Drones.
Issue:
Drones are a new and vexing element in our lives: they reduce the need for conventional warfare and its destructive effects while making it far easier to wage perpetual war; they offer safety and security enhancements in civilian society while reducing our privacy and other civil rights; they offer economic gain to some - and both benefit and disadvantage to all. We have not begun to examine the deep implications of drones for our world.
Deception:
Today the primary argument for drone use is that they provide "surgical" accuracy in warfare, reducing the body count of innocents. Rising arguments for non-military use of drones claim advantages in safety, security, law enforcement and unlimited economic potential. Much of this is deception.
Reality:
Drones are a Pandora's Box that - on balance - should be kept closed for the limitless problems they cause. Advocacy of drones is an ultimate example of widespread deception in service to renegade government and business. Their development and use are proceeding at breakneck speed within the vacuum of uninformed public discourse.
Drones, or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have been in use for decades, primarily by militaries. Yet they remain a very new technology in terms of their potential for far broader use, not only in theaters of war but in civilian society as well. We are entering a new era in which drones are transforming our lives to much the same extent as previous landmark technologies such as electricity, flight and the Internet. Unlike most other technologies, however, drones have the capacity to rapidly create a de facto police state from which we, civilians in our daily lives, will have no escape.
It is well-recognized that new technology - for all its promise - can prove harmful in unimagined ways, especially when not properly vetted and regulated. Some technologies are primarily good, others only bad, with the rest offering us a mix of both, a sort of Hobson's choice. The list is virtually endless: nuclear power is poisoning our planet while providing neither safe nor truly cheap power; many medications cause illness or death even while others offer improved health; nanotechnology sets the stage for harmful use of rogue technology at the same time it ushers in improvements in certain applications; computers and cell phones enable unprecedented and unlimited spying into our lives by corporations and government while adding vastly enhanced communication ability on a global scale. Technology designed for the greater good can lead to cruelly enhanced torture techniques, cause toxic pollution that degrades our environment and create other costs and problems previously unimagined.
Does this mean that technology is inherently bad and should never see the light of day? No. It means that some technology is inherently bad or can be used in destructive ways and therefore should be subject to thorough vetting, testing and public approval or rejection before it has the chance to do harm. Drones do irreparable harm - and have potential for unimaginable harm - that the public cannot see, refuses to acknowledge or cannot imagine. We will rue their introduction into our lives if we do not act to ban them in many instances and regulate them in the rest.
Consider the hundreds - or thousands - of innocent civilians known to have been killed by U.S. drone strikes since we began using them in warfare. The technology that took their lives is coming now to our cities, to our backyards. Today the public remains largely unaware of the harmful potential of drones as business and government promote their acceptance.
Conditioning the Public for Drone Acceptance, Step #1: Use of Drones in War
The use of drones to kill enemies of the United States (or any country) may seem sensible, even humane, due to military claims that they are capable of targeting and killing only "enemy combatants" as opposed to the "collateral damage" of death of innocents. Tremendous deception is required to advance this as legitimate argument. Why? Because the argument is a lie, deception piled upon deception courtesy of the United States government, the CIA, the military and the defense contractors. All of it is designed to condition the public to the benefit and acceptance of drone technology, not only in warfare but in civilian society. This point is examined and explained in detail in the Deceptions Explained section following this essay.
Conditioning the Public, Step #2: Use of Drones for Safety
As a subtle introduction of drones into civilian society, newscasts have started using drones to film places purportedly inaccessible to camera crews: disaster scenes, unsafe facilities and remote locations. This is generally welcomed as an enhancement to our lives; after all, what better way to determine where essential help is needed without endangering more lives? If drone use were limited to these types of applications they would no doubt be widely considered beneficial. Yet confining their use to only the truly beneficial applications is not under consideration. Drones will be used to surveil public spaces and byways; while this type of use has conceivable benefits, the potential for tracking and spying on innocent citizens will know no limits if not thoroughly regulated.
Conditioning the Public, Step #3: Use of Drones for Business
Say you are in the market for a new home or apartment or vacation destination. What could be more convenient to your search than this: intimate aerial and fly-through views of a property and its neighborhood are as close as your laptop, tablet or cell phone. The downside? The same drone filming that other place can film and hear your backyard in violation of your privacy; your local government can surveil your property to ensure code compliance or adherence to behavior laws; drones can follow and track you without your permission; businesses can offer deliveries by drone, bringing increased air traffic down to street level everywhere.
