The Amazon founder says he wants to see his company’s drones delivering tube socks, tools and toilet paper to people’s doorsteps by 2015 in major cities — and it looks so simple in the introductory video the company unveiled Sunday night. But a series of obstacles could ground Bezos’s drone dreams.

Among them: persuading the safety-obsessed FAA to play along, satisfying nervous privacy advocates, and taking on the groundswell of resistance by liberal activists and civil libertarians who have successfully promoted anti-drone legislation in several cities and states.

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“Technology-wise, it’s feasible,” said Mike Toscano, president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the drone industry’s D.C. trade group. “The question is: Is it safe?”

On the plus side, Amazon would be offering a so-far unseen level of convenience for online shoppers. Bezos said his “octocopters” could deliver any item weighing less than 5 pounds — equal to 86 percent of the online superstore’s inventory.

“This looks like science fiction,” he said in the “60 Minutes” segment that launched a thousand tweets. “It’s not.”

But here are some of the obstacles Bezos’s drones would have to fly past first:

Will the FAA allow it?

The safety question falls to the FAA, which is set to issue regulations for the smaller drones Amazon plans to use early next year. The FAA is separately planning to use test sites to help craft rules for larger drones that will share airspace with existing planes, although it declined to say whether any of them would involve drones intended for commercial delivery.

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Amazon said it was working with the the agency to develop the rules, and the FAA confirmed to POLITICO on Monday that “Jeff Bezos let our safety organization know of his plans.”

The FAA has already shown reluctance to push the technological envelope too far — witness the years of debate it took for the agency to finally allow airline passengers to keep their e-readers and tablets switched on during takeoff and landing.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Under current rules, the FAA allows hobbyists to fly drones, provided they stay within eyesight of the vehicle. It has also granted special permits for drone use, mostly to universities and law-enforcement agencies. But the agency says commercial use of drones is now banned, aside from one commercial operator in the Arctic.

In a speech last month, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the Obama administration expected 7,500 small drones to appear in American skies over the next five years. But he also laid out a wide array of safety concerns: What will happen if a drone loses its link to an operator? What kind of training will pilots need? How will they be able to detect obstacles in their path?

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“We must ensure the safety and efficiency of the entire airspace, including all aircraft, people and property — both manned and unmanned — in the air and on the ground,” Huerta said.

Some drone advocates worry the FAA could be too heavy-handed in regulating the smaller drones, which are expected to fly well below the skies populated by commercial aircraft.

“The question is whether a small drone weighing maybe 10 pounds really requires the same regulatory regime that’s been in place for manned aviation for decades,” said Brendan Schulman, a lawyer at Kramer Levin in New York who’s defending the first person ever targeted by the FAA for flying a civilian drone.

Applying those same standards — medical tests for drone operators, a rigorous approval process for new devices — could drive up costs for Amazon and other companies.

Making it work

The logistics of drone delivery will be dizzying. It’s easy enough to drop a package on someone’s front steps, but what if the person lives in a fifth-floor apartment? Amazon wants to launch the service in large urban areas — could a drone collide with a skyscraper?

“You have to look at the environment that Amazon and other delivery services operate in,” said George Novak, assistant vice president for civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Association. “There’s a lot of tall buildings, a lot of vehicles, a lot of pedestrians.”

It’s unclear how many drones Amazon intends to deploy. But the company has been expanding its roster of fulfillment centers to place them closer to customers, which could help make the drone service more feasible.

Toscano and AIA Vice President Ali Bahrami also raised the possibility a drone could be hacked, leading to a thief stealing a delivery.

“These things are going to have some valuable stuff on them,” Bahrami said.

And the drones themselves would be a valuable target for thieves, Forbes magazine pointed out.

No pilot required?

Bezos’s plan relies on pilot-less “autonomous” drones that Amazon would be able to program and let fly to their destination. But it’s not clear if the FAA will allow such an approach.

“You give them instructions of which GPS coordinates to go to, and they take off and they fly to those GPS coordinates,” Bezos said on “60 Minutes.”

The FAA’s plan for drone regulations sets a one-operator-to-one-drone standard, though it was unclear if the agency would be willing to change that. Late Monday afternoon, the agency issued a statement reiterating its rules barring most commercial drone operations, as well as its ban on autonomous drones.

Toscano said the rules could change if the FAA decides autonomous flight is safe based on what happens at the test sites. Then, he said, it would be possible for the drones to zip from A to B, with an operator taking control during takeoff and landing to make sure the drone doesn’t drop goods on the roof of someone’s car.

In the interview, Bezos acknowledged that matching autonomy with safety would be a challenge.

“The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need,” he said. “This thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood. That’s not good.”

What about privacy?

One of the biggest questions the FAA’s test centers have to answer is how to allow drones to take to the skies without giving Americans a new set of prying eyes to worry about.

Several digital privacy defenders have been clamoring for months about the implications of unmanned aircraft, but Amazon’s announcement takes things to a new level — not just because of what the retail giant could do with the technology but because of what others might.

“What you’re going to have is the same effect that Amazon or Walmart or any huge retailer creates whenever it uses a new technology like this: You’re going to flatten it out,” said American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Chris Calabrese, who testified before Congress on drone policy in May. “You’re going to make it much cheaper to use, you’re going to make it much more ubiquitous, and suddenly lots of other smaller entities are going to come along for the ride.”

Amazon’s drone program could raise questions including whether the drones will capture images of customers and their residences, and what would be done with those images.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wants to push for legislation to make the FAA require drone operators to be transparent about the kind of data they collect. A companion bill in the House is backed by Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), but neither measure has any co-sponsors.

“Before drones start delivering packages, we need the FAA to deliver privacy protections for the American public. Convenience should never trump constitutional protections,” Markey said in a Monday morning statement.

Getting cities and states to play along

While Congress has ordered the FAA to integrate drones into the nation’s airspace, their colleagues in state legislatures and city councils haven’t been as friendly. Dozens of states have considered legislation limiting drone use. The drone industry has been fighting the bills, but a left-right civil libertarian alliance has been successful in several states.

The most extreme example of the trend cropped up in the small Colorado town of Deer Trail, which considered granting residents licenses to hunt federally owned drones for $25 a piece and rewarding them with $100 bounties.

Much of the legislation so far has been aimed at restricting what law enforcement can do with drones, but Amazon’s effort could spur a new desire to clamp down on what private companies are doing.

Bezos seemed to acknowledge Sunday night that his 2015 target date is a bit ambitious, even as he pitched the notion.

“I don’t want anybody to think this is just around the corner,” he said on Sunday night’s program. “This is all an R&D project.”

But it’s an important R&D project, drone backers say.

“It’s these kinds of ideas that get things moving,” Novak said. “While it’s a very ambitious plan and it might not happen on Jeff Bezos’s timeline, this type of an idea can get things moving.”