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Lawmakers push to expand agencies’ power to cope with drones

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(NewsNation) — While U.S. residents and lawmakers wait for answers from federal agencies regarding who may be behind the rash of mysterious drone sightings, Congress is pushing to pass legislation that would give state and local law enforcement more enforcement power to cope with unknown objects taking up airspace.

The FBI says there has been a drop in drone sightings but that it has no new information about who the objects seen in New Jersey, New York and other places around the U.S. belong to. As the wait continues for more information, proposed legislation like a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, would expand the rights of federal, state and local agencies to address drones should they be considered potentially unsafe to the general public.

Peters, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, sponsored the bill, which would provide local agencies with increased drone-tracking capabilities. The law would have given the departments the right to disrupt, seize or disable drones and would have fast-tracked federal agencies like the Department of Defense and FBI to act.


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However, as lawmakers pushed to fast-track Peters’ bill through Congress, Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, was the lone lawmaker to vote against the measure. Paul, citing the FBI’s contention that drones do not currently pose a threat to national security, said that more work had to be done to ensure a law concerning drones would address the issue in the best possible way.

New laws are being considered as politicians, including President-elect Donald Trump, have called for agencies to have the right to shoot drones out of the sky. Trump recently said that the White House and President Joe Biden know who is behind the drone activity but that they want to keep the people waiting in suspense.

The Federal Aviation Administration has banned drones in parts of New Jersey until mid-January, but that hasn’t stopped the push for more federal transparency of what these objects are and who is behind them,

The FBI has warned New Jersey residents not to shoot the supposed drones down. The agency told reporters recently that they believe that many of the drone sightings that have been reported are actually manned aircraft. The agency warned that residents taking matters into their own hands could be dangerous and could lead to “possibly dangerous consequences,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

However, some believe that certain circumstances require immediate attention.


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“There are certain assets, locations, facilities that are truly critical to our operations, and those need to be defended in real time,” Scott Aaronson, senior vice president for security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, told the newspaper. “We have to be able to intervene.”

In some cases, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been granted the authority to take drones down, the report said. The Department of Defense can act if drones are considered a threat to U.S. military bases and nuclear assets, but the ability to deal with the objects does not currently fall under the jurisdiction of more local law enforcement agencies.

Local law enforcement agencies in New York and New Jersey have been provided antidrone technology by federal agencies. However, some departments say that the technology is limiting and does not allow them to adequately cope with unknown objects. However, officials with the Federal Aviation Administration are working to better perfect the technology so that it does not interfere with local air traffic, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“The cure cannot be worse than the disease,” Abby Smith, a former senior FAA official, told the newspaper.