“This is about profit over people’s rights.”

The lobbies win out . Again ! Profits   are perpetually preferred  over  Peoples' Rights. Peoples; lives, acutally. Death by drone is already a fact of life in increasingly larger parts of the world even though the  only real 'debate' is happening only over the the rights of Americans.


This gives us a deeper insight into  Greenwald's article I linked to earlier


Boeing Helps Kill Proposed Law to Regulate Drones

by Pratap Chatterjee

Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.

Boeing X-45A combat drone. Photo by cliff1066™ (Creative Commons)Local authorities in Seattle and in King county experimented with conducting surveillance from Draganfly Innovations drones last year, only to cancel both programs in the fact of public protest. "I'm not really surprised that people are upset," said Jennifer Shaw from the American Civil Liberties Union, a human rights group that campaigned against the drones. “It's a frightening thing to think that there's government surveillance cameras overhead.”

On February 7, 2013, David Taylor, a Republican member of the state legislature, introduced a bill to regulate drone use. The proposed law quickly won support from several Democratic party politicians on the state Public Safety Committee.

Alarmed by the growing bipartisan coalition, Boeing jumped into the fray. “We believe that as the technology matures, best practices and new understanding will emerge, and that it would be counterproductive to rush into regulating a burgeoning industry,” Boeing spokeswoman Sue Bradley wrote in a statement. (The company makes a variety of drones from theUnmanned Little Bird and the A160 Hummingbird helicopters to the ScanEagle which has been used in Iran and Iraq and the proposed new X-45C combat aircraft)

After the company approached several lawmakers, Frank Chopp, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington state, canceled a scheduled March 13 vote on the bill. Instead Jeff Morris, another Democrat who chairs the House Technology and Economic Development Committee, was asked to lead a “more comprehensive study of surveillance issues.”

“This is all about profit,” said a disappointed Taylor. “This is about profit over people’s rights.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/31-0