Canada Hermes 900 Drone Test | Johnny Somali 6 Months Prison | Waterloo Police Drone

Our Take

Credit to Alan Yu for stitching together three stories that look unrelated but aren't: a massive Israeli-made Hermes 900 drone getting Arctic test flights, a viral arrest story, and a small-city police department quietly adding its own drone fleet. The thread connecting them is simple — surveillance hardware built for military or border use has a way of trickling down into everyday policing, usually with far less public debate than it deserves.

That's exactly the pattern we track with license plate readers. Flock cameras started as a 'few cameras for a neighborhood watch' pitch and now blanket entire metro areas, feeding data to police departments, HOAs, and sometimes federal agencies with little transparency about retention or sharing. A local police drone program follows the same playbook: approved as a tool for emergencies, it rarely stays limited to emergencies once the hardware is in the budget and the footage is flowing.

Drones and ALPRs are different technologies, but they're part of the same expansion of automated eyes with minimal oversight. If you want to see how far that expansion has already gone in your own backyard, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch it happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.