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Hello, and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis. This is the first of what

we hope will be a regular series of podcasts covering a range of audio content related

to law and security, events, interviews, roundtable discussions, and other types of material

we probably haven't thought of yet. Today's subject is a remarkable new article by journalist

Shane Harris entitled, Out of the Loop, The Human Free Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

The essay is part of the Emerging Threat series published by the Hoover Institution's

correct Toby Task Force on National Security and Law, of which I, Jack Goldsmith, and

Ken Anderson are all members. Shane is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine and the

author of the book The Watchers, which is a lively history of data mining. He stopped

by the Brookings Institution recently to chat about his latest article.

I want to start by asking you how much of this essay is real, how much is science fiction,

how much your sure is real, how much you think might be real. I assume none of it, your

sure is fictitious. Well, it's probably less fiction in it than you might think. The

fictitious aspects of it, or we do not today have autonomous drones that go out and prowl

the skies looking for bad guys to blow up and making the decision on their own to drop

a bomb, to fire a missile. We don't have that kind of autonomous drone, but we could

have it very easily. Technology is not the obstacle to building a system like that. Policy

is the obstacle to building a system like that. So, for example, technologically speaking,

...