Conditioning the Public, Step #4: Use of Drones for Recreation
Really, flying your own drone has got to be fun. And limitless. While the Federal Aviation Administration drafts rules for use of drones in civilian airspace, the emphasis is on ensuring that drones do not interfere with your passenger plane or sensitive locations. Yet drones in the hands of civilians and businesses will know no limits of the kind designed to protect you from surveillance or errant vehicles; they may well only protect the property of government and big businesses. Rest assured that the FAA will not be concerned with preserving your privacy. Your neighbors might - and businesses will - be thanking them for that.
Applications of drone technology as represented by their advocates make them seem convenient, friendly, useful and non-threatening. After all, our view of the world will no longer be quite so constrained as it has been for centuries. Like television or cell phones, drones open windows in our living rooms that were not previously there. Unlike television but like cell phones, their use against your privacy - and safety - will know no limits.
Conditioning the Public, Step #5: Use of Drones for Civil Order
You might never participate in public demonstrations or rallies although it is your constitutional right to do so - and the "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" (First Amendment) is one of the bedrock principles of our constitutional democracy. How safe would you feel if you knew that the police - or military - could send in a swarm of miniature drones, no bigger than your cell phone or a thimble, or smaller - to monitor your speech, activity and association with others, whether in the street or in an indoor hall? Worse, how safe would you feel knowing that these all-but-invisible drones could act in concert as swarms to monitor the crowd, single out and track individuals, videotape movement and monitor conversation, deliver pepper spray or other chemicals, or discreetly attach themselves to your clothing and end up in your home?
This technology exists and is constantly being refined and enhanced. Nanotechnology, the benefits of which are acknowledged prior, is married to drone technology to create the nightmare surveillance state. It will not stop with surveillance. It will not stop with adverse police and military action against innocent civilians whether at home or abroad. It will not stop its inexorable flight toward integrating itself into our private affairs, our bodies and our behavior.
Solution:
Drones are inherently unsafe and invasive. Their potential for use by government and business against citizens is virtually unlimited. If you can imagine it, know that it will be done. Drones must be regulated - every drone for every purpose - and although the technology to monitor the use of drones already exists, the laws for monitoring do not. Without appropriate monitoring to protect safety, privacy and constitutional rights, drones must stay grounded.
How we choose to utilize drones within the borders of our territory is a new and largely unexplored matter. How we use them against the people of other countries is not. We have a decade of experience using drones to slaughter - on foreign soil - those we claim to be our enemy. Unfortunately, we are killing hundreds - if not thousands - of innocent people in the process. This murder continues unabated, despite President Obama's claim that the "war on terror" must end. As with land mines there will be no end to U.S. killing of innocent people or presumed criminals abroad as long as drones are accepted as legitimate weaponry. The day will come that the capture and killing of civilians by drone will be sanctioned at home. Another bedrock principle of our constitutional democracy, that of due process, will become a relic of our past.
Drones are a new and vexing element in our lives: they reduce the need for conventional warfare and its destructive effects while making it far easier to wage perpetual war; they offer safety and security enhancements in civilian society while reducing our privacy and other civil rights; they offer economic gain to some - and both benefit and disadvantage to all. We have not begun to examine the deep implications of drones for our world.
Deception:
Today the primary argument for drone use is that they provide "surgical" accuracy in warfare, reducing the body count of innocents. Rising arguments for non-military use of drones claim advantages in safety, security, law enforcement and unlimited economic potential. Much of this is deception.
Reality:
Drones are a Pandora's Box that - on balance - should be kept closed for the limitless problems they cause. Advocacy of drones is an ultimate example of widespread deception in service to renegade government and business. Their development and use are proceeding at breakneck speed within the vacuum of uninformed public discourse.
Drones, or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have been in use for decades, primarily by militaries. Yet they remain a very new technology in terms of their potential for far broader use, not only in theaters of war but in civilian society as well. We are entering a new era in which drones are transforming our lives to much the same extent as previous landmark technologies such as electricity, flight and the Internet. Unlike most other technologies, however, drones have the capacity to rapidly create a de facto police state from which we, civilians in our daily lives, will have no escape.
It is well-recognized that new technology - for all its promise - can prove harmful in unimagined ways, especially when not properly vetted and regulated. Some technologies are primarily good, others only bad, with the rest offering us a mix of both, a sort of Hobson's choice. The list is virtually endless: nuclear power is poisoning our planet while providing neither safe nor truly cheap power; many medications cause illness or death even while others offer improved health; nanotechnology sets the stage for harmful use of rogue technology at the same time it ushers in improvements in certain applications; computers and cell phones enable unprecedented and unlimited spying into our lives by corporations and government while adding vastly enhanced communication ability on a global scale. Technology designed for the greater good can lead to cruelly enhanced torture techniques, cause toxic pollution that degrades our environment and create other costs and problems previously unimagined.
Does this mean that technology is inherently bad and should never see the light of day? No. It means that some technology is inherently bad or can be used in destructive ways and therefore should be subject to thorough vetting, testing and public approval or rejection before it has the chance to do harm. Drones do irreparable harm - and have potential for unimaginable harm - that the public cannot see, refuses to acknowledge or cannot imagine. We will rue their introduction into our lives if we do not act to ban them in many instances and regulate them in the rest.
Consider the hundreds - or thousands - of innocent civilians known to have been killed by U.S. drone strikes since we began using them in warfare. The technology that took their lives is coming now to our cities, to our backyards. Today the public remains largely unaware of the harmful potential of drones as business and government promote their acceptance.
Conditioning the Public for Drone Acceptance, Step #1: Use of Drones in War
The use of drones to kill enemies of the United States (or any country) may seem sensible, even humane, due to military claims that they are capable of targeting and killing only "enemy combatants" as opposed to the "collateral damage" of death of innocents. Tremendous deception is required to advance this as legitimate argument. Why? Because the argument is a lie, deception piled upon deception courtesy of the United States government, the CIA, the military and the defense contractors. All of it is designed to condition the public to the benefit and acceptance of drone technology, not only in warfare but in civilian society. This point is examined and explained in detail in the Deceptions Explained section following this essay.
Conditioning the Public, Step #2: Use of Drones for Safety
As a subtle introduction of drones into civilian society, newscasts have started using drones to film places purportedly inaccessible to camera crews: disaster scenes, unsafe facilities and remote locations. This is generally welcomed as an enhancement to our lives; after all, what better way to determine where essential help is needed without endangering more lives? If drone use were limited to these types of applications they would no doubt be widely considered beneficial. Yet confining their use to only the truly beneficial applications is not under consideration. Drones will be used to surveil public spaces and byways; while this type of use has conceivable benefits, the potential for tracking and spying on innocent citizens will know no limits if not thoroughly regulated.
Conditioning the Public, Step #3: Use of Drones for Business
Say you are in the market for a new home or apartment or vacation destination. What could be more convenient to your search than this: intimate aerial and fly-through views of a property and its neighborhood are as close as your laptop, tablet or cell phone. The downside? The same drone filming that other place can film and hear your backyard in violation of your privacy; your local government can surveil your property to ensure code compliance or adherence to behavior laws; drones can follow and track you without your permission; businesses can offer deliveries by drone, bringing increased air traffic down to street level everywhere.
Conditioning the Public, Step #4: Use of Drones for Recreation
Really, flying your own drone has got to be fun. And limitless. While the Federal Aviation Administration drafts rules for use of drones in civilian airspace, the emphasis is on ensuring that drones do not interfere with your passenger plane or sensitive locations. Yet drones in the hands of civilians and businesses will know no limits of the kind designed to protect you from surveillance or errant vehicles; they may well only protect the property of government and big businesses. Rest assured that the FAA will not be concerned with preserving your privacy. Your neighbors might - and businesses will - be thanking them for that.
Applications of drone technology as represented by their advocates make them seem convenient, friendly, useful and non-threatening. After all, our view of the world will no longer be quite so constrained as it has been for centuries. Like television or cell phones, drones open windows in our living rooms that were not previously there. Unlike television but like cell phones, their use against your privacy - and safety - will know no limits.
Conditioning the Public, Step #5: Use of Drones for Civil Order
You might never participate in public demonstrations or rallies although it is your constitutional right to do so - and the "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" (First Amendment) is one of the bedrock principles of our constitutional democracy. How safe would you feel if you knew that the police - or military - could send in a swarm of miniature drones, no bigger than your cell phone or a thimble, or smaller - to monitor your speech, activity and association with others, whether in the street or in an indoor hall? Worse, how safe would you feel knowing that these all-but-invisible drones could act in concert as swarms to monitor the crowd, single out and track individuals, videotape movement and monitor conversation, deliver pepper spray or other chemicals, or discreetly attach themselves to your clothing and end up in your home?
