Review - S 1250 Introduced – SHIELD U Act

Last month Sen Lee (R,UT) introduced S 1250, the Stopping Harmful Incidents to Enforce Lawful Drone Use (SHIELD U) Act. The bill would give airport operators the authority to conduct counter-drone activities at commercial airports. It would also allow State and local law enforcement personnel broad authority to conduct counter drone operations with little federal restrictions. No additional funding is authorized by this legislation.

This bill is essentially identical to S 896 that was introduced by Lee in March of 2023. No action was taken on that bill in the 118^th Congress. This is the third session in which Lee has introduced identical pieces of legislation (S 4801).

Moving Forward

Lee is not a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there is little chance that there will be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. I suspect that there would be significant, bipartisan opposition to granting State and local law enforcement agencies this rather sweeping cUAS authority.

Commentary

While Lee does use, in most places, the fairly standard ‘not withstanding’ language to get around current statutory provisions that would interfere with counter UAS activities, this bill does specifically attempt to modify one of those statutory restrictions, 47 USC 302a, Devices which interfere with radio reception. The crafters would amend §302a, adding an exception for ““actions taken by State or local law enforcement or the law enforcement agency of a commercial service airport  [emphasis added] using covered equipment in consultation with the Commission to detect, identify, or mitigate a threat posed by an unmanned aircraft or unmanned aircraft system.”

While this bill is specifically about State and local law enforcement cUAS, federal agencies are going to need similar cover from this statutory restraint. The initial portion of that phrase should read “… Federal, State, or local law enforcement, or ….”

 

For more information on the provisions of this bill, including an expanded commentary about existing statute language, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-1250-introduced-shield-u-act - subscription required.