Our reliance on drones to patrol the borders
Op-Ed - July 22, 2014 by Jimmy Tobias
When I think of Canada, I picture caribou herds, universal healthcare and the occasional hockey brawl. Officials at our Department of Homeland Security, however, seem to think the neighbors up North pose a serious security threat. After all, the department has spent the last five years quietly building a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles — also known as drones — to keep constant watch on the United States’ northern border.
New details of drones in the North emerged only recently, thanks to the California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. Last summer, the organization obtained a cache of documents about drone flights in America in response to its public-interest lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. These documents reveal that the department, through its Customs and Border Protection Division, has deployed at least two Predator B drones to an operating base in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The drones make frequent surveillance flights along the U.S. border with Canada, using advanced radar and video systems to survey the expansive landscape.
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We should not have to live in a world where spying robots hover above us like hawks and buzzards. Those who value privacy -- from civil libertarians, tribal nations and wilderness advocates, to ranchers and Ron Paul Republicans -- have a major stake in stopping this surveillance from spreading before it becomes the norm.
Jimmy Tobias is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He is a freelance journalist and former trail worker with the Forest Service in Idaho.
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