A strange-looking plane bearing striking resemblance to the U.S. stealth drone captured by Iran in December was spotted along the San Francisco Bay waterfront. The device flying over Berkeley, however, is just a fraction of the CIA's waylaid aircraft, and it is made of plastic foam.

The 4 ½-foot-wide flying device was built by software engineers Mark Harrison and Andreas Oesterer, as a spare time project. The unmanned aircraft can fly itself to specific GPS coordinates and altitudes, while a tiny video camera mounted on the front sends a live video feed to set of goggles, offering the drone's view of the world below. "It's just like flying without all the trouble of having to be up in the air," said Harrison.

Friendlier Skies

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is trying to make skies friendlier to unmanned aircraft, especially as an entire do-it-yourself drone subculture seems to have developed, with thousands of hobbyists worldwide.

The FAA currently gives government agencies permission to fly drones domestically on a case-by-case basis. Commercial use, however, is banned, except for a small number of waivers granted to companies building experimental aircraft. On the other hand, lawmakers have urged the FAA to allow civilian use of drones in U.S. airspace by 2015. This year, the agency is expected to take the first step in this direction, by proposing rules that would allow limited use of small commercial drones. Meanwhile, the increasing ease of aerial surveillance has privacy advocates on edge, and seems to raise a constitutional issue over privacy.

Privacy Concerns

"Our concern is with all of the drones," said Jennifer Lynch, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. According to Lynch, small aircraft are hard to spot, while large drones can fly high enough not to be seen. "I think they all pose different levels of privacy risk," she added. Lynch has sued the FAA for a list of the 300 waivers it has issued for drone use in the U.S., but considers that drones used by average citizens could have important uses.

Lower Drone Prices due to Smartphones

In the past two or three years, the surge in smartphone popularity has driven drone prices sharply down, according to hobbyists. The chips used in smartphones are the same as the ones drones use, and as the use of smartphones has surged, the supply of such chips has also increased dramatically, thus driving drone prices down. "Today if you have an iPhone or an Android you basically have an autopilot in your pocket. You're just running the wrong app," said Wired magazine's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

(reported by Alexandra Burlacu, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)