYS AND THEIR ASSOCIATED ESCORTS, SUCH AS UNITED STATES COAST GUARD (USCG) OPERATED VESSELS
I don’t fully understand why drone operators follow these laws. Or any “no-fly” rules in general. Around an airport, it seems like common sense to not fly. Can’t someone just…buy/build a drone and fly is surreptitiously?
$150 will build you a 7" with a reasonably long flying time, a bit more and you can do some pretty impressive things. You still need a controller but those can be had for cheap as well. The main issue would be hiding it for pickup until after the event.
You’re talking about bargain bin analog FPV drones? Most people can’t operate them and even for an experienced operator it’s far from the best tool for the job of filming armed thugs..I mean ICE..
You’d need a digital system with a gimbal, and the DJI O4 Pro alone will run you $200+. For dual lenses with different zoom levels and feed switching it’s getting pretty expensive very fast.
You don't have to fly in acro mode lol. The common hobbyist drone firmwares have full support for even things like autonomous GPS missions. You also don't need expensive gimbal stabilized cameras; you're not making a cinematic film, so you can just hot glue a 360 camera to the bottom and deal with the slight oscillations.
FPV is a skill you can learn though and for filming armed thugs I actually can't think of a better tool because it allows you to fly the drone out of LOS so you can do it from a relatively safe position while still getting footage that matters.
For extra protection you could even abandon the drone and record the video directly on your headset.
Technically true I guess, but learning to fly a recent DJI drone takes about ten minutes. You're not so much flying it, as telling it what you want and letting it fly itself. And the controller has a built-in tutorial with a simulator.
True, but DJI drones are comparably well behaved (and boring) compared to a homebrew FPV. Even there you have various stabilization modes, including alt-hold, pos-hold and so on. In full acro mode they're a handful, that's for sure, but you don't have to fly like that, just fly in stabilized until you get the hang of that and want to live more dangerously.
What if you're already flying when they enter your vicinity. It's pretty easy to do in a city. Also they may not announce themselves until you're already violating or even after when they charge you
One more line of bullshit they can shamelessly trot out after they summarily execute someone. "The suspect approached the members of the protected class with a gun and a phone. Our brave and heroic gravy seals had a reasonable belief that the phone was being used to control a drone. The subject didn't obey the lawful order to shoot himself with his own gun, so our brave agents were forced to shoot him ten times in the back. We fully stand behind their actions keeping us all safe from the woke"
(who am I kidding, even my fake statement was too coherent)
Do not attribute to fascists/tin pot governments any concern over law/rulemaking with judicious consideration for minimizing blast radius or logistical/legal concerns for the populace. At this point, they are hardcore speed running the delegitinazation of the U.S. state in just about every practical sense.
Woah woah woah, let's not encourage domestic terrorism here! Because they'll bring criminal charges and that's also what they'll call you so you better not get caught.
So be a polite and compliant drone operator and when you find yourself in the middle of an operation because there was not an actual TFR, park the drone on the edge of a building roof where the camera can still operate thus the drone is silent, saving power and compliant. Being parked on the edge of a roof with props powered off is not flying.
@FAA can you tell I am still annoyed by your poorly thought out highly spoofable clear text RemoteID implementation and lack of integration to ADS-B... Also, NOTAM != TFR unless all drone operators are using foreflight to consolidate all surrounding NOTAMS which hint, they are not.
This is literally been the entire purpose of all drone regulations. Hobby aircraft have never been a legitimate public safety issue, but they are an issue for the state's ability to hide. There is and will always be a public interest in recording activity happening in public places, but a majority of drone laws essentially make it impossible to legally record public events from a private drone.
When I was a child I was a libertarian. I was screaming about how these regulations were going to be enforced at gunpoint, how this was just a way for the establishment to make money, etc...
I'm not a libertarian anymore, but I can tell you, I was a genius fortune teller.
My assets performed really well ignoring economic orthodoxy about supposed 2% inflation.
Are you saying the FAA has a permanent and up to date list of ICE operations? Because if so, that's a public list and something that some might be very interested in for knowing when and where ICE is operating.
And if they don't, there is no basis for enforcement, so we're done.
Doesn’t anything under 250g basically slip under the radar (not literally radar). Seems like most drones they care about might end up not being trackable anyway.
Pilot here. This is not unprecedented. The same kind of thing applies to all major sporting events. They have no-fly zones but FAA provides NO official source for getting the info of when such events occur and why. It is left to the pilots to find out all major sporting events and stadiums around and when they have events, under serious penalties. It forces pilots to care about sportsball.
Reading up on this more, it seems to be based on stadium/venue capacity, which means any possible TFRs are at a limited number of areas for very specific series, for which there is data available [1]
The TFR in TFA appears to be much more ambiguous than this. I'm not sure they're really comparable.
Which specific series? Why do i need to know when sportsball happens, any variety of it? Oh, and concerts too. Why do i need to know when taylor swift is in town?
Nope, it is not nearly that simple, and consequences can be dire.
Also relevant to this situation is that the groups this is likely targeting are actively tracking ICE convoys and personnel in group chats (and random civilians who they think are ICE too) so the excuse of “oh woe is me how can I know where not to fly” falls flat. My parents are in Minneapolis and they are saying things haven’t felt this dangerous since the riots in 2020.
My understanding is that DJI drones no longer enforce no-fly zones. Supposedly they still warn you when entering a restricted zone, but hard geofencing functionality is no longer in effect. Anyone know if that's true?
I was unable to ever get it to fly reliably without GPS. It was probably stupid to drop $7K on drone GPUs and all kind of gadgetry (6 battery bay for rapid charging, etc), but it was just really really hard to pilot around in Maryland (Montgomery County). I would constantly have it throw up warnings and alerts, even only hovering a few feet above the ground for small scale testing. I would have to disable the GPS to do small scale testing, and then with GPS enabled, it would straight up not allow me to pilot it. When I moved to Miami, brought it down there, but I managed to find an apartment right smack-dab in the MIA no-fly zone as well. The smaller drone was allowed to fly though, so I eventually got a small Mini 2 IIRC, which was a lot easier to pilot, but I was just so disappointed in not being able to use the larger scaled up version. I wanted to do realtime facial recognition (not at scale, just to show that commercial drones can be turned into research demonstrators) on the onboard GPU (apparently just a NVDA Jetson from 2017 era)
The irony is the M100 is genuinely great hardware - the payload capacity, the SDK access, the flight time with extra batteries. But DJI's geofencing treats the entire DC metro like a no-go zone, which makes sense from their liability perspective but means the thing is basically a $7K shelf ornament unless you want to deal with LAANC authorizations for every single flight.
Gah that sucks. I've looked at the hardware specs and basically ended up drooling over it and realizing that my homebrew stuff will never be able to compete. But the optics alone on that DJI stuff is nothing short of science fiction compared to what you can put together on a hobbyists budget. But for $7K you can build an octocopter with twice the range and twice the payload, which may not be as impressive on paper but can be pretty useful as well.
The larger agricultural drones are also amazingly impressive, those I've seen up close doing real work and they are so reliable it is almost boring.
I wonder what the reason is that yours behaves the way it does, that sounds like a real challenge to find out though with the closed system like that.
Drones that rely on GPS are very iffy as soon as the GPS fails, I've seen more than one inexplicable 'fly-away' happen. I've found a really neat trick to test drones that are not 'known good': just find yourself a long stretch of really light chain and tie it to the drone. As long as it behaves: no problem. But if it tries to take off by itself at some point the length of chain weighs more than the drone can handle and it will stop ascending. That way at least you have some kind of safety measure that does not immediately impact the drone in a material way as long as it is near to you.
Since them I've acquired a 3D printer, so I've increased the surface area of expensive things I can break.
If I can ever figure out how to repurpose some of these electronics maybe for some kind of AI robot (yes, the gimbal + camera optics are so nice, it feels like a sci fi eyeball from 2037!) I will be back in business.
Some people sell exploits to "jailbreaks DJI drone firmware but with current US admin I don't think it is prudent to do too much "off-label" usage of this kind of tech.
But seeing this geofencing post.... I just had too much experience trying to get around these restrictions to actually believe that they'd drop the geofencing, especially after a consumer drone ban.
Thank you for the chain suggestion, that would have been intelligent to do. Matter of fact, my father may have made that suggestion at the time. Alas, that was a very move fast and break things period of my life.
I'm flying very experimental drones (~1 Kg only so not super heavy, but still, you don't want one to land on your head) in an urban environment so I really care a lot about keeping things safe and within my yard. This seems like it was the easiest way to get really hard safety guarantees. That thing is going nowhere further than the length of the tether. Building drones is fun, there is a ton to learn and the constraints are crazy enough that you have to be very creative.
If there is one resource I can point you to that may help to inspire you have a look at this:
Thank you so much for sharing this excellent resource.
I'm watching this youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlD0C5CrWcA) and he apparently built this out to support his Master's research at the University of Maryland, where I went to school for undergrad.
I just had too much experience trying to get around these restrictions to actually believe that they'd drop the geofencing, especially after a consumer drone ban.
DJI has got to be pretty sore about the ban. The geofencing was always voluntary on their part as I understand it, basically an attempt to proactively engage with the US and other aviation authorities in good faith. Then, when Trump blew up the truce by ordering the FCC not to approve future products, they may have felt they had no reason to continue to cooperate.
That's what I was wondering -- whether or not that speculation really does describe the situation accurately. If it does, it sounds like good news for you, since that hardware may now be usable after a firmware update. I only have a 249g first-gen Mini, myself... and being out in the middle of nowhere, I don't know if it ever had those restrictions to begin with.
I wonder if these vessels, convoys, etc. are going to jam drones or use some other anti-drone weapon and this NOTAM allows that by saying "we can intercept or destroy it if it comes too close". That way they don't have to identify how much of a threat each individual drone is.
Loudly broadcasting electronic signals out of something you’re trying to keep hidden seems like a tactical error, but these cats aren’t the best trained, are they?
They aren't trying to keep hidden. They are trying to avoid their murders from being filmed by drones with cameras. Jamming is perfectly compatible with this goal.
Bubble of protection is 3000 feet laterally and 1000 feet vertically. From the article:
“Unlike traditional Temporary Flight Restrictions, the NOTAM does not provide geographic coordinates, activation times, or public notification when the restriction is in effect near a specific location. Instead, the restricted airspace moves with DHS assets, meaning the no-fly zone can appear wherever ICE or other DHS units operate.”
“In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is to have laws that are virtually impossible to not break.
I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional for being overly vague and arbitrary. For example, Montana used to have some maximum speed limits that were just "reasonable and prudent", but they were eventually rejected by courts as being too vague (what's prudent to you may not be prudent to someone else). This is similar, in that the FAA has a no fly zone but they don't actually publish what it is.
Catch-22 and 1984 weren't supposed to be instruction manuals.
> I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional
The rule of law has left the building. The SC is willing to rubber-stamp nearly anything right now.
Waiting and hoping for common sense to prevail is what allows authoritarian regimes to bulldoze through existing laws and norms. Even if the courts were an avenue for redress, they are being overwhelmed by the daily barrage of new illegal and unconstitutional actions. Once the courts get around to addressing these cases, the damage has been done and the precedent has been set.
Anything but an administration being able to manipulate the Fed, it seems. Most legal experts believe that will be a hard strike down on the administration
that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything
very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.
all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.
This is literally backed by data. 21 out of 25 emergency docker cases taken up with the Supreme Court were ruled in the Trump administration’s favor. Only one of the cases against the administration was unanimous.
At the appellate level, Trump appointed judges vote in favor of his policies at a substantially higher rate than any previous president at 92% of cases.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trumps-appeal...
And the emergency docket is exactly where one should look for these very recent very blatantly illegal actions and lawsuits aiming to counter them.
So yes the data is in, and yes it’s bad, and emphatically yes it’s exactly what this thread is saying. In case anyone reading in good faith was wondering.
Is there a reason you’re only choosing the emergency docket in your sample size though?
The emergency docket is a preferred method for blatant partisanship because it lets them immediately prevent lower courts from stopping the administration but doesn’t require them to set a binding precedent or even explain the ruling. If it looks like they might be losing power, suddenly those “emergency” decisions which were subsequently back-burnered can be dropped to prevent a Democrat from using the same powers.
If you think the SCOTUS has been arbitrarily rubber stamping the administration's goals, you haven't been paying attention. I'll fully agree with you it appears to have been fairly partisan, but less than a month again they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states:
>In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-12-30/supreme-cou...
> they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states
That is not what the decision stated - there was even a quote from a justice saying that the administration could easily attain the same result with a different legal mechanism, all but encouraging such a change in behavior.
Edit: the ‘improperly’ portion of your quote is the operative term
Yes, and my point is exactly that a rubber stamping SCOTUS would have literally allowed it even though it was "improper." That's what rubber stamping means.
"Change this sentence, change the date and resubmit" is rubber-stamping - they just require a big-enough fig-leaf and are bold enough to publicly hint at the parameters of the fig-leaf they will accept.
But they also said the president can’t be punished for doing illegal things, so what difference does it make?
They made that ruling while Biden was president. It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
John Roberts and other conservative members of the court do have an ideological commitment to the Unitary Executive Theory of the presidency (foolishly, in my view) but this has the potential to benefit both Democratic and Republican presidents.
That ruling[1] is even worse than rubber stamping. It's saying that no stamp is needed at all.
> It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
The Trump administration absolutely did exist, both in the past and the present (waiting in the wings) in July 2024 when the ruling was issued.
While it's true that all past and future presidents are affected by the ruling, there's exactly one former president and presidential candidate at that time that was likely to face criminal charges for actions taken while in office, in either first or second terms.
It's a bit much to claim that the ruling doesn't have at least the appearance of benefiting Trump exclusively, especially given the timing. The ruling caused many of Trump's trials to be delayed to be effectively concurrent with the 2024 election.
We went 235 years without clarifying that presidents had presumptive immunity; all previous presidents (even Trump) acted under the presumption that prosecution for official acts might be unlikely but was possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
This is all highly commical considering the US has black bagged a foreign president.
That is going to be the court case of the century by the way. Maduro will have lawyers begging to represent him. It will be America on trial and I'm looking forward to the Trump administration absolutely bungling it.
And they will be perfectly happy to walk it back when (or if) a Democrat is elected president in the future. Stare decisis is no longer a thing with this bunch.
That’s not what they ruled.
How so? The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties", which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
And notably, before any further disagreement pops up the other dissenting judges literally said as much. The relevant quote:
"When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today."
Unless ordering assassinations and launching a coup are "core constitutional powers" of the president, then no the ruling does not give him immunity for that.
As a practical matter, if the president is ordering the military to do those things and the military is obeying those orders, we are far beyond the point where concepts like legal immunity matter.
Ordering violence orchestrated by the military is a core constitutional power. It's called being "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces.
The ruling makes it very clear that core constitutional powers have conclusive and preclusive (absolute) immunity.
Other official acts have presumptive immunity.
In all cases, the motive is above question. If Trump has a fight with Melania, he can order the CIA to rendition and disappear her. He doesn't even need to claim that she's a spy. It can never be questioned in court. He can then pardon everyone involved, so even the underlings face no court.
In all cases, the official acts are explicitly not admissible as evidence. Using the example above, the District of Columbia can try to prosecute for murder, but is unable to introduce the fact of the order as evidence. If Trump receives a bribe, the official act that he undertook at the briber's behest is similarly inadmissible.
> Ordering violence orchestrated by the military is a core constitutional power. It's called being "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces.
Incorrect. The commander in chief, same as all military officers, has the authority to issue lawful orders to the chain of command below him. He does not have the authority to issue unlawful orders, and if he does, his subordinates have the legal obligation to disobey them. The president does not have constitutional power to order arbitrary violence.
> If Trump has a fight with Melania, he can order the CIA to rendition and disappear her
No he can't because this is against the law, and it is therefore not a presidential power. The president has no constitutional authority to order agencies to violate the law.
> He can then pardon everyone involved, so even the underlings face no court.
This is, unfortunately, true. But it has been true as long as the US has existed.
> If Trump receives a bribe, the official act that he undertook at the briber's behest is similarly inadmissible.
This is true, but the act of taking the bribe is not an exercise of presidential power so he can be charged with accepting a bribe. This is not new to the recent SC decision.
Ok he can tell his chain of command some lies then. Same difference.
How on earth is that going to make the orders lawful?
On the receiving end, giving cover and benefit of a doubt.
The chain of command may or may not signal (similarly to the Supreme Court) what kind of fig leaf lies are required.
From there it’s a game of telephone until a barrel of a gun.
You’re a student of history, thus I think you understand how “commander in chief of the armed forces” is a constitutional duty without needing further explanation of why.
I think you intended to communicate the Supreme Court would balk at it happening.
Yes.
Much like Kavanaugh balking at ethnicity-based stops after allowing language + skin color based stops. By then, it’s too late.
You are obviously not a student of military law or you would understand that being commander in chief confers only the right to issue lawful orders.
We blew up shipwrecked survivors a few weeks ago, which is a textbook example of a war crime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/us/politics/us-boat-attac...
> Two survivors of the initial attack later appeared to wave at the aircraft after clambering aboard an overturned piece of the hull, before the military killed them in a follow-up strike that also sank the wreckage. It is not clear whether the initial survivors knew that the explosion on their vessel had been caused by a missile attack.
And "textbook" is not an exaggeration.
https://apnews.com/article/boat-strikes-survivors-hegseth-72...
> The Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war describes a scenario similar to the Sept. 2 boat strike when discussing when service members should refuse to comply with unlawful orders. “For example,” the manual says, “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
Ok, but that was not ordered by the president so is completely irrelevant to the discussion of presidential immunity.
President immunity as laid out by SCOTUS clearly covers pardons.
Including "I'll pardon you and everyone down the chain if you do a war crime" promises.
It seems extremely relevant. Your argument suggests the president need only appoint a subordinate who will themselves give the desired illegal order without the president's public command. In the unlikely event the subordinate is called to account, the president can simply pardon them.
This is certainly not a hypothetical "parade of horribles", since Trump has already pardoned military officers convicted of war crimes.[1]
1. https://apnews.com/article/257e4b17a3c7476ea3007c0861fa97e8
War crimes sounds scary as a whole mess of badness, but which one is kind of material. Eg Obama's drone strikes and CIA torture likely count as war crimes, though no court has actually tried him for them, so it's hard to get worked up about Navy Seals (whos job it is to go into war zones and do war-type things) having generically having committed war crimes. Did they rape women and babies, or did they shoot the wrong person in the dark of night who it turns out wasn't actually a threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)
> Gallagher was the subject of a number of reports from fellow SEAL team members, stating that his actions were not in keeping with the rules of war, but these reports were dismissed by the SEAL command structure.
> Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.
Murdered a prisoner, and was shitty enough his fellow SEALs were uncomfortable enough to complain. Pardoned eventually, by Trump.
The decision explicitly says anything you do is de facto legal.
I won't talk down to you like you talked down to me. I will continue to talk up to you, if neutral in this comment. What you said was unnecessary.
> Unless ordering assassinations and launching a coup are "core constitutional powers" of the president, then no the ruling does not give him immunity for that.
Just to be clear: you are disagreeing with a dissenting Supreme Court justice on how much the law protects the president. Are you a lawyer? Do you know more about how much the law binds the president than the literal office that has the final say on the law?
Are you disagreeing with all 6 concurring Supreme Court justices on much the law protects the president? Are you a lawyer? Do you know more about how much the law binds the president than the literal office that has the final say on the law?
See how stupid that argument is?
No, they aren't, because the concurring justices have not said that those acts are not covered. All we have is what the majority wow, which notably did not include any exceptions
If you think Roberts, Alito, and especially Thomas have actually been following the law as it was intended, then I have a beautiful bridge in New York to sell to you.
Make no mistake, I fully believe the Supreme Court is complicit in this manner and has long since abdicated their duties to uphold the law and the constitution. But my point is that when the Supreme Court comes out and says that the President is immune to all actions they take, it seems like a folly to try and pretend that they don't mean what they say, at least as long as Trump is President. The 'law' is what the Supreme Court says it is, and they've decided Trump is the law.
> The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties"
Yes. This was basically agreed upon before that the president has legal immunity for exercising his constitutional powers, but was never explicitly ruled on by the court. If the president does something outside his legal authority, then that isn't his presidential duty, and he can be punished.
> which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
This part is just false
Trump claimed repeatedly and vigorously that whatever the President does is by definition legal. He also repeatedly and vigorously claimed that Obama had broken the law by spying on then-candidate Trump in 2016. I don't know if he himself noticed the contradiction but blustered on anwway or was too dense to notice.
[BTW, Trump wasn't spied on -- Russian assets were spied on and it turned out that some of those communications were with Trump's team. There are ~100 pages of these communications captured in the Mueller report. ]
One time I was racing across the country in a moving van because my wife was injured. The truck was speed-governed to 75 mph, which I was sitting at for most of the trip. I have a picture of the back of a school bus that handily passed me by on highway 90 :-)
The gun free school zone act has been upheld even though you could be within 1000 ft of one with no real indication there is one there. Supposedly you can only be convicted for doing it knowingly, but IIRC knowingly has been interpreted to mean as little as you live near the area so reasonably should have known.
Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.
So there is not necessarily any need for mens rea in the US legal system.
But your examples are markedly different to me. Yes, those examples do put the onus on the individual to ensure there are no schools around or that an individual is of legal age, but those are at least discoverable things - school locations are public info, and I think for any adult it's not that difficult to steer clear of anyone who looks mildly close to underage.
But in this instance, the movements of ICE are specifically hidden by the government - heck, they've even threatened to prosecute people who publish this information!! It is the literal definition of a Catch-22.
School buildings don't randomly and secretly move around all the time.
So while there isn't a line drawn on the ground, it's completely different.
>> Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.
You had me up to the "selling the services" part.
If you are 'engaging' with someone in a criminal enterprise it's probably reasonable to assume they might misrepresent certain facts to make the sale.
Speed limits are biology and physics derived. The eye has a max speed, over which it starts to rewrite the history of what you saw. Everytime you have been "frozzen in fear" the first few milliseconds are just the eye rewriting the logs.
So you take that the saccade speed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) + speed of visual buffer reaction + reasonable time to break and you get a max speed for that.
Same goes when you have two points of attention, like traffic in front of you and merging traffic, the speed gets reduced to compensate.
Weird that when you're in Nevada the eye moves fast enough for you to react when going at 80 mph but in Arizona your eyes can only move fast enough for 75 mph, and in California no ones eyes move fast enough to react over 70 mph.
So the unannounced movements of the secret police in their unmarked vehicles also create a bubble around them where usually-legal activity is illegal?
And reciprocally, where usually illegal activity (beating up people and kidnapping them) is legal.
You mean, shooting them ten times in the back?
Oh yeah, that also.
That's the goal, it just isn't spelled out.
See no crimes. Hear no truth. Speak no facts.
I'm guessing that's entirely the idea. There will be even more cameras on them after yesterday, and they're trying to be proactive in having the authority to arrest all of them. They want the authority to arrest someone who was just out flying a drone and happened to film them as they moved.
IDK, it's probably more a matter where they don't want people to be flying RPGs into their windscreens and this is the first step for them to carry around frequency jammers. The last time I was in Iraq they used them to stop the cellphone detonated IEDs and all the convoys has one or two.
Coincidentally, folks won't be able to live stream their encounters but I'm sure that's totally unrelated...
Yes, because the USA is totally undistinguishable from an active war zone...
I'm not sure what your point is, are you saying ice will draw a line because that tech was used in war?
Trump has ordered troops to be ready deploy, pretending lines exist is silly
> “In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” ― Oscar R. Benavides (Peru)
Even if you won't actually be sentenced you'll still spend a couple of days in jail.
This creates a chilling effect for normal people who don't want to become professional activists.
This is a useful measure to point the law as a weapon against drone operators who may be recording what’s going on by accident or on purpose. Any drone made in the last few years is going to be emitting its ID, which likely has been registered with the pilot’s name and contact information.
They can then after the fact come down on that person without having to get facial recognition, grab cellphone beacons, or other similar steps.
It's trivial to build your own drone without a DroneID.
And you will be labeled a terrorist for doing so, regardless of intent.
Every protester and registered democrat has been labelled a domestic terrorist already in both rhetoric and policy.
I don't mind being labeled a terrorist. Fortunately I'm not in the USA. But you couldn't pay me to go there. One man's terrorist...
> I don't mind being labeled a terrorist.
You should. It's not meant for your vanity and it represents and extreme overreach by the government. It doesn't make you "cool."
> But you couldn't pay me to go there.
Of course we could. Aside from that this mentality always shocks me. There are more civilians in the US than government agents. What were you expecting when you got here? It's madness..
> One man's terrorist...
Is another mans freedom fighter. Sure, fine, if you want a civil war. Perhaps a more civilized approach is called for? Unless you particularly enjoy digging graves for your friends.
> Perhaps a more civilized approach is called for?
It certainly is, but one side doesn't seem to think so.
The "other side" says the same thing.
I think you're both being manipulated by cynical people who have extensive access to the media that you do not.
Seems far more likely, no?
DHS flagged my passport on a list for literally fighting against terrorist in a US sanctioned anti-terrorist militia. When I returned they interrogated me as if I was a terrorist.
So if you are against the terrorists, you are also a terrorist.
The Americans who fought against the Francoists in the Spanish civil war faced enormous scrutiny back home for what was later described as “being prematurely anti-fascist.” The state worries about people willing to take up arms to protect their ideals without being told to do so (or what those ideals are).
This is the administration of the same FDR who stayed in power for 4 consecutive terms, which imprisoned nearly 150k ethnic Japanese, most of them US citizens, without any due process, and which executed one of the biggest power grabs by the federal administration. In a way, FDR was much more impudent towards law than Trump, but he was not publicly arrogant or silly, and WWII has been won under his rule, so he is considered a good guy.
FDR and the US were actively at war against Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. These were two of the worst, period, regimes to ever exist and they carried out absolutely abominable war crimes that are still studied in history books today.
Trump and ICE are at war with a middle aged mother and a VA nurse. And they're doing all this in Minneapolis because the gangs in LA scared them off.
Many of the interned Japanese were second or third generation US citizens. It was racism and economic competition, and also pandering to important voter constituences, pretending to have something to do with military circumstances. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
This was done despite multiple reports of the military officers who studied the problem and stated that the Japanese pose no threat, are often US patriots, and need not be isolated.
Imagine Russia interning everyone of Ukrainian descent up to third generation because of the war, and everybody be like "Well, fine, they are doing a reasonable thing, let them go on".
And...?
Yeah, that’s been the GOP playbook for 20+ years. It’s only recently been used for US citizens.
If you do not want to be labeled a domestic terrorist then the solution is rather simple - do not conspire, coordinate and attack law enforcement.
For some people
How is an operator supposed to recognize these “MOBILE ASSETS”? For the case of ICE, ICE is reputed to try fairly hard to make it challenging to recognize their mobile assets. But the NOTAM says nothing about ICE per se, and there are lots of things that seem like they would qualify. On multiple occasions, I suspect that I have personally transported “DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY … MOBILE ASSETS”, and any drone flying nearby would have seen this as … a rental car with a couple people in it. All the DOE assets would have been in the trunk or maybe the back seat. Definitely assets and definitely mobile, but I suppose a court would need to determine whether they were MOBILE ASSETS or whether they were sufficiently associated with the DOE.
