A bill in the Florida legislature is going too far, and I think that I know why. The proposed law says that a property owner that is being photographed by a drone in an area of his property where he has an expectation of privacy may use reasonable force to prevent that spying. The law is being sold as a boon for the privacy of a homeowner being photographed in their backyard pool:
If I’m at a park and I’m playing baseball with my kids, and somebody takes up a drone just to show what’s going on in the park, do I really have an expectation of privacy? But if my daughters are sunbathing in the pool behind my house, I have an expectation of privacy.
Picture that a drone has been flying over your house. You believe that it is taking pictures of your family as they sunbathe in your backyard. You know that this looks just like the drone owned by your neighbor, so you go to his house. Sure enough, he is standing on the porch, flying his drone. You happen to know that the law also says this:
2. A person who has a reasonable expectation of privacy on his or her privately owned real property may use reasonable force to prohibit a drone from conducting surveillance in violation of this paragraph, if such drone is operating under 500 feet over such property.
To stop him, you wind up and punch him square in his stupid face. That was reasonable force, right? The problem here is that there is no way for you to know if he is conducting what the law says is surveillance or if he was simply flying by your house on the way to another location.
In your case, it turns out that he wasn’t taking pictures of your house, he was taking pictures of your other neighbor’s house because that neighbor wanted to sell his house and was looking for some drone shots for the listing’s Zillow page.
This is going to create a mess. The law is vague and isn’t really intended to protect homeowners. The law requires that the person using force know the intent of the person operating the drone. Let me explain:
A person, a state agency, or a political subdivision as defined in s. 11.45 may not use a drone equipped with an imaging device to record an image of privately owned real property or of the owner, tenant, occupant, invitee, or licensee of such property with the intent to conduct surveillance on the individual or property captured in the image in violation of such person’s reasonable expectation of privacy without his or her written consent. -emphasis added
So why is this law being proposed? The real reason for this law has absolutely nothing to do with homeowners or their families at the pool. No, it has to do with the state’s powerful developers, like the developers of The Villages. That developer is engaged in a legal battle with local journalists who have been filming and selling video of the construction projects in the area. It seems that there is quite a market for this sort of thing, and people have been making money by selling drone footage. That particular developer owns their own newspaper and has been trying to make money by selling their own footage of the area, and is upset that others are trying to horn in on the action. This is purely a big company trying to use the law to create their own monopoly.
Developers in Florida have been trying to do this for over a decade. Back in 2011, there was a failed attempt to make it a felony to take pictures of a farm. It wasn’t about farms- developers will often claim that their property is a farm because property tax rates on farms are low. The developer will place a cow or two, or perhaps a couple of orange trees, on a property that they have bought in order to develop the land, and they claim it to be a farm so that they can avoid paying taxes on the land until the last minute.
They don’t want people photographing their land because the construction crews are frequently breaking all sorts of laws- most of the construction crews are illegal immigrants, there are frequent environmental and OSHA violations, along with other illegalities, and this is how they get the official protection from the government.
When my own house was under construction, I took pictures of the entire house. I have hundreds of photos of the house as it was being built. I did it to have a record of where each wire, pipe, and stud was located, just in case I needed to do repairs or renovations. The developer found out and had a fit. He told me that I couldn’t take any pictures unless there were no construction workers on site, or he would prosecute. It is a felony in Florida to be on a construction site without permission.
Officials know that they are breaking the law, but can’t ignore it unless there is no evidence staring them in the face.
A few decades ago, children of the large farmers in Florida decided that they didn’t want to be farmers, and realized that you could make a lot more money per acre by growing houses on the land and selling them to gullible retirees than you could by growing oranges or raising cattle on that land. They became developers. The Villages is one of those developers, but there is no shortage of them in this state.
Illegal immigration is the modern day equivalent of slavery. Too many people, Democrat or Republican, are making money from this. That is why so many entrenched politicians hate DJT. They are all, D and R, making millions in the graft and corruption, and can’t have him upsetting their golden goose.
A note on developers:
You can take an 80 acre farm, develop it into a housing neighborhood with about 250 houses. If you get cheap enough labor to build the houses, those homes will sell for more than $25 million in profit. Do you have any idea how long you have to operate an 80 acre farm to sell $25 million in oranges?
Do the math- an orange orchard grosses about $2500 per acre each year. It would take an 80 acre orchard more than a century to bring in that kind of cash.
