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Dragonfly-Sized Insect Spies Spotted, Denied
SRA8 sends in a Washington Post piece about work at various academic, government, and military labs on insect-sized flying spies. A number of people reported what appeared to be flying mechanical insects, larger than dragonflies, over an antiwar rally in Washington DC last month. The reporter got mostly no-comments from the agencies he called trying to pin down what it was they saw. Only the FBI said through a spokesman: "We don't have anything like that." The article describes work on insect cyborgs as well as purely mechanical flying spies, but quotes vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., as follows: "I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys." The article also mentions an International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland in August, at which Japanese researchers demonstrated radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths.
Robotic *and* insect overlords
Well, it is actually, literally, nothing to see - robotlike insects flying near a big crowd and nobody took any pics?
I would take these supposed sightings with a huge grain of salt. If you're expecting to be watched, then you just might see something "watching" you. Sometimes a dragonfly is just a dragonfly.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Sure, the gov't has limitless budget/captive genius scientists, etc... but really.. the technical hurdles to such a product are enormous... for starters....
Batteries - this would be very difficult to make work for a long time when it has to fly by way of flapping wings!
Control system - Airplanes are *relatively* easy to make a control system for, because they're well studied and time tested(and even this is hard and requires pounds upon pounds of circuitry (yes, the redundancy isn't necessary for a spy bug, but even the smallest processors/accelerometers/gyroscopes weigh more than a fsking bug!). A robot with flapping wings we don't understand well on the original nature-made product? not happening yet!
Reproducing a convincing style of flight
When someone caught/"killed" one, the jig would be up!
What's much more likely is if your "men in black" were to use the hundreds of *readily available* security cameras mounted.... everywhere....
Besides, if it is a protest, what are you hiding? You are OUTSIDE. You are making your desires VISIBLE for the reason of convincing others to take them! you are not in a back room being all clandestine. You want people to see you!
It seems there is no video or pictures to share of this, so there is a link to a large video of a demo of some other small flyer that requires a custom player download. This is a good example of modern gotcha journalism where being anxious for clicks and page views and movie downloads to drive their advertising model causes lots of incomplete, poorly edited, or barely relevant material to be included. Using video instead of text is particularly important since that offers a way around most ad blocking technologies.
In unrelated news, Joe Dyer has been found dead in an alley. Here's tom with the weather.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
I'm a model hobbiest. I happen to fly RC helicopters in the "small" size range. For those that want to believe these are real, more power to you, honestly. It would be really fun to buy consumer level versions of something similar to the purported goverment versions as I'm sure they would be fun as hell to fly. But frankly..... Helicopters, which are tried and tested technology, at the minature level (I fly one with an 18" rotor diamater) it becomes EXTREMELY unstable in any wind. Shrink that down to a 6" diamater and to be honest, you wouldn't be able to control it in anything but a room with no fans, etc, causing air currents. Now we're talking about dragonfly size? AND outdoors? It's, unfortunately, not a reality. At least in my opinion.
From the 9/11 commission report [p102] standard policy was to hold luggage off the plane until people were confirmed to be boarding, or to search their luggage. There was not much keeping a hijacker from taking control of an airplane. At that point I'm sure they were more concerned about bombing than hijacking; typically hijackers make a few political demands, the plane lands somewhere and they get shot or arrested.
I don't know if the 9/11 hijackers used fake IDs (I thought they just used student Visas and such), but I'm pretty sure it would have been irrelevant if they had done so, since it's not like they'd have been stopped from boarding the airplane.
Regardless, take off the damn tinfoil hat, it makes you look stupid.
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I'm not saying that any of these were used (or a newer version of the technology) at the protest but remotely controlled mini-insect UAVs have been around since the 70's. If you go to the CIA's website and take the virtual museum tour (https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/cia-museum-tour/index.html) you can actually look at the Dragonfly Insecothopter that has been declassified. From the CIA text:
"Developed by CIA's Office of Research and Development in the 1970's, this micro-UAV was the first flight of an insect-sized vehicle (insectothopter). It was intended to prove the concept of such miniaturized platforms for intelligence collection. Insectothopter had a miniature engine to move the wings up and down. A small amount of gas was used to drive the engine, and the excess was vented out the rear for extra thrust. The flight tests were impressive. However, control in any kind of crosswind proved too difficult."
Once again Im not saying these were used to spy on protesters, but I know people are going to be like "there is no such thing like this out there...." So I figured I would add in some info to show that this type of tech did exist.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
We don't yet have insect-sized spy vehicles. Maybe check back in another 15 years but not now. Besides, we don't need 'em, what we already have is scary enough. Check this shit out.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jvWgeVUqlII
http://youtube.com/watch?v=f04Jf3mnGAU&mode=related&search=spy%20drone%20police%20big%20brother
The picture quality from these drones is simply amazing. The small size means that they're very likely to escape notice from people on the ground. One of the spy drone models I've seen is a four rotor copter running off of battery with a 2.5 hour air time. Longer-haul drones are fixed wing and can stay on station for longer. These little drones are astounding. They can get a line of sight on a second floor window from a few miles away and zoom in until you feel like you're peeking in from a ladder outside. The gyroscopic stabilization means that the images remain clear and useful.
In conjunction with the air vehicles, I'm sure there's probably work going on with vermin-sized spy vehicles, something rat-like. Small enough to penetrate buildings and go unnoticed. Rather than relying on agents to covertly break into locations and install bugs, send in a "rat." If you lose it, no big deal, it's not like one of your agents was killed. Note: I don't have a link for this since I haven't seen it discussed anywhere but it seems like too obvious of an idea, someone has to be working on it somewhere.
Right now we are seeing a huge transition for drones, moving from the era of being remotely piloted aircraft to autonomous robotic aircraft. The Fire Scout the Navy is working on is completely computer-controlled, the only joysticks on the ground equipment are for directing the cameras.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSok1JRWbu0
I've read about what the scout drones can do for warfare and its revolutionary. Field commanders can get a view of the battlefield that is something you'd expect from a video game, eye in the sky, spying on enemy positions, all of the information relayed to a tactical plot in real-time. Avionics designers have been talking about sensory overload for a long time, the problem where a pilot can have more geegaws and doodads feeding him information than he can deal with at one time. That was the reason why interceptors like the F-14 and F-4 had a dedicated radar operator in addition to the pilot. That's also the reason why a guy-in-back was added to some models of the F-15. With more advanced systems fusing the streams of information into consolidated displays, one pilot can keep up with all of the information. That's why the Apache flies with a pilot and gunner but the canceled Comanche only had a single pilot.
This same process is going to be going on in the army general's command post. And with how bloody cheap technology is getting, you can well imagine the same thing will be happening for the third world military and insurgents as well.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Umm... the 9/11 hijackers didn't use fake IDs.
You failed to make your observation in a free speach zone. Your failure to comply will be noted in your "freedom file".
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Damn, and I used up all my mods points... else you would get modded up. Nobody seems to know or care that the 9/11 hijackers all were here legally, all had valid ID, all had valid tickets, none were carrying prohibited items. Nobody seems to care that we're reducing the civil rights of Americans in response to 9/11, when 9/11 ITSELF was proof that the very things we're doing would not have stopped the attacks. It's like being afraid of strangers because you keep getting mugged at family reunions. Nonsensical.
This space available.
Well considering that most people can not tell the difference between two cars, two airplanes, or two snakes I would say that this is a none story.
One nut case in a group of protesters that are sure that.
1. Each and every one of them is SO important to the peace movement that there is a whole team dedicated to watching there every move.
2. The government is just one step away from throwing them into a re eduction camp.
3. That the government not only has the technology to build robot bug but also cars that get 300 MPG an run on water.
Finally why would they use them over of all things an anti-war protest?
I mean if you want to spy on them you send in agents with small cameras and MK1 eyeballs and ears. It would be cheaper and far more effective.
If you wanted to test them then a better test would be over a military base or exercise. You would be trying to defeat trained observers then.
If you wanted to test them with untrained observers in the wild then just about any sporting event right down to a high school football game would do and again be less likely to end up in the Washington Post. Test it in Iowa or any of the other "fly over" states that the Post doesn't know exists.
So it comes down to these two options.
a. The government of the US can create almost magical technology and then is stupid enough to use it in this manner.
or
b. Someone at a anti-war protest thinks they see robotic spy bug and tells other like minded people that they saw a spy bug who are then sure they saw a spy bug......
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.