Yes, you read that correctly, the “occucopter” is a drone that is being used by protestors to monitor the police. As the 99 per cent continue their protests around the world, they’ve acquired their own surveillance drone. Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”.

So, the drone is nothing like what the Iranians paraded a few weeks ago, in fact, the Parrot AR Drone is a fairly inexpensive quadracopter, which can be piloted via smartphone or iPad.

It’s something that has been used by police and special task forces before, and it has a small built-in video camera with a R3 000 price tag, making it a pretty accessible tool for protestors.

Pool wants to adjust it so that multiple people in a crowd can assume control of it, just in case he gets detained by the police.

He also hopes to create a 3G controller to allow people to pilot the drone remotely.

Tim explained:

[It] comes back to giving ordinary people the same tools that these multimillion-dollar news corporations have.

It provides a clever loophole around certain restrictions such as when the police block press from taking shots of an incident.

He is referring to specific incident that took place during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering the area.

And what if the police take his drone out?

They can’t just fire a weapon in the air because it could seriously hurt someone. They would have no excuse because the occucopter is strictly not illegal.

Their only recourse would be to make it illegal, but it is only a toy and so they might as well make the press illegal.

Tim has been experimenting with his drone, or you can check out his live feed he calls, Timcast.

[Source: Guardian]