The FAA is set to loosen rules to let people fly drones beyond their "line of sight. On Thursday, I published a story about the police-tech giant Flock Safety selling its drones to the private sector to track shoplifters. Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now leads Flock's drone efforts, described the ideal scenario: A security team at a Home Depot, say, launches a drone from the roof that follows shoplifting suspects to their car. The drone tracks their car through the streets, transmitting its live video feed directly to the police. It's a vision that, unsurprisingly, alarms civil liberties advocates. They say it will expand the surveillance state created by police drones, license-plate readers, and other crime tech, which has allowed law enforcement to collect massive amounts of private data without warrants.

An NYPD drone observed four minors, between the ages of 12 and 16 years old, riding on top of a train in the Bronx on Thursday as it passed multiple stations at a high speed. FIRST ON FOX: A new move by Congress would unleash civilian drone use across America's skies by establishing rules to allow them to be flown beyond a user's line of sight and using AI for approval to do so. Her LIFT Act, introduced in the House on Thursday, would require Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to establish set performance and safety standards for BVLOS operations and review current aviation standards, which were designed with manned aircraft in mind. It would also require the Transportation secretary to deploy artificial intelligence to assist with processing waiver applications to allow civilian drones to fly BVLOS. Industry operators have long pushed for new BVLOS policy to replace the current system in which individuals must apply for waivers with the Federal Aviation Adminsitration (FAA) through a costly, cumbersome process to fly beyond the line of sight.

A aviation company is turning heads with an electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle. President Donald Trump signed three new executive orders on Friday aimed at accelerating American drone innovation and supersonic air travel, while also restoring security to American airspace. The three orders will be critical to American safety and security, White House officials involved in the drafting of the orders indicated, particularly in light of major worldwide events coming to the United States in the next few years, such as the World Cup and the Olympics. In addition to bolstering safety and security, the new orders will also spur greater innovation in the aerospace and drone sectors, something White House officials said has been stifled in recent years as a result of burdensome regulations. "Flying cars are not just for the Jetsons," Michael Kratsios, a lead tech policy adviser at the White House said.

The agency recently granted Amazon's Prime Air program approval to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight from its pilots in parts of Texas. The FAA has also granted similar waivers to hundreds of police departments around the country, which are now able to fly drones miles away, much to the ire of privacy advocates. However, while the FAA doling out more waivers is notable, there's a much bigger change coming in less than a month. It promises to be the most significant drone decision in decades, and one that will decide just how many drones we all can expect to see and hear buzzing above us in the US on a daily basis. By September 16--if the FAA adheres to its deadline--the agency must issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking about whether drones can be flown beyond a visual line of sight.

Jeff Bezos likes to surprise. Roaming Amazon's global headquarters in 2013, the tycoon promised a television crew half his fortune if they could guess his company's latest innovation. "Oh my God," one of his wide-eyed guests exclaimed, as they caught sight of autonomous delivery drones. Bezos, a self-declared optimist, suggested it could happen by 2017, or maybe 2018. "I know this looks like science fiction. It's not," he told 60 Minutes on CBS in 2013.

Until recently, disruption in IT meant something very different than sending everybody home to work for a year. But the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the technology landscape, stalling some approaches and systems, while speeding the adoption of others. In our recent State of the CIO survey, tech leaders placed AI and machine learning at the top of their list of technologies most likely to significantly impact how businesses operate in 2021. IT leaders also see big data and analytics having a distinct impact, along with less widely adopted technologies such as blockchain. We reached out to IT leaders and industry analysts to get their take on which technologies pose the most disruptive potential in 2021, with some offering perspective on which technologies might be in favor as the pandemic subsides.

A team of unmanned aerial vehicle experts led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks is working on delivering emergency medical supplies and, maybe later, cargo across Alaska with drones. UAF recently announced an upcoming test to fly a package across Turnagain Arm from Indian to Hope, and while that package -- a three-pound box of Q-tips, actually -- is only one step toward those goals, it could eventually lead to major changes for Alaska communities off the road system. Cathy Cahill, director of the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration, spoke with Alaska Public Media's Casey Grove about the test and the center's work. Grove: Alaska has this kind of amazing history of delivering medical supplies in emergencies, you know, 1925, dog mushers running diphtheria serum to Nome, that kind of thing. So this idea seems kind of obvious, and not to be rude, but drones have been around for a while, why aren't we already doing this?

Flying robots that can travel dozens of kilometres without stopping could be the next big thing for power companies. Utilities in Europe are looking to long-distance drones to scour thousands of miles of grids for damage and leaks in an attempt to avoid network failures that cost them billions of dollars a year. However the technology faces major safety and regulatory hurdles that are clouding its future in the sector. Snam and EDF's network subsidiary RTE have tested prototypes of long-distance drones that fly at low altitudes over pipelines and power lines. Italy's Snam, Europe's biggest gas utility, told Reuters it is trialling one of these machines - known as BVLOS drones because they fly'beyond the visual line of sight' of operators - in the Apennine hills around Genoa. It hopes to have it scouting a 20 km stretch of pipeline soon.

The laws governing the use of drones in the United States are changing so fast it can be hard to keep up. But I'd like to explore here some proposed drone rules that never went into effect because the legislation that described them, Senate bill 2658 (the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2016), was never passed. Why care about rules that didn't become law? It's my theory that although the legislation died in Congress last year, the people championing various parts of it are still around and may yet influence future laws. So an examination of the ill-fated legislation could provide a window on what the future holds for drone operators.

Some commentators said it was just a publicity stunt. But the notion began to seem less far-fetched when Google revealed its own drone-based delivery effort in 2014, something it calls Project Wing. And in the early months of 2016, DHL actually integrated drones into its logistics network, albeit in an extremely limited way--delivering packages to a single mountaintop in Germany that is difficult to access by car in winter. "It started to get momentum after serious players came in," says Parimal Kopardekar, NASA's senior engineer for air transportation systems, who has been researching ways to work these buzzing little contraptions into an air traffic control system created for full-size aircraft. "We need to accommodate drones."