It appears that the “Drone people” have decided that they need an extreme makeover to change the image of drones from authoritarian killing machines to something more like a really really smart toaster. Company officials are about to launch a publicity campaign to change the public perceptions of drones after conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said recently that the first person to shoot down a surveillance drone on U.S. soil will be a “folk hero.” It is not clear when this ” How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Drone” will start.
Michael Toscano, President of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), says that the industry will soon start the publicity campaign. It is not clear what group of Mad Men ad executives will tackle the problem. However, they will seek to change the view of the drones as threatening privacy or safety.
The industry already has a Gretchen West, fetching “Domestic Drone Advocate” who appears on Fox.
The article below discusses the recently uncovered Air Force document laying out how the government can circumvent laws to use drones to monitor the activities of Americans.
Some standard publicity moves can be expected like photo ops of drones visiting wounded veterans in hospitals and commercials showing them at home with their little drones. However, they may want to ramp it up a bit. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Change the name of drones from menacing monikers like “the predator” to “the sky buddy.”
2. Use drones to locate missing kids, cats, and car keys on local news.
3. 
Show a drone next to a Ted Nugent clip and ask “who would you prefer to hover outside of your house at night?”
4. Have a drone marry Kim Kardashian and then go on an interview tour to explain why it just couldn’t stay married more than a week with someone who is so self-engrossed and materialistic.
5. Release talking points to Fox anchors showing more people are killed each year by civil libertarians driving than drones.
6. Have Rush Limbaugh attack drones as “sluts” and “prostitutes” who want the taxpayer to subsidize their lifestyle.
7. Distribute bumper stickers at Tea Party conventions comparing the “American-made drones” to a “foreign-born President” and proclaiming “all drones are straight.”
8. Play on the rising angst of permanently single and divorced Americans with a campaign promising “The BFF Force: Drones will never leave you.”
9. 
Reveal that drones are all Cubs fans (who have not been a threat to anyone in decades).
10. More drones mean fewer black helicopters.
Any other suggestions for the good people at AUVSI?
Source: Salon
There were rumors in the media that Paris was envious of Kim but it can’t be said
with any certainty. After you get here, just follow all of the instructions and within
a few minutes everything should be back up to date. But still
we believe in such unrealistic fictional fantasy
stories that movies have.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/25/un-inquiry-us-drone-strikes
UN to investigate civilian deaths from US drone strikes
Special rapporteur on counter-terror operations condemns Barack Obama’s failure to establish effective monitoring process
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 October 2012 13.07 EDT
The United Nations is to set up a dedicated investigations unit in Geneva to examine the legality of drone attacks in cases where civilians are killed in so-called ‘targeted’ counter-terrorism operations.
The announcement was made by Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard law school in which he condemned secret rendition and waterboarding as crimes under international law.
His forthright comments, directed at both US presidential candidates, will be seen as an explicit challenge to the prevailing US ideology of the global war on terror.
Earlier this summer, Emmerson, who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN, called for effective investigations into drone attacks. Some US drone strikes in Pakistan – where those helping victims of earlier attacks or attending funerals were killed – may amount to war crimes, Emmerson warned.
In his Harvard speech, he revealed: “If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms … then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act.
“Together with my colleague Christof Heyns, [the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings], I will be launching an investigation unit within the special procedures of the [UN] Human Rights Council to inquire into individual drone attacks.”
The unit will also look at “other forms of targeted killing conducted in counter-terrorism operations, in which it is alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted, and to seek explanations from the states using this technology and the states on whose territory it is used. [It] will begin its work early next year and will be based in Geneva.”
Security officials who took part in waterboarding interrogations or secret rendition removals should be made accountable for their actions and justice, Emmerson added.
“The time has come,” he said, “for the international community to agree minimum standard principles for investigating such allegations and holding those responsible to account.
“Let us be clear on this: secret detention is unlawful as a matter of international law. Waterboarding is always torture. Torture is an international crime of universal jurisdiction. The torturer, like the pirate before him, is regarded in international law as the enemy of all mankind. There is therefore a duty on states to investigate and to prosecute acts of torture.”
The US stance of conducting counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida or other groups anywhere in the world because it is deemed to be an international conflict was indefensible, he maintained.
“The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” Emmerson said. “It has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.
“The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US. The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia …
“[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.”
