Who Showed Up to the FAA's Virtual Drone Town Hall?

Don't blame the Federal Aviation Administration for not trying to loop the general public into the domestic drone debate. There's the agency's drone-focused "request for comments" page, which allows the public to raise privacy concerns regarding the site selections of six drone proving grounds that'll soon dot the US interior. (You've got until April 23 to air your thoughts, by the way.) And on Wednesday, the agency played host to a virtual town hall on drone privacy.

It may not be much--and sure, it's all laughably last minute--but it's something. Yet given that as of this writing a whopping 55 comments have been submitted to the FAA's request for comment page (compare that with the Food and Drug Administration's flavored milk notice, which to date has pulled in a staggering 30,617 comments) I was curious to see how many folks would turn up at yesterday's two-hour forum.

Roughly 40 Americans, it turns out.

And here's the kicker: It's not like this was some sort of ultra-exclusive, tightly-vetted session à la Google+ chatting with President Obama. The floor was open to anyone here, so long as folks registered in advance. Still, 40 entrants? Really? With drones having recently gone mainstream--and with a good number of those spy (and kill!) toys set to come back home as the Afghanistan conflict draws down--to hear that not even a head for every state in the Union looged into this thing is somewhat surprising. I'll hazard the guess that there were more (or at the very least, just as many) people sitting on the back end than there were up front, spouting off concerns.

Turnout aside, there's a telling takeaway from the drone town hall. What's resoundingly clear, according to the Washington Times, is that US citizens want the FAA to stay in the business of being the FAA. Which is to say, Americans--if we can at all generalize from the town hall--would rather see the FAA keeping a watchful eye over the safety of domestic airspace, not butting in to the privacy rights discussion.

“We shouldn’t take the focus of the world’s finest aviation safety organization off of safety," retired Air Force Maj. Gen. James O. Poss told the Times. Poss, one of the 40-some citizens who entered Wednesday's online forum, said privacy is "a very important concern" when it comes to determining which candidate test sites should get the nod, but that privacy concerns are best left to other agencies.

Maybe it was all a product of weak outreach. With a bit more hype, concerned citizens maybe would've turned out in droves to this sort of digital town hall. Who knows? But for now, if this town hall headcount, together with comment-page responses, are any indication, far more Americans are losing sleep over dairy flavoring than non-consensual surveillance from above.

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone