Wyoming lawmakers are considering a bill to ban law enforcement use of drones without a warrant.
Members of the Wyoming Legislature's Joint Judiciary Committee are set to hear a draft bill this week in Laramie. If it's approved, the full Legislature could consider the measure early next year.
Linda Burt is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Wyoming. Burt says it's important for the state to set limits on the use of drones before they become more prevalent in law enforcement.
Legislative staffers drafted the bill the committee is set to consider at its meeting Thursday working from a model bill Burt presented to the committee earlier.
"Basically what it does is it asks that before any law enforcement uses a drone for any kind of searches that they get a warrant based on probable cause," Burt said.
A few other websites have similar versions of this story, but they all seem to be copies of the AP report (although the Washington Times provides its own paraphrasing of the AP report here). Because of this, there are some missing details -- namely, the text of the bill.
After some investigative Google searching, I located the text of the bill -- you can find it here.
While the bill is not much of a deviation from laws that have been passed and proposed in other states, I have a few comments on the current version.
