Are you saying the US uses drones on their own territory?
If yes, what for? Spying their own people comes to my mind, but maybe I read to much spy stories lately and there are legitimate reasons.
I'm sorry, I don't believe that. I mean, all this Internet and telecommunication surveillance is one thing - and a bad thing for sure, but spying drones is in another ballpark.
I'll just leave this here from Orwell's 1984:
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs,
hovered for an instant like a bluebottle,
and darted away again with a curving flight.
It was the police patrol, snooping in people's windows.
Border Patrol has 10 Predators in operation along the U.S. border. They're supposed to only be used within 30 miles of the border, but they loan them out to other agencies for more internal purposes all the time, including detecting fishing violations.
> According to the documents, CBP already appears to be flying drones well within the Southern and Northern US borders, and for a wide variety of non-border patrol reasons. What’s more — the agency is planning to increase its Predator drone fleet to 24 and its drone surveillance to 24 hours per day / 7 days per week by 2016.
There appear to be no privacy controls for citizens currently, but they may add them… eventually.
The US does use drones over its own territory, but whether it's for "legitimate reasons" is still a controversial matter. One planned use for them, if not already, is to patrol the US-Mexican border.
The FBI has very recently admitted to using them for domestic surveillance, but I don't think specifics were mentioned.
