Skip to main content

A drone coming to a neighbourhood near you......

Be concerned.   If this is going on in the USA, be assured many other countries are likely to also be doing the same - or will soon be.    What?    Drones.



"Digital watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published several thousand pages of new drone license records on Wednesday confirming innumerable theorists' fears: that drones "regularly fly" in "national airspace all around the country."

The records, which were obtained by way of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and—for the first time—three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the group writes on their Deeplinks blog. 

According to the records, the Air Force has been testing out a variety of drones, from the smaller, hand-launched Raven, Puma and Wasp drones to the larger Predator and Reaper models largely responsible for countless civilian and foreign military deaths.

Breaking down the shocking capabilities of the various machines, Deeplinks writes that the technologies "takes surveillance to a whole new level." They continue:

According to a recent Gizmodo article, the Puma AE (“All Environment”) drone can land anywhere, “either in tight city streets or onto a water surface if the mission dictates, even after a near-vertical ‘deep stall’ final approach.” Another drone, Insitu’s ScanEagle, which the Air Force has flown near Virginia Beach, sports an “inertial-stabilized camera turret, [that] allows for the tracking of a target of interest for extended periods of time, even when the target is moving and the aircraft nose is seldom pointed at the target.” Boeing’s A160 Hummingbird, which the Air Force has flown near Victorville, California, is capable of staying in the air for 16-24 hours at a time and carries a gigapixel camera and a “Forester foliage-penetration radar” system designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Perhaps the scariest is the technology carried by a Reaper drone the Air Force is flying near Lincoln, Nevada and in areas of California and Utah. This drone uses "Gorgon Stare" technology, which Wikipedia defines as “a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city.” This imagery “can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind's Eye project” being developed by DARPA."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more