EFF Warns: Armed Police Drones Are No Longer Hypothetical, Legislators Have 'Little Time Left'

EFF Warns: Armed Police Drones Are No Longer Hypothetical, Legislators Have 'Little Time Left'

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued a stark warning on June 26: armed police drones are no longer a hypothetical scenario, and U.S. federal law contains no provisions governing when law enforcement agencies may use force through a drone. In effect, those decisions are being left to the hardware vendors themselves. The digital rights organization — which has long opposed the arming of police robots and drones — cited two developments from June as evidence that the United States may be drifting toward normalized drone militarization. One of them was Skydio CEO Adam Bry walking back the company's no-weapons pledge on a national podcast — a shift DroneXL reported in detail eight days before the EFF published its analysis.

The EFF's core demand is clear and specific: cities should not procure armed drones or robots, and existing multi-purpose machines already in the hands of law enforcement agencies should be explicitly prohibited by policy from inflicting any physical harm — whether lethal force or non-lethal options such as pepper spray, kinetic impact, rubber bullets, or tasers. Relying on vendors' goodwill is no longer sufficient, the EFF argues, because the vendors themselves have begun signaling that goodwill has its limits.

Skydio CEO Called the No-Weapons 'Red Line' 'Dangerously Misleading' on Podcast

The first development flagged by the EFF is the story DroneXL reported on June 18. On The Verge's Decoder podcast, which aired June 15, Skydio CEO Adam Bry deliberately distanced himself from a written commitment still publicly posted on the company's website — a pledge stating that Skydio would not weaponize its drones. Bry said the previous language had created a mistaken impression that Skydio would prevent military customers from mounting weapons on its aircraft, a position the company no longer holds.

The EFF's reading of that statement aligns with DroneXL's: it is a signal that Skydio will not restrict how customers use its hardware. The EFF's language is blunt — whether police arm drones domestically is now more a function of corporate ethics than of any law passed by elected officials. Bry went further than quietly retreating from old policy; he called the impulse to impose such self-restrictions "dangerously misleading," arguing that explicit refusal clauses create adverse selection: responsible buyers comply with terms of service while adversaries and terrorists do not. It is a logically coherent argument — but it also clears every constraint from a defense contractor's product roadmap, delivered by that contractor's own CEO.

This is not abstract. As DroneXL reported in June 2025, soldiers from the U.S. Army's 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment used a 3D-printed munitions-drop device to drop live M67 fragmentation grenades from a Skydio X10D at Grafenwöhr Training Area in Germany. Bry confirmed on Decoder that the Army had indeed conducted those grenade-drop experiments, and that internal voices calling for a halt did not prevail. What Skydio's official statements said the company would not do has already happened on a Skydio airframe.

A Company Will Deploy Suppression Drones in Georgia and Florida Schools This Fall

The second development cited by the EFF is Campus Guardian Angel, a campus-safety startup that will launch pilot programs at high schools in Georgia and Florida this fall. Founded by Justin Marston and Bill King and headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company has built what it calls an Active Shooter Suppression System: small drones staged on charging pads distributed throughout school buildings, operated remotely from the company's headquarters, designed to reach an attacker's location in approximately 15 seconds and deploy non-lethal effects to buy time before police arrive.

Those "non-lethal effects" are far from gentle. The drones can emit deafening alarms, strobe disorienting lights, spray pepper gel, and ram attackers with kinetic force. Georgia has allocated $550,000 for five high schools; Florida has allocated $557,000 across the Broward, Leon, and Volusia school districts, with Deltona High School going live first. The Georgia pilot will run through the end of the 2026–2027 school year. Marston has publicly stated the concept was inspired by watching small drones engage soldiers on the battlefields of Ukraine — with the distinction that his drones are designed to incapacitate rather than kill.

DroneXL has tracked this program closely, including Georgia's $550,000 commitment and early Texas demonstrations, with a consistent assessment: the human-in-the-loop design is genuinely worth acknowledging, but the accompanying certainty-laden marketing overstates the case. The impressive figures come from demonstration settings, where everything works. The EFF raises the same operational concerns from a civil-liberties angle, noting that public demonstrations have largely shown drones ramming stationary mannequins in controlled environments, and asks: what happens when a shooter fires at a moving drone while a crowd is fleeing in the background? The EFF also connects this program to Axon — the maker of tasers and body cameras — which paused a taser-armed drone initiative in 2022 after its ethics board resigned en masse over the project.

