This isn't to say that you can buy any drone at all: In addition to the limits imposed by your bank account, certain specific technologies and products were developed solely for specific government clients and are currently restricted. The same is true of certain weapons and imaging technologies, which cannot be privately purchased.
But this doesn't pose much of a limit to the size or potential lethality of your personal drone. The technologies relating to UAVs are no easier to put back into bottles than any other genies, and there's currently nothing to stop a mayhem-minded citizen from creating his own fairly sophisticated weaponized UAV. You can buy toy drones for under a hundred bucks. Attach a tiny camera and a small remotely controlled explosive charge and you can, at a minimum, cause havoc in your immediate neighborhood. If you're technologically savvy and you have a bigger budget, you can escalate: Buy a bigger drone, or an even bigger one, and attach legally available weapons, and you're in excellent shape to start a small armed conflict.
As long as you stick to components that are legal to purchase, there are no apparent legal barriers to creating your own weaponized UAV (though it remains an idiotic and antisocial idea). Using your weaponized drone is another story: All the usual criminal laws apply. So don't even think about it.
And except in uncontested airspace, small drone wars are not easy to sustain; even sophisticated military drones remain fairly vulnerable to basic anti-aircraft systems. They can be shot down; their computerized control systems can be hacked. This is still more true for do-it-yourself drones manufactured by even the most malevolent hobbyists.
In this sense, UAVs don't pose unique new problems. They just offer additional (and often cheaper) ways to pose common old problems. Neighbors who stockpile assault weapons are scary, whether they add drones to the arsenal or not. Those who unlawfully use weapons to intimidate or kill are criminals, whether they do their killing with slingshots or hand-made explosives dropped from personal UAVs. By and large, the same is true of UAVs equipped with surveillance cameras and electronic eavesdropping devices: If the paparazzi are after you, there are already plenty of legal ways for them to make your life miserable. The same goes for your nosy neighbor and for paranoid moms with nanny-cams.
None of this keeps most of us from drone-related freak-outs, of course. In a recent poll, 60 percent of Americans reported concerns that government use of drones would invade their privacy. Incredibly, 47 percent of Americans believe they should have a right to shoot down a drone flying over their property and taking pictures. (My Roomba shows no inclination to go airborne, but just to be safe, I've ordered it to stay indoors).
Widespread angst about drones will almost certainly lead to tighter regulation in the next few years. The FAA has been charged by Congress with finding a way to integrate both privately owned and government-owned UAVs into the national airspace by 2015, which will require the agency to develop rules relating to the licensing and use of UAVs. There will likely be more stringent rules for hobbyists as well.
Meanwhile, several states are already considering drone-related legislation, though given FAA preeminence when it comes to regulating airspace, it's an open question whether states have the legal authority to regulate drones themselves. (Does the airspace at knee-level count as airspace, wonders US News?) Some scholars, such as the University of Washington's Ryan Calo, even argue that drones may end up being the best thing that ever happened to privacy law. Until recently, it was mostly the left and libertarians who worried about the rise of the surveillance state. Thanks to drones, these anxieties have gone mainstream.
Not all drone uses are nefarious, of course: UAVs also have great potential to be used "for good" -- finding missing persons, spotting early signs of impending atrocities, assisting during natural disasters, and so on. Ironically, some journalists are using personally owned surveillance drones to keep an eye on government drone bases. As we move towards a more coherent legal and regulatory regime for UAVs and the behaviors they enable, we'll need to make sure we preserve the ability to use drones for the public good.
Drones are the new "in thing" in the world of policy-wonkery, too. Consider political science pundit extraordinaire Francis Fukuyama, who is building his own drone (and blogging about it). This is the man who once prophesized "the end of history."
Really, what more do you need to know?
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