I’ve been pretty busy, this week, and have just gotten caught up with this story about a letter from the FAA to Tampa Bay-area drone hobbyist Jayson Hanes. The precise meaning and intent of the letter is rather more vague than the writer suggests. As Hanes himself correctly pointed out in an interview, the FAA has not demanded that Hanes cease and desist from flying, or from posting his videos on YouTube, and has not threatened any enforcement action against him.

Nevertheless, this, and another recent story of a drone hobbyist in Maine who was told by the FAA that he would have to take down his website, raise a troubling concern that the FAA may be on a collision course with the First Amendment. Matters of free speech are not within the agency’s normal purview, which might explain the naïveté of an agent seeking to challenge one’s right to post videos on the internet.  Hanes commented that the FAA “is trying to flex its muscles” in an area that it doesn’t understand.

We understand that the FAA might be having difficulty enforcing its commercial drone ban.  The agency is not equipped to handle traditional law enforcement duties.  There are no police cars with flashing lights and the letters, “F-A-A,” emblazoned on their doors.  Everyone knows that non-compliance is rampant, and that the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

But such difficulties often prove to be the undoing of police agencies across the country.  The law books are full of cases where, out of sheer frustration, law enforcement officials overreached their constitutional boundaries and violated the rights of private citizens.  Avoiding such scenarios requires training and vigilance by those charged with enforcing the law.

As Peter Sachs commented to Motherboard, “It would behoove the FAA Office of Chief Counsel to make it abundantly clear to all aviation safety inspectors that the First Amendment is alive and well.”

Of course, the agency would more easily avoid getting itself into these kinds of embarrassing public relations imbroglios if it adhered to its own definition of what constitutes a “commercial” operation – i.e., activity with a business nexus.  It simply defies logic to say that posting videos on YouTube has any sort of nexus with business activity.