(Also, had this been in effect and if a drone had been a part of the project, which would not have been unreasonable [0], it would have been really annoying if I was carrying a portable do-not-fly zone and needed to get permission from the agency to take some photos of the equipment I was carrying.)
[0] To be fair, part of this project was in a location where operating a drone would have been inappropriate for reasons that have nothing to do with the FAA or national security.
Not shady at all. Can’t have the public see what’s going on.
You don't understand. You must always respect authority. Trump is the highest authority in the land, put there by God.
This is the real danger of religion. When you train people from birth to turn off their brains and submit to authority without question, this is what happens.
This is not an accurate description of religion, at least not as practiced by anyone I have ever known who is religious.
Religiosity is negatively correlated with intelligence, so it sounds directionally accurate.
Not quite. Religion, when taught properly, can serve as an innoculant against corrupt states, as it ingrains a kernel of understanding that man, and all his works are flawed, falling short of the perfection only attainable by the divine. There is always something higher worth maintaining loyalty toward. Like most things though, practicing that doesn't make you super popular with "leaders of worship" who wield their position in a human institutions as a tool to their own ends.
I agree wholeheartedly. Religion, practiced as designed, is extremely positive in my experience. I think the issue is that religion is and has been abused throughout history. I’m really not sure how to deal with this issue though. It seems the Abrahamic religion are quite vulnerable to this kind of abuse, likely because a core part of the doctrine is submission to authority.
I’ve never seen a Buddhist led genocide for instance, and I think a big part of that is the emphasis on looking inward for answers instead of outward.
I don't know if it ever was labeled a genocide, but Sri Lanka has a long history of Buddhist lead attacks against Tamils and other minorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence
Fair enough. Seems like the common thread is religion + government = atrocities
The common thread is groups of people = atrocities. Religion and government are two common properties that emerge from groups of people, but there are also countless examples of atrocities that involve neither.
I’m sure they said the same about Obama…. Right?
Each time that Obama expanded a domestic policing organization that then went to American cities and executed citizens, the same thing was said about him, yes. All zero times.
I no longer know if it's sarcasm
That's because this is a pretty mainstream opinion now. I'd say... a quarter to a third of the population holds such beliefs.
If you ever shook your head at theocratic regimes such as Iran, well maybe look a little closer to home. "But... the people in charge of Iran are hypocrites, they do nasty stuff at home behind closed doors."
Again, may I point to Mom: "we have mullas at home".
It depends on what team you’re rooting for in the sports game that has become politics in the US.
People believing the president of the United States has been ordained by God, and can therefore do no wrong, should be extremely concerning to EVERYONE, no matter what team your rooting for.
The preachers lost control of the Republican party in 2016. And if me from 10 years ago could hear me from today saying that I wish they were still in control, he would have a stroke, but I do.
Correction: you cannot have a debate with people who have set up their politics as a God.
In the scriptures God is depicted as someone who sometimes is willing to have a debate, and reason with people, of course not to learn anything, but to explain why things are (or must be) the way they are.
In some instances, God is even depicted as willing to listen to man and do things he otherwise would not have done, so long that they don't deviate from his fundamental purpose.
This has been the case for a long time. What's new and weird with this "sports" game is that the side with the umpire in their pocket has suddenly decided the game is bloodsport.
Oh from their point of view it always was. You can't explain the last decades in any other way. It's been brewing over time and as long as the blood spilled was mostly foreign blood on foreign soil it was all fine. Now the masks are dropping and suddenly it is plain to everybody what was plain to outsiders looking in for a long time.
If you’re a minority in America then it’s been a blood sport for a while. It’s only recently that the majority demographics are now at risk.
> ALL UNMANNED ACFT ARE PROHIBITED FROM FLYING WITHIN A STAND-OFF DISTANCE OF 3000FT ... LATERALLY AND 1000FT ABOVE ...
> TO: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DOD), DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE), AND DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (DHS) FACILITIES AND MOBILE ASSETS, INCLUDING VESSELS AND GROUND VEHICLE CONVOYS AND THEIR ASSOCIATED ESCORTS, SUCH AS UNITED STATES COAST GUARD (USCG) OPERATED VESSELS
Much more restrictive than just ICE operations.
See also: https://udds-faa.opendata.arcgis.com/search
This is overreach. Congress didn't give them this power.
See Loper-Bright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
It's been overreach since the start of FAA claims on low altitude space.
From what I understand their jurisdiction didn't begin until 500 feet into the air.
Not only is it overreach, it's encouraging impediments on what has been largely considered private property.
What is optic cables are used?
I don’t fully understand why drone operators follow these laws. Or any “no-fly” rules in general. Around an airport, it seems like common sense to not fly. Can’t someone just…buy/build a drone and fly is surreptitiously?
Traditional, permanent no-fly areas tend to be enforced by the drone firmware (via GPS checks), so sometimes there is also a technological obstacle.
This is probably not the case here, but IIRC there are criminal charges attached to violating NOTAMs, so there’s still some kind of deterrence.
What is the best hackable drone brand these days? Where you can remove all this bs remote ID and GPS disobedience?
$150 will build you a 7" with a reasonably long flying time, a bit more and you can do some pretty impressive things. You still need a controller but those can be had for cheap as well. The main issue would be hiding it for pickup until after the event.
