We observe a world of increasing anxiety due to natural and man-made disasters, pandemics, andmilitary conflicts. Such disruptive events lead to decreased infrastructure and personnel availability; still, infrastructure and personnel are essential for keeping society running, and for addressing the effects of disruptions. We argue that drone technology could provide monitoring/logistics services that can help in addressing such needs. This paper focuses on the monitoring function whichcan provide situational awareness to decision makers after such a crisis. Drones are less dependenton nearby area infrastructure and can observe affected regions from above. Those are key advantagescompared to other solutions. Still, drones are dependent on communication services and ground operators. Therefore, we need drone solutions that are less dependent on the availability of local infrastructure and people. Several conceptual solutions to reach this independence, based on recent developments in drone technology, are explicitly discussed in the current paper and confronted with therequirements and boundary conditions posed by disruptive events. Validating such solutions in real emergency situations is left for future work. @en

Drone technology can potentially be useful for land-borer security - unmanned drone missions could be performed in the sky, supported by embedded sensors and data processing. Algorithmic rules can be incorporated in the drone software to make instant decisions, whereas other decisions might be made on the ground on the basis of monitoring data received from the drone. This allows for achieving context-awareness: the operation of the drone depends on the situation at hand. The mix of algorithmic and human decision-making distributed over many components raises questions that concern accountability - who would be responsible in case of an accident or a 'wrong doing': the hardware or software developers, the ground station managers, the law (regulations) makers, or the ones who have decided to use drones in the particular situation? In the current work we analyze the usability of drones with regard to land border security, featuring benefits and corresponding accountability concerns. To achieve this, we have studied drone technology and in particular: the technical features as well as the corresponding actor-roles and relationships, considering a land-border-security-related application scenario. On that basis we have carried out an analysis from an accountability perspective.

@en