Make your town a drone-free zone.

• Author: Musgrave, Shawn

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ON FEBRUARY 4 IN A THREE-two vote, the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia, became the first representative body in the country to pass a resolution prohibiting the use of drones for surveillance by local law enforcement.

"It's possible for people to be in charge of the technology rather than have the technology be in charge of us," says activist David Swanson, a central figure in the peace and justice community in Charlottesville.

Swanson spearheaded the campaign to pass the resolution, which also bans the use of weaponized drones. Swanson is just one of the thousands of activists around the country who are mobilizing to restrict or ban drones at the local, state, and national levels. In many ways, his success in Charlottesville reflects the "No Drones" movement that has propelled bills into thirty-one state legislatures. Patchwork coalitions drawing from all political quarters have sprung up from Virginia, Texas, and Florida to Seattle, Berkeley, and Chicago. And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are listening.

The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that as many as 30,000 drones may fly in American skies by 2030. Drones come in all sizes, from the 48-foot wingspan MQ-1 Predator to miniature units weighing five pounds or less. As police increasingly laud drones as cheap and effective eyes in the sky, critics insist their powerful imaging capabilities demand strong preemptive restrictions against privacy abuses.

The FAA has granted waivers to operate drones in American airspace since at least 2007. But until recently it was difficult to get a comprehensive view of how many drones were being flown across the country. It took a lawsuit to pry open the FAA's files.

"Given that police were starting to show interest in drones' surveillance capabilities, we thought the public deserved to know all of this information about drone use across the country," says Trevor Timm, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization that filed the lawsuit.

The foundation successfully sued in January 2012 under the Freedom of Information Act, and in April 2012, two months after Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act requiring the integration of drones into domestic airspace by 2015, the FAA released a list of sixty agencies that had applied for drone waivers. Many of the entities on the list were as predicted: Border Patrol, Homeland Security, the FBI, the State Department, the major...