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Seatlle Police Drones Overhead Now

Seattle police are deploying the Draganflyer X6 Helicopter for domestic surveillance.


(Seattle drone surveillance video)

The kite-sized micro chopper weighs three pounds and can stay aloft for about 20 minutes. As a Seattle PD officer explains in the video, it’s not allowed to fly above 400 feet and has to be operated from a SPD vehicle

Science fiction writers have been working on this idea for generations. In his 1966 novel This Moment of the Storm, Roger Zelazny writes about surveillance eyes:

I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall... My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.

I knew then that we were in for something.

I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen's at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.
(Read more about Zelazny's Eye surveillance devices)

Other writers to deal with this area include Philip K. Dick and Jack Vance; read excerpts highlighting the robot tracking device IDick) and the servo-optical stick-tight (Vance).

Via Defense Tech; thanks to Winchell Chung (aka @nyrath) of Project Rho for submitting this story and reference.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/9/2012)

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