As its efforts to track down former police officer and fugitive Christopher Dorner move into their second week, the LAPD has announced it will use drones in its search efforts. If you are the kind of disturbed anarcho-communist who doesn’t want to live in George Orwell’s 1984, this should be a very fucking scary development.
While this is not quite the first time a criminal suspect has been targeted by drones on U.S. soil, Dorner’s is certainly the most high-profile case of domestic drone use. It sets a dangerous precedent in a country already teeming with civil liberties abuses.
As we saw in the aftermath of Sept. 11 (and the McCarthy-era Red Scare, and the Jim Crow south, and…), the U.S. government is not at all opposed to targeting non-criminal civilians for surveillance. As technologies are developed that have more and more reach, they are consistently originally legitimized for more serious law enforcement purposes and then quietly expanded into oversight of civilians engaging in legal activities. The Obama administration has continued this unnecessary surveillance, watching over both activists and alternative journalists.
Telephone and email surveillance are one thing, and they are bad enough. But unmanned drones, which are more famous for traumatizing and murdering the people of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and more, are a vastly more invasive technology when used for surveillance. For one thing, they’re often armed, so the jump from “surveillance” sky robots to “surveillance and death” sky robots is a short one. The other issue is that drone cameras are incredibly powerful — a recent Time magazine story reports that
A Reaper drone equipped with the Air Force’s appropriately named Gorgon Stare sensor package, for example, can surveil an area 2½ miles across from 12 angles at once. Its field of view swallows entire cities. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has produced an imaging system called ARGUS that can pick out an object 6 in. long from 20,000 ft. in the air.
Perhaps at this point you are uncomfortable with the unprecedented invasion drone technology represents. But all of this is happening in the States, you say. They’re crazy down there! Canadian governments and police would never do something like that. We’re all too nice, right?
Well…
Police in cities across Canada are currently ordering these same drones. Disturbingly, there doesn’t seem to be any interest among Canadians in even learning about this development, let alone debating or contesting it. Without a public outcry or demand for information, police in Canadian cities will be able to put this technology to use in whatever way they want.
But, I mean, they definitely won’t abuse that trust, right?
via:Gizmodo via:Time image: Wikimedia
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