Tinfoil Tuesday: Arsenic-Armed, Insect-Sized Predator Drones
February 7th, 2012
When I was in high school 1984 was required reading. These days I doubt they want kids that well informed. I read it twice. The first time I read it as it was intended. Winston Smith is cast as a tragic hero crushed beneath the boot a tyrannical system. The second time I force myself to perceive Big Brother as beneficent and wise beyond my comprehension. Winston Smith was a dangerous dissident, a thought criminal, threatening the peace and tranquility of all. Whatever evils befell him were simply necessary for the greater good. This exercise taught me more then I ever wanted to know about authoritarian thought, because shockingly the book will support either paradigm. So when Congress calls for accelerated use of unmanned aerial drones in U.S. airspace I am not surprised. I simply presume they read the story the other way, and I feel uniquely qualified to predict where this is going.
When I first started blogging 10 years ago claiming that the government was developing surveillance programs to spy on us from the sky was disregarded as the paranoid ramblings of an insane person. At the time the go to crazy thing conspiracy theorists believe in was black helicopters, whereas today maybe it’s reptilian bankers. The bar has moved because black helicopters just don’t seem that crazy anymore. Drones were the prediction of Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, but if you combine the robotic aircraft of Brave New World with the surveillance state of 1984 you pretty much get current US policy.
Last week a House-Senate conference report called to accelerate the use of “civilian unmanned aerial systems.” Notice the name change? Over foreign soil they have the ominous name “predator drones” but over U.S. soil they change to the more benign “civilian system” even though we are talking about the exact same MQ-9 “hunter/killer” Drones that the Obama Administration has used 260 times to attack civilians in Pakistan. They just claim the domestic ones are unarmed… sure. The bill asks for a plan for “the safe integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015.” The bill also calls for the establishment of test ranges for the drones in cooperation with the Department of Defense. These same provisions already passed in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (section 1097), which mandates the establishment of “a program to integrate unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system at six test ranges.” I’m not sure what they’re testing exactly. It seems to me they have already been pretty well tested in the field.
While that’s been going on in Congress the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding research for the next generation of unmanned aerial drones. Thanks to Tiras Lin, an engineering undergrad at John Hopkins University, a swarm of insect-sized “Micro Aerial Vehicles” (MAV) is probably on their way. Up until now recreating insect flight has been notoriously difficult for mechanical engineers, but Lin had the bright idea of taking a super high-speed video camera down to the entomology department to capture a butterfly in flight. What he discovered was that the maneuverability of a butterfly has more to do with shifting it’s body mass to modify its inertia than with flapping it’s wings. This discovery means the development of new micro drones able to pilot urban environments, where variable weather conditions and complex obstacles made them impossible before.
In other words, soon drones won’t just be the robot eye watching us from above, they’ll be bug buzzing around in our face. Imagine a swarm of video capable micro drones blowing through a public demonstration and capturing a mug shot of every participant. Or how about a mosquito drone, equipped to capture the tiniest of DNA samples without you even knowing. Forget checking for a bulky GPS tracker under your car. Take a second look at that critter caught in your windshield wiper. How long before they weaponize one of these things with a little dose of arsenic, or perhaps some organic compound that would alert less suspicion? Does it still sound like the paranoid ramblings of an insane person? Because I think it will be here any day now.
And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com
