Coming Soon To A Turnpike Near You: Drones

State Sen. Nicholas Sacco, D-Hudson, says drones could benefit society if used correctly; his bill , introduced on April 25, would let police and fire departments use drones for extreme conditions that might be too dangerous for humans, or where existing tools simply wouldn’t work.

“Think about missing children, missing seniors,” Sacco told the Star-Ledger of Newark. “The immediacy and the ability to use drones to find them quickly is very important. Think about forest fires. Things like this are extremely important.”

Children: Used As A Vague Justification For Tyranny Since About 1950! Is there anybody left who is naive enough to think that drones will be used to find missing children? After all, missing children tend to be inside buildings and/or surrounded by other, taller people. Not great conditions for drones, really.

On the other hand, a freeway is a great place for drone surveillance. And while they’re up there scanning the freeways tirelessly for missing children, seniors, or forest fires, they might as well issue some speeding tickets, right?

Welcome to the traffic Skynet. But New Jersey already has a John Connor.

International Business Times reports that some New Jersey legislators just cannot wait to get some drones flying over the freeways. They want New Jersey to get those birds in the air by 2015, well ahead of when the FAA is expected to have some half-assed thing together that makes it impossible to fly a Cessna because all the space under, say, 28,000 feet will be reserved for surveillance drones, traffic drones, and drones that seek out microaggressions against womyn and punish it via the so-called “castration ray”.

Unless a whole hell of a lot of children and seniors can be persuaded to go missing for extended periods of time, those drones will probably be used exclusively for traffic ticketing. Drones are a municipality’s dream. They can fly above traffic and issue hundreds of speeding tickets in minutes. Imagine a world where doing 68 in a 65 down a hill immediately “originates” a drone speeding ticket. That’s the future.

Luckily for the State That Made Snooki Famous, there are already voices speaking out against SkyNet. New Jersey Assemblymen Robert Schroeder and Declan J. O’Scanlon, Jr, who was recently described by my perceptive subconscious as “someone who might possibly be of Irish descent”, have introduced a bill that requires a warrant for all drone surveillance and specifically prevents the use of drones for traffic enforcement. This bill is likely to be treated like toilet paper the minute anybody takes the time to look at it, but it’s nice to know that the drones already have enemies. In the near future, which actually means the somewhat distant past in this case, we can probably expect a Resistance-captured surveillance drone to pop out of a time warp and impregnate Declan J. O’Scanlon, Jr’s mother-to-be so that he can lead the Resistance after Judgment Day. I’ve written a brief fragment of a movie script describing this:

The scene is a PARKING LOT. The DRONE-1000 is flying in a circle approximately five hundred feet above DECLAN J. O’SCANLON JR’S FUTURE MOTHER, who looks up at the faint noise overheard.

D.J.O’S.J’S.F.M.: What’s that up there?

DRONE-1000: It’s me, the Drone-1000! I’ve been sent back in time to protect you so that you can be the mother of the Resistance! In order to do this, I have to impregnate you!

D.J.O’S.J’S.F.M.: That’s weird, it’s making a noise.

DRONE-1000: I haven’t figured out the impregnation mechanism yet, but a primary data approximation says it would help if you could rent a small aircraft for an hour or so and come up here! Better make that two hours — I like to take my time!

D.J.O’S.J’S.F.M.: Huh. I wonder if Jameson is on sale at the Quickie Mart.

FINIS

While our hero drone is working that problem out, now might be a good time for TTAC readers in New Jersey to contact their local legislator.