Feeling a little too secure in your freedoms? Miss that post-9/11 sense of dread that the country would turn into a police state, devoid of dissent or even abnormal behavior? No longer wondering who may be listening to your phone calls? Afraid you may soon live in an open society where the sanctity of individual privacy is not only tolerated but upheld as a fundamental principle?

Me neither, but let’s suppose you were, because your fear would no longer be justified. Cuz pretty soon flying fucking robots will be silently following you everywhere you go.

Yup, these are the same ‘Predator’ drones that have been hunting and killing people who might be terrorists, the American citizens they travel with, and other assorted brown people. No word on whether the domestic model will carry the same massive deathstrike capabilities.

Now if these were normal times and a normal administration we could probably assume that this slightly-scary-but-somewhat-inevitable technology would be confined to the heavy duty work like border patrol and searching for clandestine pot farms. But lucky us — we live in interesting times indeed:

one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air–close enough to identify faces

Biker gangs? Are you fucking serious? The last time I heard of violent biker gang causing any trouble was in Cannibal Apocalypse. And even there they weren’t more than a set piece.

Since these are federally funded by the Department of Homeland Security, and we know how well-spent their money is, we can expect to see these deployed in all sorts of mission-critical capacities - real soon now.

“Phoooom,” he says, his hands blooming like a flower.

Related Posts:

• United States Using Chemical Weapons Against Iraqi Civilians (November, 2005)
• My Submission to StopTheSpying.org (January, 2008)
• “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” (April, 2008)
• Live Ink (May, 2007)
• Demotix: Citizen Journalism (July, 2008)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 10:07 pm and is filed under doomsaying, privacy, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.