These devices are helping activists expose what authoritarian regimes and oligarchies have long kept carefully hidden. The entire operation spans just a few minutes: After zipping off the ground in a nondescript field just outside Kiev, the quadricopter whirls its way over the elite gated community nearby, where at least one Ukrainian judge is believed to own property with an estimated value far exceeding the funds disclosed in her official declaration. Collecting photo and video evidence of the impressive estate and its carefully manicured lawn, the device returns safely and quietly back to the car by the time a perplexed security guard calls the cops. Later, at the headquarters of Prosud, a civil society organization that pushes for transparency in Ukraine’s judicial system, director Kateryna Butko explains just how crucial drones have become to her group’s work — as well as to that of so many other like-minded organizations and citizens across Eastern Europe and parts of Central Asia. Activists around the former Soviet Union, where corruption remains ingrained, have increasingly relied on drones as a powerful tool to back up the allegations they’d long chanted at rallies or chattered about online. Especially in often Byzantine political systems, where hard evidence of official graft is difficult to come by, flying over lavish properties belonging to officials with nominally meager salaries is the perfect visual retort to claims by those very officials that they live within the law. | 