Federal Law Governs Shooting at Drones — Not Drones Shooting at People

The regulatory asymmetry the EFF identifies is real and severe. Federal law is well-established in one direction: shooting at a drone is a felony. As DroneXL reported this month, a man who shot a Lee County Sheriff's Office drone with a BB gun is facing charges under 18 U.S.C. § 32, which classifies drones as aircraft with penalties of up to 20 years in prison. That statute dates to 1956 and has been applied to drone cases for years.

No equivalent legal framework exists in the other direction. No federal statute defines the circumstances under which a law enforcement drone may use force against a person, what constitutes proportionate force, or who bears liability if non-lethal effects injure a bystander. San Francisco became the first city to ban police from using robots to deliver lethal force in 2022, but the EFF argues that a single-city policy covering robots but not drones is wholly inadequate. Workable regulation must cover both categories and explicitly prohibit all forms of physical harm, the EFF says.

This asymmetry is the crux of the problem: a person on the ground who shoots at a police drone may face a federal 20-year sentence, while the drone that may one day use force against that person operates in a legal vacuum.

The DJI Ban Cleared the Field for Domestic Vendors

One piece of context the EFF largely sets aside is how thoroughly the procurement market has been cleared. The Federal Communications Commission's December 22, 2025 ruling placed DJI on its Covered List, blocking new equipment authorizations; DJI has filed a petition for review with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Case No. 26-1029), and the ban is estimated to cost the company approximately $1.56 billion in U.S. market revenue this year. On Decoder, host Nilay Patel put the dynamic directly to Bry: the government effectively handed Skydio a gift by removing the affordable competition serving first responders, allowing Skydio to sell premium solutions to agencies with no alternatives. Bry did not push back on the characterization.

The implications for the EFF's argument were not fully developed in the EFF's article. The same policy forces invoking domestic security and supply-chain integrity are also consolidating the police-drone market among a handful of U.S. vendors with close ties to the defense industry — at least one of which has just announced it will no longer draw lines around weapons. Bry acknowledged on the podcast that China can still manufacture better drones at equivalent price points, and that even his own products contain Chinese components that become untraceable beyond the first tier of the supply chain. The market is consolidating around companies whose ethical commitments — in their CEO's own words — are negotiable.

DroneXL's View

I disagree with the EFF in many places. The EFF tends to treat police drones as near-presumptive suspects, and I do not. I have spent years documenting drones pulling drowning victims from rivers, locating missing children in the dark, and clearing buildings so officers do not have to walk blind into barricaded rooms. Drone-as-first-responder programs represent one of the genuinely good uses of this technology, and that conviction is not in conflict with taking the EFF's warning seriously — it is precisely the reason to take it seriously.

There is a line worth holding. Surveillance and weaponization are two different battles, and the latter can still be won while the former never really was. No voters asked for U.S. police drones to carry pepper spray and kinetic impactors. No department is begging for them. The only force pushing in that direction is a vendor that decided drawing a red line was bad for business and packaged the reversal in adverse-selection philosophy. The grenade-dropping rig has already flown on a Skydio airframe in Germany. Campus Guardian Angel is about to put ramming-and-pepper-spray drones into high schools where teenagers attend class. From "non-lethal effects in a school" to "non-lethal effects at a protest" is one procurement decision, not a technical barrier.

The asymmetry should disturb every operator in this industry. If you shoot a police drone with a BB gun, the federal government can imprison you for twenty years — rightly so, because that drone is an aircraft and the people relying on it are doing real work. But no law anywhere tells a police drone what it cannot do to a person on the ground. We have built an entire legal architecture protecting the machine while leaving the people it may one day act against entirely unprotected.

The EFF wants legislators to close this gap before armed police drones become the norm. On this specific point, the civil-liberties organization and this pro-drone publication are in complete agreement — and the drone industry itself should want this line drawn. One department arming a drone that injures a bystander will do more damage to public trust in this technology than all the privacy complaints of the past decade combined. Do not be that company, or that city, that learns this lesson the hard way.

Watch the Florida and Georgia 2026–2027 school-year pilots closely, and watch whether any state legislature introduces a bill that actually defines the boundaries of drone use of force. The Campus Guardian Angel contracts have end dates; whether they are renewed, expanded, or quietly used to study the effects of non-lethal systems against moving targets will be the next real test — and a story DroneXL will continue to follow.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation.

---

原文來源： 查看原文