What do we mean when we talk about drones? Back in Shakespeare’s day it meant a buzzing bee, but in modern times the earliest use of the word referred to the unmanned aerial vehicles used during World War I to draw enemy fire away or deliver explosive payloads.

Today, purists within the drone community use the word to mean a flying robot that can navigate to multiple GPS waypoints and perform other actions without a human pilot’s constant guidance. But the term has come to mean something very different in the mind of the public and the media.

The Predator drones flying missions in the Middle East are remotely piloted, but we have come to think of them as robo-killers. The word “drone” has become a catchall to describe a range of different aircraft, and to symbolize war performed at a distance, remote killings, and a creeping surveillance state. When we talk about drones in this article, we mean UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), a category that includes a wide spectrum of remotely piloted and semi-autonomous craft that are increasingly less reliant on human pilots.

The Federal Aviation Administration expects there to be more than 30,000 UAVs over our skies by the year 2020 doing work for private companies and law enforcement. Add in the the number of highly advanced vehicles being flown by hobbyists, and that number gets much higher. “I would guess there are already forty or fifty thousand aircraft in the hands of civilians capable of autonomous flight,” says Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, who recently left the magazine to focus full time on his drone company, 3D Robotics, and community, DIY Drones. “That’s far more than our best estimates of what the military has, and the number is going to grow rapidly over the next few years.”

How have things changed so fast? “10 years ago, drones were military industrial technology, extremely expensive and some of it classified,” says Anderson. “What happened over the last decade is that the revolution in your pocket, has made that technology so cheap, and easy, and ubiquitous that regular people could do it.”

Once-rare components like accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and GPS trackers have all been driven down in cost by the explosion of mobile devices. “A lot of the technologies to pilot a drone used to be covered under what’s called export control, which is to say they were regulated as military technology,” explains Anderson. That meant you couldn’t simply order these technologies online or find them at your local hobby shop. “But there is a provision in the export control laws that exempts public domain.” In other words, once all these parts became readily available in the smartphones you could pick up at Best Buy, they were no longer banned for civilian use. “Because the stuff became so easy and so cheap, suddenly regular people could do the stuff only defense contractors could do before.”

The capabilities and cost of drones seem to obey Moore’s law. The advanced flight control systems built by DJI Innovations used to be reserved for vehicles priced between $5,000 and $10,000. Now $679 buys you DJI’s quadcopter Phantom, a craft capable of flying 22 miles per hour, achieving altitudes of more than 1,000 feet, and using GPS satellites to maintain its position, correct for strong winds, and navigate home in the event that the pilot loses his link.

“SUDDENLY REGULAR PEOPLE COULD DO THE STUFF ONLY DEFENSE CONTRACTORS COULD DO BEFORE.”

The sudden accessibility of this powerful technology requires new regulations around safety and privacy. Last year Congress passed a bill mandating that the FAA create a new framework so that drones can fly domestically, both for civilian and commercial use. The hope is that drones will spark an economic boom, helping to revolutionize industries like agriculture, security, and shipping. The FAA says it’s working on technology that would allow the drones to “sense and avoid” stationary objects, as well as one another. It’s setting up six test sites around the country to fly unmanned missions and collect data. But the new rules aren’t set to go into effect until 2015. In the meantime, commercial use is banned, and civilian drones are becoming increasingly cheap, plentiful, and powerful.

In the absence of a nationwide framework from the FAA, 30 states and numerous cities have introduced their own legislation, which could lead to a patchwork of reactionary and incompatible laws. “The thing is, the majority of the drone community is in favor of regulation,” says Chris Sanz, the founder of Skycatch, which plans to use drones to secure private property. “What we want to avoid is a lot of knee-jerk response on the state level that stifles innovation and growth in this young industry.”

“I THINK IT’S IMPORTANT TO GET AHEAD ON ISSUES LIKE THESE BEFORE THEY GET OUT OF CONTROL.”Sanz is acutely aware of how effective drones can be as a surveillance technology. Skycatch is building its own custom UAVs that will dock at a customer’s home. When triggered by a motion sensor, or as part of a pre-programmed circuit, the drones will fly out and record video, beaming the footage back to its owner’s computer, smartphone, or tablet. “What we need to do is create a set of standards for the community, to self-regulate so that we can avoid painful government oversight,” says Sanz. To this end, he is developing an air code of ethics — don’t spy on others, do not weaponize your drone — which he hopes will become industry standard. Chris Anderson’s DIY Drones has a similar community code and shuns offending members vigorously.

There is little disagreement in the drone community that laws haven’t kept pace with the evolving technology. “Some of the uses are going to be scary,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “There is a technology called ARGUS which can view an entire city at once.” The system, named for the hundred-eyed giant of Greek myth, can track the movements of every vehicle and person in a fifteen square mile radius. “It saves that data and so it has a real potential to build up a database of people’s comings and goings,” says Stanley. “We don’t believe people should live in a society where the police can watch you at all times just in case you commit a crime.”

But advocates for this budding industry say that it’s the laws around privacy which should change, rather than instituting new legislation aimed specifically at drones. “The fact that drones are capable of doing a lot of aerial surveillance at low cost wouldn’t be that big a deal, but for the fact that privacy law largely isn’t up to the task,” says Ryan Calo, a professor of law at the University of Washington.

Calo points to cases like Florida vs Riley, where police used a helicopter to see into a greenhouse through missing panels on a roof, spotted marijuana plants, then used that as evidence to obtain a warrant. The Supreme Court ruled that the aerial search didn’t violate the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights, because citizens can have no reasonable expectation of privacy of anything viewable from a public vantage. “That kind of doctrine will likely be applied to drones as well,” said Calo.

The Virginia House and Senate recently passed a bill banning the use of drones by government and law enforcement for the next two years, and it’s now awaiting the governor’s signature. “I think there’s a sense of urgency,” Donald McEachin, the Democratic state senator in Virginia who introduced this legislation, told the Daily Beast. “I think it’s important to get ahead on issues like these before they get out of control. We can imagine the problems that drones will bring in the future. I believe when the Founding Fathers wrote the Fourth Amendment, they never envisioned a low rider that could sit over your house and see things and hear things.”

Another member of the Democratic caucus, speaking anonymously, joked to The Verge that, “This legislation brought out supporters from the Tea Party and the ACLU. When those folks line up on the same side, you know it’s either a damn good idea, or the end times are here.”

But Calo says the fatal flaw with legislation like the Virginia bill is that it is narrowly aimed at flying drones. “Why draft a bill that specifically regulates robots which fly through the air? Then it doesn’t pertain to the new machine someone invents that climbs up walls instead. The cameras are going to keep getting better. What needs to change are the privacy laws.”