DHS's Use of Domestic Drones

A friend of mine at the Homeland Security Institute recently called my attention to this fascinating article in the Atlantic.  The article reveals nascent plans by CBP and the Border Patrol to equip domestic drones with non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize targets.  One can, of course, readily imagine the use case scenarios for that type of equipment (say, immobilizing illegal aliens crossing the border for a period of time until ground units can arrive) but I have to say that discussing that type of use case in this way is politically unwise.  It plays directly into the worst preconceptions that people have about domestic drone use and just reconfirms them.  At a minimum that sort of thing should be the subject of explicit public discussion -- not an offhand throw away in a concept of operations draft. Speaking of which, by far the =most= interesting thing about the article (at least to me) is the Concept of Operations manual itself which was released under FOIA.  If you dig down into the CONOPS (page 24) you will see that there really are a host of perfectly reasonable and thoughtful potential missions for drones to accomplish in the homeland space.  They range from border surveillance, to search and rescue, to marine protection.  Drones can provide pre- and post-disaster baselines for assessing damage.  They can monitor pipelines and other critical infrastructure for accidents and/or intrusions.  Etc. In short, used wisely, domestic drones are likely to be very functional.  I simply can't imagine why anyone would consider (even speculatively) the use of armed drones (even non-lethal ones) when that is so likely to lead us to throwing the baby out  with the bath water.