Flying taxmen, postmen and spies: Special ways governments use drones

Governments appear to be the ones who are using drones for some fascinating exploits. [Photo/Pixabay]

Flying drones or watching them in action can be an exciting and a thrilling experience. When used for good, drones can help capture some amazing images and film some great footage. Sometimes however, they have been used with the intention of doing good, but the outcome was far from helpful.

It also seems governments are leading in the crazy stakes, as they appear to be the ones who are using drones for some fascinating exploits. Here are a few strange and perhaps even inspirational examples of how governments across the world have used the flying devices.

Tax cheats

Spain's Tax Agency has discovered that almost 2 million homes have failed to pay the right taxes thanks to drones.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) revealed improvements to people's houses that they had failed to declare to the tax office, such as extensions and swimming pools.

The drone and satellite search was conducted across 4,340 Spanish municipalities, according to a report in Spanish daily El Mundo.​

Wasting taxpayers' money

As well as catching tax cheats, drones have been known to waste taxpayers' money.

What does a US $250,000 experimental drone get you? Apparently not much if, it disintegrates in midair during a SWAT training exercise in Montgomery County, Texas.

Granted, the drone's demise - which crashed into a lake - was caused by a rotor blade coming apart. Good thing for insurance!

County officials however, plan to replace it, hopefully with something that's a bit more tried-and-tested.

Crashing into the White House

A small drone crashed on White House grounds, causing a lockdown of the entire complex. According to the New York Times, the drone was being flown by an "inebriated, off-duty employee for a government intelligence agency," who was flying it from a nearby apartment and lost control.

Since this incident, DJI - the makers of the drone - have updated the firmware to ban its drones from flying in the nation's capital.

Crashing a drone in your neighbor's backyard is bad enough without putting national security in jeopardy.

Shopping

The UK government is keen for drones to start delivering people's shopping, working with Amazon they hope that companies will eventually start using drones to deliver small parcels within 30 minutes of ordering something online.

Now this is probably a very useful thing for humans, but the strangest thing will be seeing all of these flying objects in the sky carrying tiny parcels and shopping bags, as well as spying on any home improvements for the taxman or potentially, just snooping on us for government intelligence services.