You’re talking about bargain bin analog FPV drones? Most people can’t operate them and even for an experienced operator it’s far from the best tool for the job of filming armed thugs..I mean ICE..
You’d need a digital system with a gimbal, and the DJI O4 Pro alone will run you $200+. For dual lenses with different zoom levels and feed switching it’s getting pretty expensive very fast.
You don't have to fly in acro mode lol. The common hobbyist drone firmwares have full support for even things like autonomous GPS missions. You also don't need expensive gimbal stabilized cameras; you're not making a cinematic film, so you can just hot glue a 360 camera to the bottom and deal with the slight oscillations.
Most people can't operate drones, period.
FPV is a skill you can learn though and for filming armed thugs I actually can't think of a better tool because it allows you to fly the drone out of LOS so you can do it from a relatively safe position while still getting footage that matters.
For extra protection you could even abandon the drone and record the video directly on your headset.
> Most people can't operate drones, period.
Technically true I guess, but learning to fly a recent DJI drone takes about ten minutes. You're not so much flying it, as telling it what you want and letting it fly itself. And the controller has a built-in tutorial with a simulator.
True, but DJI drones are comparably well behaved (and boring) compared to a homebrew FPV. Even there you have various stabilization modes, including alt-hold, pos-hold and so on. In full acro mode they're a handful, that's for sure, but you don't have to fly like that, just fly in stabilized until you get the hang of that and want to live more dangerously.
It may be simpler to build from scratch using parts from a hobby store if you want a drone which cannot be tracked back to you or your credit card
What if you're already flying when they enter your vicinity. It's pretty easy to do in a city. Also they may not announce themselves until you're already violating or even after when they charge you
I think that's the point.
One more line of bullshit they can shamelessly trot out after they summarily execute someone. "The suspect approached the members of the protected class with a gun and a phone. Our brave and heroic gravy seals had a reasonable belief that the phone was being used to control a drone. The subject didn't obey the lawful order to shoot himself with his own gun, so our brave agents were forced to shoot him ten times in the back. We fully stand behind their actions keeping us all safe from the woke"
(who am I kidding, even my fake statement was too coherent)
Do not attribute to fascists/tin pot governments any concern over law/rulemaking with judicious consideration for minimizing blast radius or logistical/legal concerns for the populace. At this point, they are hardcore speed running the delegitinazation of the U.S. state in just about every practical sense.
Woah woah woah, let's not encourage domestic terrorism here! Because they'll bring criminal charges and that's also what they'll call you so you better not get caught.
Potential criminal charges are enough to deter most people.
So be a polite and compliant drone operator and when you find yourself in the middle of an operation because there was not an actual TFR, park the drone on the edge of a building roof where the camera can still operate thus the drone is silent, saving power and compliant. Being parked on the edge of a roof with props powered off is not flying.
@FAA can you tell I am still annoyed by your poorly thought out highly spoofable clear text RemoteID implementation and lack of integration to ADS-B... Also, NOTAM != TFR unless all drone operators are using foreflight to consolidate all surrounding NOTAMS which hint, they are not.
This is literally been the entire purpose of all drone regulations. Hobby aircraft have never been a legitimate public safety issue, but they are an issue for the state's ability to hide. There is and will always be a public interest in recording activity happening in public places, but a majority of drone laws essentially make it impossible to legally record public events from a private drone.
When I was a child I was a libertarian. I was screaming about how these regulations were going to be enforced at gunpoint, how this was just a way for the establishment to make money, etc...
I'm not a libertarian anymore, but I can tell you, I was a genius fortune teller.
My assets performed really well ignoring economic orthodoxy about supposed 2% inflation.
Impossible to comply with other than to stop using drones and filming, which is the goal of this. Gotta prevent more recordings of executions.
Remember that words have no meaning
You can still fly drones in and around ICE agents, bases, etc. and literally their words cannot stop the drone.
So, is the FAA going to provide something like IceBlock so that it's possible to obey the new regulations?
Are you saying the FAA has a permanent and up to date list of ICE operations? Because if so, that's a public list and something that some might be very interested in for knowing when and where ICE is operating.
And if they don't, there is no basis for enforcement, so we're done.
It's just an extra chilling effect. Or yet another reason to shoot you and your terrist drone.
Doesn’t anything under 250g basically slip under the radar (not literally radar). Seems like most drones they care about might end up not being trackable anyway.
> But how will i know where such zones are ?!
Pilot here. This is not unprecedented. The same kind of thing applies to all major sporting events. They have no-fly zones but FAA provides NO official source for getting the info of when such events occur and why. It is left to the pilots to find out all major sporting events and stadiums around and when they have events, under serious penalties. It forces pilots to care about sportsball.
Aren't NOTAMs published for those with specific information about the TFR, including location and time window?
NO. They just say “any event”
What about SEAMS, mentioned here? https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/where_can_i_fly/airs...
iirc, it is not considered official data, so if it makes a mistake and you violate a TFR, YOU are on the hook.
Reading up on this more, it seems to be based on stadium/venue capacity, which means any possible TFRs are at a limited number of areas for very specific series, for which there is data available [1]
The TFR in TFA appears to be much more ambiguous than this. I'm not sure they're really comparable.
https://adds-faa.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/faa::stadiums/...
Ha!
Which specific series? Why do i need to know when sportsball happens, any variety of it? Oh, and concerts too. Why do i need to know when taylor swift is in town?
Nope, it is not nearly that simple, and consequences can be dire.
Also relevant to this situation is that the groups this is likely targeting are actively tracking ICE convoys and personnel in group chats (and random civilians who they think are ICE too) so the excuse of “oh woe is me how can I know where not to fly” falls flat. My parents are in Minneapolis and they are saying things haven’t felt this dangerous since the riots in 2020.
