A new bill moving through the Oregon Legislature would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to use drones without a warrant—and it has civil rights advocates alarmed. 

“This is just another example of an unnecessary and really excessive expansion of law enforcement authority,” Michael Abrams, policy counsel at the ACLU of Oregon, said. “I really want to emphasize that it’s unnecessary: existing law permits law enforcement to use drones for all kinds of legitimate uses with a warrant.”

The ACLU of Oregon’s concern with Senate Bill 238 is manifold: if it passes, it would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to surveil Oregonians as they see fit with no prior judicial oversight. Drones could potentially be deployed to collect information on protesters, for instance, tracking where people assemble and demonstrate. 

There are other instances in which people like Abrams are concerned that the passage of the bill and the warrantless deployment of drones could lead to widespread privacy violations. 

“What’s going to happen when law enforcement routinely responds to 911 calls using drone technology and starts seeing a lot more than what they're immediately responding to?” Abrams said. “You can imagine your neighbor calling 911 and a drone flying over their backyard—it’s going to be seeing things on the way to and from, and it’s going to see potentially into your backyard.”

The bill is currently in the House Rules Committee. Senator Floyd Prozanski (D—Eugene), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that passed the bill, said he became convinced of the legislation’s necessity after attending a drone technology demonstration at Eugene Police Department headquarters last year. 

“I have been one who has been [for] much more due diligence on what authority we give to law enforcement and their contacts, but 238 to me seems like a reasonable next step in the process of utilizing a tool that I believe provides public safety as well as safety for officers,” Prozanski said. 

There is little disagreement that the use of drones has benefits for police officers, particularly in responding to situations in which people may be dangerous or unstable. Drones can be used to survey scenes before officers arrive, allowing officers to prepare in advance for what they may face in high-intensity situations. 

Prozanski and other proponents of the bill have argued that removing the warrant requirement could allow law enforcement agencies to expand their use of the technology, especially in situations where the time it takes to get a warrant would be prohibitive. It could also potentially help in cases when a warrant may be too narrow in scope to respond to developing situations.

But Abrams has pushed back against the notion that freeing law enforcement agencies from the warrant requirement from drone use would have a positive impact on public safety, saying law enforcement officials haven’t offered “any concrete examples” of situations in which they weren’t able to get a warrant in time.

Abrams also noted that the current framework for drone usage already makes exceptions to the warrant requirement for situations in which law enforcement agencies need to act with particular rapidity, including search and rescue situations, wildfires, and other natural disasters. 

Another argument proponents of the bill have advanced is that the expanded, warrantless use of drones is particularly essential at a moment when many Oregon communities are facing an officer shortage—that, in short, drone surveillance can help compensate for a lack of police staffing. 

Chief Bob Day of the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) emphasized the Bureau’s staffing challenges in his public testimony in support of the bill, writing that the legislation could help address issues related to elevated bureau response times. 

“Like many law enforcement agencies, we continue to face significant staffing challenges, which are reflected in these response times,” Day wrote. “Senate Bill 238-1 offers a thoughtful path forward.” 

But while the prospect of functionally replacing officers with drone technology raises its own ethical questions, Abrams said that it’s not entirely clear that such a transition would even be possible given that federal rules currently require that anyone flying a drone must have the drone within their line of sight.

If it passes, the legislation could be a boon for drone manufacturers. One of the bill’s chief backers is the Eugene-based Law Enforcement Drone Association, which counts among its sponsors drone and surveillance technology producers like Flock Safety and Axon.

The proximity of drone corporations to the bill has made some observers uneasy, as has the idea of expanding police surveillance power at a moment when the Trump administration has been targeting activists, immigrants, and organized labor. 

Nick Caleb, climate energy attorney at Breach Collective, said he’s particularly concerned about the potential that data collected by drones operating without warrants might be shared with the federal government whether the bill allows it or not.

Caleb pointed to extensive reporting that has documented how both local and federal law enforcement surveilled activists opposed to the Jordan Cove energy project in southern Oregon and shared data on activists with a wide range of agencies and interest groups. 

Prozanski said his committee has been attentive to the concerns of the ACLU and other civil rights organizations, and inserting language into the bill barring drones from collecting data on their way to their destinations, barring local law enforcement agencies from sharing data with federal agencies, and requiring that all data collected by destroyed after a period of 30 days. 

That set of restrictions, Prozanski said, would exceed restrictions in place for drone usage in states like Washington and California. 

Nevertheless, the ACLU of Oregon and groups like Breach Collective remain opposed to the bill’s passage—partly because they aren’t sure law enforcement agencies will abide by the guardrails written into the law, whatever they are. 

“They can say we won’t share this, but once that data exists and is being generated, it’s capable of being shared,” Caleb said. 

If a law enforcement agency broke data collection and sharing rules established in the most recent version of the bill, that breach could likely only be litigated after the fact. Oregon already has infrastructure in place for collaboration between local and federal law enforcement, such as the TITAN Fusion Center. 

This is not the first time in recent years that Democratic lawmakers in Salem have taken steps to expand law enforcement capacity over the objections of groups like the ACLU. There was a similar clash two years ago over a bill designed to punish domestic terrorism, which civil rights groups warned could be used to target climate and racial justice activists. That bill passed. 

To Caleb, the passage of that law and the progress of this bill speak to a schism between many Democratic elected officials and a number of the people they represent. 

“They have an implicit trust of law enforcement, and I think that’s where the difference is between a lot of the constituencies—especially in Portland, where people have dealt directly with law enforcement a lot,” Caleb said. “We don’t have an implicit trust. We want safeguards, we want rules, we want laws, we want things that we can rely on and enforce.”

Given the national political climate, that level of trust in law enforcement may be even lower than usual. 

“This is definitely a moment in time where caution is as warranted as it possibly could be,” Abrams said. “I don’t understand why the legislature is interested in expanding data collection without a real, demonstrated need.”