So says Peter Popham for the UK Independent, here:
The use of drones for the surveillance purposes sketched by Gitlin takes us back to their original function. The critical weakness of the Nazi doodlebug was the lack of control: its only use was as a mechanical kamikaze. Once you had control of the thing, everything changed. George Orwell was the first to describe the possibilities, in his novel 1984. "In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and dashed away again with a curving flight," he wrote in the novel's first chapter. "It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows...". ...
It is the snooping function foreseen by Orwell that is the most significant next step for drones in our societies: with our cities and public buildings already saturated with surveillance cameras, we may fondly suppose that the state's monitoring of our daily lives has gone as far as it can go. But we ain't seen nothing yet. ...
Orwell's black vision of total surveillance – "It was even conceivable," he wrote in 1984, "that [the Thought Police] watched everybody all the time" – is finally achieving its technological apotheosis. In a few weeks, the US Army is expected to deploy in Afghanistan its latest helicopter-style drone, the A160 Hummingbird, equipped with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras. Able to hover, unlike current drones, it will have "unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground", the Army says. Able to track people and vehicles from above 20,000ft, and with a 65sq-mile field of view, it will have 65 steerable "windows" able to follow separate targets. More modest surveillance drones may be used to enhance police monitoring of London's Olympics.
