Texas Declares War on Drones

> Do you want fotage of your 3 year old playing in an inflated pool in your back yard to end up on pedo.net because you didn't put a cammo net over your back yard?

Where does one acquire such an extreme level of paranoia? I mean, seriously...

  There was a clog in the sewer line near a cleanout valve.

This sounds like the cleanout is on the sewer customer's property.

  The City has full access to our property at all times to 
  test the sewer line. At any time, officials could have 
  entered our property to find the source of the overflow.

Not in Texas, they don't. The city water/sewer department or sewage treatment company (or district) does not have right of entry into a property unless invited by the subscriber. The subscriber has the duty to ensure that the equipment on his or her property is functioning as designed. That is why laws requiring water sprinkler backflow valves are enforced at the junction between the city's water pipe and the customer's water pipe. The city or supply company shut off the valve on their side of the pipe. Property demarcation is a huge thing in Texas.

  The city of Dallas apparently knew 
  there was a problem on December 9th, but allowed it to 
  continue and did not notify us until 41 days later when 
  government agencies served search warrants.

This I can believe (I mean, lolcityofdallas amirite?) but it does not absolve the property owner of liability for failure to maintain the sanitary sewer connection on his property.

  The city maintains a box on our sewer line that has for 
  years monitored the amount of waste water going through 
  the line and the substances contained in the waste 
  water.  The city monitors this locked box on its own 
  schedule.

And when your sewer bill was half of what it should be, this didn't raise any eyebrows? If there's one thing Dallas Water Utilities does shockingly well, it's collect money from ratepayers.

I think that sending in the mod squad and filing charges was overkill. The Trinity has been used and abused for decades and people are just now trying to clean it up, so it doesn't shock me that TCEQ and Dallas dropped the hammer on this fellow.

Follow politics close enough, each step the police gets better technology and so what used to be ok, like the police beeing able to follow a suspect ends up meaning that they can slap a cheap GPS tracker on any car, all without a warrent.

Of course it is admissible evidence when the police see you sell heroin on the street, it is a little different when that gets changed intro a drone that can watch entire neighborhoods from the air.

And when the police gets those rights, so will other people.

As both a libertarian and tech junkie, I have serious concerns about the use of drone surveillance and am excited to see the technology develop.

The best I can figure, what's needed is parity in drone use. That is, whatever is good for the government should automatically be good for the citizens to do. If the government wants to use hi-res cameras to surveil a city all day long, then anybody else should be able to do so too. If the government wants to arm drones, then I should be able to arm my own drones.

I don't think that's an answer, but I think it will work for a decade or two -- hopefully long enough for us to develop workable policies.

Sadly it's not a war on drone use by any level of government, only individuals.

I suspect government drones will get federal protection if people try to use them as skeet targets when they fly over their property.

Countdown to when the public starts to say "oh well, what can you do, we need to be safe" (ala TSA).