man 2 unshare tells
Use of CLONE_NEWPID requires the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability
and the suggested read for further information as suggested man 7 pid_namespaces does not really disclose or talk about the prosumable risk that makes it necessary to restrict pid_namespaces to be used by root/CAP_SYS_ADMIN only?
Indeed I wonder strongly what the risk of CLONE_NEWPID would be if run by a non-root user?
In a clone without CLONE_NEWPID the PID namespace would be unchanged and hence much broader and potentially dangerous than it would be the case of a new empty pid namespace.
Sadly the without hackery or user namespaces for a non-root user keeping track of decendent processes in linux cannot be improved when pid namespaces are not available, which though would be a very handy functionality and make it incompehensible to me why only CAP_SYS_ADMIN is thought fit to run CLONE_NEWPID. Did I miss a major point that makes CLONE_NEWPID such a risky busyness?