This technology exists and is constantly being refined and enhanced. Nanotechnology, the benefits of which are acknowledged prior, is married to drone technology to create the nightmare surveillance state. It will not stop with surveillance. It will not stop with adverse police and military action against innocent civilians whether at home or abroad. It will not stop its inexorable flight toward integrating itself into our private affairs, our bodies and our behavior.
Solution:
Drones are inherently unsafe and invasive. Their potential for use by government and business against citizens is virtually unlimited. If you can imagine it, know that it will be done. Drones must be regulated - every drone for every purpose - and although the technology to monitor the use of drones already exists, the laws for monitoring do not. Without appropriate monitoring to protect safety, privacy and constitutional rights, drones must stay grounded.
How we choose to utilize drones within the borders of our territory is a new and largely unexplored matter. How we use them against the people of other countries is not. We have a decade of experience using drones to slaughter - on foreign soil - those we claim to be our enemy. Unfortunately, we are killing hundreds - if not thousands - of innocent people in the process. This murder continues unabated, despite President Obama's claim that the "war on terror" must end. As with land mines there will be no end to U.S. killing of innocent people or presumed criminals abroad as long as drones are accepted as legitimate weaponry. The day will come that the capture and killing of civilians by drone will be sanctioned at home. Another bedrock principle of our constitutional democracy, that of due process, will become a relic of our past.
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"Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue, but this war, like all wars, must end - that's what history advises; that's what our democracy demands. A perpetual war - through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments - will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." President Obama surely jests. We have failed to stop the use of drones and Special Forces and troop deployments. These actions have already altered our country and others in damaging ways. The "war on terror" has morphed to include "the war on innocents" through its curtailment of civil liberties, its militarization of our society, its tremendous cost in lives and money and its spread of military technology into our communities. Drones, perhaps more than any other single technology, represent the catastrophic cost of perpetual war and unregulated use of technology in foreign lands - and in our homeland.
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Deceptions Explained:
More on Conditioning the Public, Step #1: Use of Drones in War
First deception: "War" vs. "Defense"
The U.S. rarely declares war anymore, preferring instead to label its military attacks and invasions in more gentle terms: "limited strikes", "surgical strikes", "defensive actions", "interventions" etc. Just as the cabinet-level War Department was renamed Department of Defense in an effort to dispel any notion that the U.S. might be an aggressor nation, the language of combat is increasingly sanitized to deceive the public as to the horrific nature of the destruction waged in our name using our taxes. The press furthers this deception by willfully adopting the language put forth by the government and the defense contractors and public relations firms that profit from war, language that encourages us to believe that all is copacetic on the western front. Please do not be deceived: war is war, and the United States is constantly at war.
Second deception: "Enemy Combatants"
The U.S. is fond of labeling many of the people it kills or imprisons indefinitely with no access to justice as "enemy combatants", a term the U.S. has unilaterally redefined to conveniently skirt the Laws of War - rules designed to protect civilians as well as soldiers. Other terms are proffered as well: rebels, guerrillas, revolutionaries, terrorists etc. This is rife with deception.
"Enemy combatant" has historically defined members of an opposing army. After the attacks of September 11, 2011 the George W. Bush Administration expanded this definition to include any person the U.S. regards as hostile to the state - whether a soldier or civilian and regardless of their nationality, even if a U.S. citizen. Though President Obama stopped use of this term as official U.S. policy in 2009, the principle it represents remains entrenched in our nation's regard for, and treatment of, anyone we perceive to be our enemy. What is the deception here?
First deception: "War" vs. "Defense"
The U.S. rarely declares war anymore, preferring instead to label its military attacks and invasions in more gentle terms: "limited strikes", "surgical strikes", "defensive actions", "interventions" etc. Just as the cabinet-level War Department was renamed Department of Defense in an effort to dispel any notion that the U.S. might be an aggressor nation, the language of combat is increasingly sanitized to deceive the public as to the horrific nature of the destruction waged in our name using our taxes. The press furthers this deception by willfully adopting the language put forth by the government and the defense contractors and public relations firms that profit from war, language that encourages us to believe that all is copacetic on the western front. Please do not be deceived: war is war, and the United States is constantly at war.
