Texas DPS Drone Missions over Protests Focused on Public Safety, Not Surveillance — DRONELIFE Exclusive

Texas DPS launches drone flights in response to No Kings protest

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

The Texas Department of Public Safety flew 16 drone missions in the state on Oct. 18 in relation to the No Kings protests, keeping watch over such iconic Lone Star State sites as the Capitol Complex in Austin, downtown Dallas and the Alamo.

The flights were conducted to ensure public safety and provide tactical overwatch of some of the massive demonstrations that took place across Texas and the rest of the country, according to data released to DroneLife, under a Texas Public Information Act request.

According to the DPS, the drones were not used to collect surveillance data on individuals participating in the protests, as some civil liberties groups had feared might be the case.

“The use of UAS was for providing situational awareness of the events, and not to obtain any identifying information of any participants. Any images obtained as part of these events will be retained for one year. No images captured as part of these events by UAS will be utilized to identify or conduct further investigations on individuals,” the agency said in a statement accompanying the release of the data.

A spreadsheet outlining all of the No Kings-related drone deployments showed that the DPS mostly flew drones made by China-based DJI, including 13 flights deploying Mavic 3Ts and two flying Mavic 4T aircraft. The agency also conducted one flight with an American-made Skydio X10.

 The DPS listed “Providing Security at a Large Public Event” as the primary reason for most of the flights, with the purpose of one flight being listed as being to provide a quick response to a public safety event.

Seven of the deployments were focused on the protest being conducted in the state capital of Austin, including keeping watch on the State Capitol grounds and Auditorium Shores, a large park that served as a gathering place for protestors. One flight took place at Tarleton State University in Erath County and two in Dallas.

One of the Dallas flights was conducted in a joint operation with the Dallas Police Department’s UAS team “to provide overwatch and real-time live feed to our respective incident commanders,” during protests held in downtown Dallas at Pacific Plaza. The DPS reported that in Dallas “UAS were grounded due to intermittent rain.”

A drone flight conducted overwatch and quick response operations for the No Kings demonstration in the city of Pflugerville, and two UAV deployments were conducted in the city of McAllen, including one flight conducted to assist U.S. Marshals Service’s operations near the Federal Courthouse in that city.

No arrest or other significant incidents were recorded as a result of the drone overflights, although one of the flights over the Capitol Complex in Austin helped locate a heat stroke victim.

Drones at protests raise concerns

The DPS’s drone response to the No Kings protests reflected those of other police agencies across the country.

In recent months, with the increased use of drones by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, some political leaders and civil liberties advocates have expressed concern over the possibility that UAVs used to monitor protest demonstrations could also could be used as surveillance tools to gather data on individuals, impinging on their civil rights.

On July 31, five Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, complaining about the deployment of at least two Predator drones over anti-immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles earlier in the summer. The senators complained that the aircraft took video images of the protestors and that DHS then published the collected footage online, in an attempt to induce local officials to crack down on protestors.

“Although extraordinary circumstances could justify drone flights over protests, these flights also raise serious concerns about individual privacy and may be intended to intimidate the public and chill free speech rights,” the lawmakers wrote.

The senators demanded that Secretary Noem respond to their concerns and answer detailed questions about the department’s drone surveillance policies. As of Oct. 30, DHS had not responded to the senators’ request.

In a statement to DroneLife, a DHS spokesperson said that the department has a two-year backlog of congressional correspondence, dating to the time of Noem’s predecessor, “something Secretary Noem has worked diligently to clear.”

The spokesperson also declined to answer DroneLife’s specific questions concerning the use of drones for surveillance by the Customs and Border Protections Air and Marine Operations’ (AMO), except to say, “AMO is not engaged in the surveillance of First Amendment-protected activities.”

In an emailed statement, Beryl Lipton a senior investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said technologic advances in the past several years have dramatically increased the ability of law enforcement agencies to use drones to collect data on individuals. “Surveillance, airborne and otherwise, can affect people’s desire to protest, a First Amendment- protected right,” Lipton said.

“In a big change from the major BLM (Black Lives Matter) protests of 2020, drone footage and other types of police camera footage are now being stored and integrated into other surveillance data,” she wrote.

“Any footage can be run through facial recognition or other biometric identification. It is not yet clear how police are using this footage, but as part of the current surveillance, it’s more than possible that this information is being integrated and coupled with data on individuals being taken from other places, like mobile devices and data breaches.”

There are few federal laws restricting the use of drones over protests by law enforcement officials, although state and local regulations vary widely. Some states require a warrant for police use of a drone. “Cleveland, Ohio, in particular, prohibits the use of drones over a protest,” she said.

Read more:

• ACLU Discusses Concerns Over Police Drone Surveillance, Drone Delivery: DRONELIFE Exclusive
• ACLU Calls for Strict Limits on Police Drones. Skyfire Consulting Asked Them Why.
• Bee Cave, Texas: Fully Autonomous Drone First Responder Program Set to Launch

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.