Obama: ‘The Drone that Landed in the White House You’d Buy in Radio Shack’

‘We don’t really have any kind of regulatory structure at all for it’

“I’ll leave the Secret Service to talk about this particular event. But I’ve actually asked the FAA and a number of agencies to examine how are managing this new technology because the drone that landed in the White House you buy in Radio Shack. You know that there are companies like Amazon that are talking about using small drones to deliver packages. This is —there are incredibly useful functions that these drones can play in terms of farmers who are managing crops and conservationists who want to take stock of wildlife. And so there are a whole range of things we can do with it. But we don’t really have any kind of regulatory structure at all for it.

So I’ve assigned some of the relevant agencies to start talking to stakeholders and figure out how we’re going to put an architecture in place that makes sure that these things aren’t dangerous and that they’re not violating people’s privacy. And you know, in some ways, Fareed, this is similar to what’s happened in cyberspace. These technologies that we’re developing have the capacity to empower individuals in ways that we couldn’t even imagine 10-15 years ago.”

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