Second deception: "Enemy Combatants"
The U.S. is fond of labeling many of the people it kills or imprisons indefinitely with no access to justice as "enemy combatants", a term the U.S. has unilaterally redefined to conveniently skirt the Laws of War - rules designed to protect civilians as well as soldiers. Other terms are proffered as well: rebels, guerrillas, revolutionaries, terrorists etc. This is rife with deception.
"Enemy combatant" has historically defined members of an opposing army. After the attacks of September 11, 2011 the George W. Bush Administration expanded this definition to include any person the U.S. regards as hostile to the state - whether a soldier or civilian and regardless of their nationality, even if a U.S. citizen. Though President Obama stopped use of this term as official U.S. policy in 2009, the principle it represents remains entrenched in our nation's regard for, and treatment of, anyone we perceive to be our enemy. What is the deception here?
- We do not typically know that the people we kill are our enemy or have committed acts of war (or terror or whatever) against us, unless they are in military uniforms representing their state. We routinely kill people in civilian clothing without first undertaking arrest, investigation, charge or trial. They are unilaterally killed without the justice we accord to ourselves, that of "innocent until proven guilty". Killing a uniformed soldier on a battlefield is an acceptable rule of engagement in war; killing others is lawful only under a stricter definition of "enemy combatant" than that used by the U.S.
- Even accepting that some of these people are indeed our sworn enemy in civilian clothing, it remains that they are fighting for their cause whether it be their country, politics, religion or community and are doing so on their native soil or - barring that - the soil of another country, not our own. Despite our disagreements we owe them the same courtesy we extend to ourselves, which is recognizing their legitimacy and sovereignty. They are not guerrillas or terrorists, they are simply our enemy as we are theirs.
- If this sounds foolish to you, consider how the use of language affects our perspective. Why is a soldier not a terrorist? Why is a terrorist not a soldier? Because we are taught that uniforms of a state confer some kind of legitimacy upon an enemy, entitling them to protections under the Laws of War. Would the attacks of September 11, 2001 be any more palatable to the U.S. had they been carried out by soldiers of our ally Saudi Arabia, instead of the Saudi Arabian non-soldier citizens that comprised the majority of the hijackers?
- Bear in mind as well that the Laws of War include a prohibition on any direct attacks against civilians or civilian objects, as well as attacks which do not attempt to distinguish between military targets and civilians. Yet U.S. drones routinely commit direct attacks against both civilians and civilian objects, making only cursory attempts - if any - to distinguish civilian from military targets.
- Finally, the Laws of War make clear the narrow circumstances in which civilians or civilian objects lose their protection - for example, when a civilian object is used for military purposes (the laws very dryly and coldly outline acceptable behavior in the business of destroying one another). The Laws prohibit the targeting of civilian populations. Yet this is what we do every time we target an alleged "enemy combatant" in a residence or café or public street, often killing people about whom we know nothing and who are often innocent whether they are our target or a bystander. It also remains that we do this exclusively on foreign soil, as invaders. We are not yet targeting foreign enemies on our soil, enemies that represent a direct and imminent threat to our homeland. When we do - and we will - our targeting will not be limited to foreigners.
End Note:
Killing U.S. civilians within our own country is our future, as the U.S. government has set the stage to lawfully label its own citizens "enemy combatants". Blatantly unconstitutional and inhumane, this approach to dealing with criminal acts within our borders - acts which should always be tried within our civilian judicial system - will transform our country into the sort of society which we have fought against for two centuries in other lands. This would be tragic enough without the use of drones. But it will be accomplished largely through the use of drones, insidious and oft-unseen forces that will soon be able to deliver every horror of science fiction and tyranny unto our lives.
Killing U.S. civilians within our own country is our future, as the U.S. government has set the stage to lawfully label its own citizens "enemy combatants". Blatantly unconstitutional and inhumane, this approach to dealing with criminal acts within our borders - acts which should always be tried within our civilian judicial system - will transform our country into the sort of society which we have fought against for two centuries in other lands. This would be tragic enough without the use of drones. But it will be accomplished largely through the use of drones, insidious and oft-unseen forces that will soon be able to deliver every horror of science fiction and tyranny unto our lives.
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