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Pentagon Documents the Military's Growing Domestic Drone Use (zdnet.com)
New data on the Pentagon's domestic drone use documents 11 missions during the 2018 fiscal year. That's up from 11 missions over the entire span of 2011 through 2017, as noted by Dan Gettinger, co-director of Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone. ZDNet reports: Most of the military's 2018 missions fell under the category of "Defense Support of Civil Authorities." That meant responding to requests from the governors of California and Oregon for support during last year's wildfire season, as well as helping the South Carolina National Guard with its Hurricane Florence flood response. Defense Department drones were also on call throughout 2018 to provide Southern Border support for a regiment of the Army. In 2018, the military also used its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in three cases to provide Defense Department installation and airspace support. It also responded to a request from the governor of New York for support during an emergency response training exercise. And for five months during the fiscal year, it used drones to support the US Customs and Border Patrol's counterdrug operations.
With the upcoming Fascism, the military will mostly serve to keep the masses under control. They see that clearly and are preparing for that mission.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The police already have actual assault rifles, armored assault vehicles, and grenade launchers. Why would you need the military?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
A country that is free to wiretap you without a warrant will also be free to surveil you using drones
Don't ask "if" this is being abused, ask "where" and "how often"
This public release is a dog and pony show
Using drone to help civil authorities during a wildfire, hurricane relief, or National Guard training exercise.
And I like how TFA shows a drone armed with missiles; those are useful for fighting a wildfire I suppose.
Unarmed drones are just sky cameras - fairly cheap, and basically a slightly different shade of the other sky cameras we have in the form of satellites.
As long as they're coordinating with the FAA, and validly serving the public interests rather than doing it for income or favors to third parties, I'm generally cool with it. It's actually a relatively cheap way to keep those folks busy and maintaining a large-scale force of pilots and software that would likely be useful in future intelligence-focused hot zones.
Armed drones on the other hand have WAAAY too many forms of major liability - from theft, to crashes, to irresponsible use, to accidents even with responsible use. I say don't even have them installed with hard points to install weapons, and make converting them to armed drones require several forms of permission and emergency confirmation at the least - and even then, that's more the job of the police during emergencies.
If you want to train with armed drones, do it in simulations, or rarely in the desert in existing ordinance testing zones. Don't risk the liability of using them anywhere near populated areas or in any kind of unrestrained use - that's way outside the military's realm of responsibility.
Ryan Fenton
may be handy in the elimination of police high speed pursuits. They could either track or target the vehicle...
Drones could also be useful in surveillance of high crime areas that have not deployed sufficient camera coverage.
Not that anybody would ever take advantage of drones for their own personal/political gains.
I want someone to do some long-term analysis of traffic patterns on highways to try and improve efficiency and identify the causes of backups.
Drones are fine by any branch of the government to use domestically on humanitarian missions, as long as the economics are correctly calculated for running each mission. I'll give an exaggerated example to illustrate my point. If it takes a thousand dollar weapon to jam a billion dollar drone, then the economics of running the drone on a mission should shut the mission down, or should alter its mission. This might apply to avoiding to use highly expensive and sophisticated drones on missions to protect US borders against hostile acts, for instance. In this case, the government should use drones during its missions, which the government can afford to have jammed. That is to say, the government should use inexpensive, throw away, unsophisticated drones to do the job. It is not clear from this report, what types of drones are being deployed in each mission.
Yes, liberals have already illegally taken over the house and are using it to push there fascist ideas about open boarders and gun confiscation. Soon they will finish there bullshit "investigation" of the president and try to do a coup to overthrow him and put there 'national socialist' leader nancy pelosi in charge.
Around the DC / Northern Virginia area, I occasionally see military drones flying at night.
(Yes, that's what they are. I'm an aircraft pilot and I know what I'm looking at.)
I've seen them at very low level flying above the road, and also flying around on military bases that are bisected by public highways. At first you think it's a helicopter until it gets close enough.
Big surprise...
In The Color Of Money Paul Newman's character criticizes Tom Cruise's character for wasting his time with some video game, to which Tom replies that in 10 years time someone who scores good on video games will be a sure entry to West Point. It's all coming down to computerized reactions man!
Tom knew. That's why he and Xenu are building a space ship to get off this shithole planet.
If only there was some kind of filter you could apply to the cops to keep the good ones...
Are also just replacing aircraft performing the same duties.
Unarmed camera drones are just as dangerous imo, BUT these are all situations they would otherwise use a manned aircraft in and none of them are activities which broaden the scope of domestic surveillance by the military.
Now the interested one would be to find out how many US spy satellites are currently being used for real time tracking of regions of the US. Or those independent subcontractors in private aircraft flying around with stingrays or cameras to provide realtime surveillance over cities. Neither are under the branches of military/government being discussed here however.