My understanding is that DJI drones no longer enforce no-fly zones. Supposedly they still warn you when entering a restricted zone, but hard geofencing functionality is no longer in effect. Anyone know if that's true?
There’s a checkbox in the app that implies that. I haven’t had a reason or way to test it yet.
I can confirm altitude restrictions can be turned off.
I highly doubt this
Edit: owner of matrice m100 and a few other DJI drones
Matrice is a nice bit of kit. Building that kind of functionality from scratch with the same weight and range is very difficult.
I was unable to ever get it to fly reliably without GPS. It was probably stupid to drop $7K on drone GPUs and all kind of gadgetry (6 battery bay for rapid charging, etc), but it was just really really hard to pilot around in Maryland (Montgomery County). I would constantly have it throw up warnings and alerts, even only hovering a few feet above the ground for small scale testing. I would have to disable the GPS to do small scale testing, and then with GPS enabled, it would straight up not allow me to pilot it. When I moved to Miami, brought it down there, but I managed to find an apartment right smack-dab in the MIA no-fly zone as well. The smaller drone was allowed to fly though, so I eventually got a small Mini 2 IIRC, which was a lot easier to pilot, but I was just so disappointed in not being able to use the larger scaled up version. I wanted to do realtime facial recognition (not at scale, just to show that commercial drones can be turned into research demonstrators) on the onboard GPU (apparently just a NVDA Jetson from 2017 era)
The irony is the M100 is genuinely great hardware - the payload capacity, the SDK access, the flight time with extra batteries. But DJI's geofencing treats the entire DC metro like a no-go zone, which makes sense from their liability perspective but means the thing is basically a $7K shelf ornament unless you want to deal with LAANC authorizations for every single flight.
Gah that sucks. I've looked at the hardware specs and basically ended up drooling over it and realizing that my homebrew stuff will never be able to compete. But the optics alone on that DJI stuff is nothing short of science fiction compared to what you can put together on a hobbyists budget. But for $7K you can build an octocopter with twice the range and twice the payload, which may not be as impressive on paper but can be pretty useful as well.
The larger agricultural drones are also amazingly impressive, those I've seen up close doing real work and they are so reliable it is almost boring.
I wonder what the reason is that yours behaves the way it does, that sounds like a real challenge to find out though with the closed system like that.
Drones that rely on GPS are very iffy as soon as the GPS fails, I've seen more than one inexplicable 'fly-away' happen. I've found a really neat trick to test drones that are not 'known good': just find yourself a long stretch of really light chain and tie it to the drone. As long as it behaves: no problem. But if it tries to take off by itself at some point the length of chain weighs more than the drone can handle and it will stop ascending. That way at least you have some kind of safety measure that does not immediately impact the drone in a material way as long as it is near to you.
Since them I've acquired a 3D printer, so I've increased the surface area of expensive things I can break.
If I can ever figure out how to repurpose some of these electronics maybe for some kind of AI robot (yes, the gimbal + camera optics are so nice, it feels like a sci fi eyeball from 2037!) I will be back in business.
Some people sell exploits to "jailbreaks DJI drone firmware but with current US admin I don't think it is prudent to do too much "off-label" usage of this kind of tech.
But seeing this geofencing post.... I just had too much experience trying to get around these restrictions to actually believe that they'd drop the geofencing, especially after a consumer drone ban.
Thank you for the chain suggestion, that would have been intelligent to do. Matter of fact, my father may have made that suggestion at the time. Alas, that was a very move fast and break things period of my life.
I'm flying very experimental drones (~1 Kg only so not super heavy, but still, you don't want one to land on your head) in an urban environment so I really care a lot about keeping things safe and within my yard. This seems like it was the easiest way to get really hard safety guarantees. That thing is going nowhere further than the length of the tether. Building drones is fun, there is a ton to learn and the constraints are crazy enough that you have to be very creative.
If there is one resource I can point you to that may help to inspire you have a look at this:
https://www.drehmflight.com/
Top engineering skills, very likable character and an amazing source of hard tech knowledge.
Thank you so much for sharing this excellent resource.
I'm watching this youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlD0C5CrWcA) and he apparently built this out to support his Master's research at the University of Maryland, where I went to school for undergrad.
The long arm of the DMV no-fly zone is no joke!
I just had too much experience trying to get around these restrictions to actually believe that they'd drop the geofencing, especially after a consumer drone ban.
DJI has got to be pretty sore about the ban. The geofencing was always voluntary on their part as I understand it, basically an attempt to proactively engage with the US and other aviation authorities in good faith. Then, when Trump blew up the truce by ordering the FCC not to approve future products, they may have felt they had no reason to continue to cooperate.
That's what I was wondering -- whether or not that speculation really does describe the situation accurately. If it does, it sounds like good news for you, since that hardware may now be usable after a firmware update. I only have a 249g first-gen Mini, myself... and being out in the middle of nowhere, I don't know if it ever had those restrictions to begin with.
I wonder if these vessels, convoys, etc. are going to jam drones or use some other anti-drone weapon and this NOTAM allows that by saying "we can intercept or destroy it if it comes too close". That way they don't have to identify how much of a threat each individual drone is.
Loudly broadcasting electronic signals out of something you’re trying to keep hidden seems like a tactical error, but these cats aren’t the best trained, are they?
They aren't trying to keep hidden. They are trying to avoid their murders from being filmed by drones with cameras. Jamming is perfectly compatible with this goal.
That's when the fiber optic lines will become necessary