Friday, January 6, 2012

Don't Have A Cow - Predator Drones And Your Livestock

Don't Have A Cow - Predator Drones And Your Livestock

So all this time talking bad about the predator drone targeted attacks and the use of them domestically had me overlook the obvious - That there's some use for them. Just take a look at how they were used domestically to crack the case of the missing cows.
Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

"We don't use [drones] on every call out," said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. "If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don't call them."

The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.

Congress first authorized Customs and Border Protection to buy unarmed Predators in 2005. Officials in charge of the fleet cite broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite "interior law enforcement support" as part of their mission.

So 12 hours of drone surveillance to find $6,000 of missing cows. Oh and terrorizing a sheriff. Sounds like a good enough use of tax dollars. I guess you should get used to this as this will be the glorious future under the benevolent gaze of the Google Homeland domestic intelligence surveillance system.

I mean, just look at this quote.
This time, Janke watched the live Predator feed from his office computer, using a password-protected government website called Big Pipe.
If that's the case, the balls in your court, Anonymous. I mean, just think about how easy that shit must be to hack into. It's probably hackable with a cantena and a laptop like the real military drones that Iran took to that airport that one time.

But hey, maybe these cows are ruining the environment. But if we're getting rid of man power looking for them they are at least killing American jobs if we have to unleash the robots on them! I can't wait for when they accidentally kill a slew of kids around the found cow like most predator drones do.

I really don't get how even the most complacent person could not be worried about police and security forces monitoring everything with flying camera robots in the sky. It's just so cartoonishly Orwellian and evil.

I mean, even the British had protest over the bus cameras and the British are fascist as fuck. Yet we can't have even one civil unrest over the course that our country seems to be taking? But maybe people just assume that this is the only domestic use that these drones will ever be put to. Looking for fucking cows in a field. And not, you know, monitoring your every movement looking for crime.

No comments: