Comment by dayofthedaleks
8 hours ago
Bubble of protection is 3000 feet laterally and 1000 feet vertically. From the article:
“Unlike traditional Temporary Flight Restrictions, the NOTAM does not provide geographic coordinates, activation times, or public notification when the restriction is in effect near a specific location. Instead, the restricted airspace moves with DHS assets, meaning the no-fly zone can appear wherever ICE or other DHS units operate.”
“In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is to have laws that are virtually impossible to not break.
I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional for being overly vague and arbitrary. For example, Montana used to have some maximum speed limits that were just "reasonable and prudent", but they were eventually rejected by courts as being too vague (what's prudent to you may not be prudent to someone else). This is similar, in that the FAA has a no fly zone but they don't actually publish what it is.
Catch-22 and 1984 weren't supposed to be instruction manuals.
> I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional
The rule of law has left the building. The SC is willing to rubber-stamp nearly anything right now.
Waiting and hoping for common sense to prevail is what allows authoritarian regimes to bulldoze through existing laws and norms. Even if the courts were an avenue for redress, they are being overwhelmed by the daily barrage of new illegal and unconstitutional actions. Once the courts get around to addressing these cases, the damage has been done and the precedent has been set.
Anything but an administration being able to manipulate the Fed, it seems. Most legal experts believe that will be a hard strike down on the administration
that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything
very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.
all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.
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If you think the SCOTUS has been arbitrarily rubber stamping the administration's goals, you haven't been paying attention. I'll fully agree with you it appears to have been fairly partisan, but less than a month again they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states:
>In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-12-30/supreme-cou...
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One time I was racing across the country in a moving van because my wife was injured. The truck was speed-governed to 75 mph, which I was sitting at for most of the trip. I have a picture of the back of a school bus that handily passed me by on highway 90 :-)
The gun free school zone act has been upheld even though you could be within 1000 ft of one with no real indication there is one there. Supposedly you can only be convicted for doing it knowingly, but IIRC knowingly has been interpreted to mean as little as you live near the area so reasonably should have known.
Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.
So there is not necessarily any need for mens rea in the US legal system.
But your examples are markedly different to me. Yes, those examples do put the onus on the individual to ensure there are no schools around or that an individual is of legal age, but those are at least discoverable things - school locations are public info, and I think for any adult it's not that difficult to steer clear of anyone who looks mildly close to underage.
But in this instance, the movements of ICE are specifically hidden by the government - heck, they've even threatened to prosecute people who publish this information!! It is the literal definition of a Catch-22.
School buildings don't randomly and secretly move around all the time.
So while there isn't a line drawn on the ground, it's completely different.
>> Also note, i.e. stuff like statutory rape has been upheld even in cases where the perpetrator in all good faith thought the victim was 18+, the victim initiated selling the services, and the victim provided fake ID showing they were 18+.
You had me up to the "selling the services" part.
If you are 'engaging' with someone in a criminal enterprise it's probably reasonable to assume they might misrepresent certain facts to make the sale.
Speed limits are biology and physics derived. The eye has a max speed, over which it starts to rewrite the history of what you saw. Everytime you have been "frozzen in fear" the first few milliseconds are just the eye rewriting the logs.
So you take that the saccade speed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) + speed of visual buffer reaction + reasonable time to break and you get a max speed for that.
Same goes when you have two points of attention, like traffic in front of you and merging traffic, the speed gets reduced to compensate.
Weird that when you're in Nevada the eye moves fast enough for you to react when going at 80 mph but in Arizona your eyes can only move fast enough for 75 mph, and in California no ones eyes move fast enough to react over 70 mph.
So the unannounced movements of the secret police in their unmarked vehicles also create a bubble around them where usually-legal activity is illegal?
And reciprocally, where usually illegal activity (beating up people and kidnapping them) is legal.
You mean, shooting them ten times in the back?
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That's the goal, it just isn't spelled out.
See no crimes. Hear no truth. Speak no facts.
I'm guessing that's entirely the idea. There will be even more cameras on them after yesterday, and they're trying to be proactive in having the authority to arrest all of them. They want the authority to arrest someone who was just out flying a drone and happened to film them as they moved.
IDK, it's probably more a matter where they don't want people to be flying RPGs into their windscreens and this is the first step for them to carry around frequency jammers. The last time I was in Iraq they used them to stop the cellphone detonated IEDs and all the convoys has one or two.
Coincidentally, folks won't be able to live stream their encounters but I'm sure that's totally unrelated...
Yes, because the USA is totally undistinguishable from an active war zone...
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> “In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” ― Oscar R. Benavides (Peru)
Even if you won't actually be sentenced you'll still spend a couple of days in jail.
This creates a chilling effect for normal people who don't want to become professional activists.