This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 4, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We're living in the Wild West when it comes to how and when and under what authority the

police may use drones, be it for lawful surveillance,

following suspects, or maybe satisfying a less than appropriate curiosity.

Patrick Eddington is a research fellow in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute.

We spoke last week.

Where is the tension right now between federal and state rules governing the use of drones both privately and by police agencies.

A lot of folks are trying to figure that

you have two different tracks essentially.

You have what I would describe as a state-based use problem, right, whether it's the federal, state, or local law

enforcement on the one hand. And then you have a separate issue of drones

essentially in the private sphere. Where this all comes together is in the private sphere.

Where this all comes together is in the safety issue and of course this is what the

Federal Aviation Administration has been wrestling with now for going on two or three years and they

have an interim kind of rule out there that's being debated now and some basic operating guidelines.

But FAA is not in the privacy and civil liberties business, right?

They're in the airline safety and air safety business.

And so they have punted essentially this entire issue of privacy and civil liberties

with respect to drone usage over to the National Telecommunications

and Information Agency, which is holding a series of public meetings over the course of the next

several months to try to get public input on exactly how these issues ought to be

...