Emmerson singled out both President Obama and the Republican challenger Mitt Romney for criticism. “It is perhaps surprising that the position of the two candidates on this issue has not even featured during their presidential elections campaigns, and got no mention at all in Monday night’s foreign policy debate.
“We now know that the two candidates are in agreement on the use of drones. But the issue of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is an one which, according to the record, continues to divide them.
“I should make it absolutely clear that my mandate does not see to eye to eye with the Obama administration on a range of issues – not least the lack of transparency over the drone programme. But on this issue the president has been clear since he took office that water-boarding is torture that it is contrary to American values and that it would stop.
“… But Governor Romney has said that he does not believe that waterboarding is torture. He has said that he would allow enhanced interrogation techniques that go beyond those now permitted by the army field manual, and his security advisers have recommended that he rescind the existing restrictions.”
The Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, he pointed out, used the technique. “Anyone who is in doubt about whether waterboarding is torture should visit Tuol Sleng, the infamous S-21 detention facility operated by the Khymer Rouge in Phnom Penh.
“Over a period of four years 14,000 people were systematically tortured and killed there. It is now a genocide museum. And right there, in the middle of the central torturing room, is the apparatus used by Pol Pot’s security officials for waterboarding.”
I was just getting ready to post the above when saw i wwas beaten to it ((*_*))
I am confused by the last paragraph, standing alone one could read ( into it) condemnation but the preceding paragrahg sure makes him in favor of it (maybe given his flip flopping he wanted this to be read in both ways(?) )
haha those are good, Darren
here’s lookin at you, kids
who’s dat
UFO
i do wonder what’s going to happen the first time one of these things collide with a news chopper or a light aircraft. (coughcoverupcough).
or if a skydiver nails one
How about some Nose Art for the Drones as we saw on WWII Bombers
School Nurse
Bureaucrat
DMV Doris
Enola Survey
Memphis Tell
Sentimental Surveillance
Peeping Tom Tom
Buckaroo Backyard
Watchin’ Wabbit
Big Sister
She’s A Looker!
Bedroom Eyes
Warrantless Wendy
Habeus Watchus
Jus One Mo Peek
Holder’s Hounds
Jittery Janet
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/11/us-navys-ufo-like-stealth-drone-reaches-new-milestone/?intcmp=sem_outloud
Freaky deaky. Who woulda thought that the horribly corney movie Stealth would turn out to be eerily prophetic?
Bigfatmike,
I don’t think it’s the U of Chi. I think it comes after when the corporations and their big bucks jump in.
@bettykath
I think you are exactly right. Whatever our differences, we are all in it together with it comes to growing limitations on our constitutional rights.
It seems that any practice is now permissible, no matter how abusive, so long as a politician first claims that it is necessary for our safety.
It really makes me wonder what they teach in that class on constitutional law at University of Chicago?
bigfatmike,
“I would tell you what you should not be doing but that information is classified – unless you are making a film explaining the good work being done by the administration to keep Americans safe.
Hope that eases your mind.”
I think it’s becoming more obvious that any attempt by me or you to exercise our constitutional rights is not what we’re supposed to be doing. No, it doesn’t ease my mind 🙁
Notice how I slipped you in? I’m not alone. : )
Thursday, May 24, 2012 09:37 AM EDT
Warrantless spying fight
Obama officials demand full, reform-free renewal of the once-controversial power to eavesdrop without warrants
By Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/warrantless_spying_fight/singleton/
Excerpt:
“Fifth, the Obama administration has perfectly adopted the standard tactic used by Bush officials to coerce approval of any surveillance power they want and to smear anyone questioning those powers. Namely, they insist that the Terrorists will get us all if they do not get their way, and that anyone opposing their demands will have the blood of Americans on their hands. Recall Harry Reid’s attacks on those urging reforms to the Patriot Act last year (“‘When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we will be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot against our country undetected,’ Reid said, referring to the law’s expiration this week. ‘The senator from Kentucky is threatening to take away the best tools we have for stopping them’”). Similarly, Holder and Clapper warn that rapid, reform-free extension of their eavesdropping powers is necessary “to avoid any interruption in our use of these authorities to protect the American people”: because, apparently, just like Bush officials insisted, it’s impossible to Keep America Safe if you first have to obtain warrants before eavesdropping on them.
The continuously expanding Surveillance State in the United States is easily one of the most consequential and under-discussed political developments. And few are doing more to ensure it continues than top-level Obama national security officials.”