Cop drones: CA sheriff who wants one tells one story to lawmakers, but quite another to homeland security

Related: In Nebraska, Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus wants to nip in the bud police use of drones to spy on citizens of the state and has introduced LB412 to accomplish just that.

Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones covers a drone initiative in the San Francisco Bay Area:

     Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern wants to buy a surveillance drone, or, as he prefers to call it, a "small Unmanned Aerial System." At a meeting before the county's Board of Supervisors last week, he claimed that he'd only use the drone for felony cases, not to spy on people or monitor political activists. But a few minutes later he'd seemed to change his mind, adding: "I don't want to lock myself into just felonies."
     Catcalls and hisses erupted from a crowd of some 100 anti-drone activists. One man later called the proposal "an assault on my community."
     Police departments could outfit drones with infrared sensors that see through walls, with facial recognition software, or with technology that intercepts calls and emails. Yet the the federal government doesn't do much to regulate how drones can use such technologies to collect information on private citizens...
     Privacy activists are trying to put pressure on state and federal regulators by holding protests in this liberal and tech-savvy Bay Area county, which could become the first local government in California to buy a drone...
     Last year, Ahern publicly pitched the drone to county lawmakers as a search-and-rescue tool, but told a different story in a grant application submitted to the Department of Homeland Security, which said the drone would assist with "surveillance (investigative and tactical)…intelligence gathering…suspicious persons, large crowd control disturbances, etc." (Alameda County includes Oakland, where police battled with Occupy protesters last year.)
     ...Alameda County isn't the only place where drones have encountered a backlash. Earlier this month, the Seattle Police Department grounded two drones it had purchased in response to privacy concerns, and Charlottesville, Virginia, became the first American city to ban drone flights within city limits...

     Read the entire story at Mother Jones.