New Orleans cancels plans for Super Bowl drone, after indie paper investigates

Above, "The Bravo 300," a tactical drone manufactured in New Orleans by Crescent Unmanned Systems. Weeks after New Orleans local investigative paper The Lens began digging into city officials’ plans to use a U.S. Homeland Security Department aerial drone to monitor crowds at the upcoming Super Bowl, a spokesman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced that the city is no longer pursuing those plans.

Spokesman Ryan Berni offered no reason for dropping the eye-in-the-sky technology, telling a reporter to submit a public-records request. In a brief phone interview, he would say only that the decision to ditch the drone was made “over the past several days.” In a follow-up email, Berni said Homeland Security would be providing a manned helicopter, equipped with a camera, and that “the City learned by phone in the last few weeks” about the switch.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: DRONES • new orleans • police • spying • surveillance

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http://twitter.com/AbelUndercity Abel Undercity

Am I a bad person for wanting one for myself?
- OldBrownSquirrel
  
  It’s a quadcopter. Quadcopters are cool.
  - absimiliard
    
    So are fezzes, I think I heard it from a Doctor…..
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SGEJB2K6NLPXN3KP2DGXSDW754 Calvin

Canceled only because Landrieu & the NOPD thugs were caught!
http://twitter.com/FotoVerite Matthew Bergman

No, I’m actually doing a hackathon on drones next month. They’re just machines
fuzzyfuzzyfungus

“The relatively small Crescent Unmanned Systems model sells for about $100,000.”

It’s a quadcopter, and a small one at that. Quoted endurance time of less than an hour. And the FLIR optics package isn’t a standard feature.

Does it provide home-baked cookies and the love and affirmation that your parents never did, or what?
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

Don’t they already have snipers at the Superbowl? How is this worse?
- GoatLordMessiah
  
  It’s white?
IronEdithKidd

Oh, mission creep, do you know *any* limits?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  UK local councils using anti-terror laws to bust people for putting their trash cans out too early makes this effort look weak.
disillusion

Would it be cynical of me to suggest they turned this down because it’s simply not loaded with enough weaponry?
theophrastvs

It might become a distraction from the bread and circuses. oh but what if it had branding “oh look daddy! it’s the cuervo-gold panopticon!” “yes timmy, daddy remembers when our friendly drones were not everywhere” “but who watched over us?” “no one, you scamp… no one”
travtastic

Mission success, the drone has been defeated. Now we’re back to regular old quaint, bigoted human policework.
pjcamp

Let’s make a deal.

The cops can have their little RC quadcopter if they turn in their tanks and helicopter gunships:

http://www.lsp.org/swat.html
xiagang

Even the Chinese are surprised sometimes by the lengths to which Americans will go for surveillance. I think I’ll translate this one and put it on my weibo.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BOOM27DBLMZQIJVK4BQLE7K5YA Nagurski

See a drone, shoot a drone.