The Federal Aviation Administration reports a surge in the number of near-midair collisions between small privately-owned drones and commercial planes and other aircraft. Disaster is inevitable, but maybe this development could lead to something positive.
Fun with Dangerous Drones
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Such as…?
Right now, it is the nation/state corporate entity that controls virtually all information on this planet. Wanna’ know how to hack into a (Chinese/Russian/EU … but mostly American) drone control center? Just buy that information from some appropriate corporate spy. The global corporate hegemon is tapped into everything.
They’ve even made movies pantomiming this theme, except instead of a psychotic super-computer, it’ll probably just be some super-hacking, Israeli Zio-cyber-nerd redirecting a sidewinding American drone to take out BarryHO (and then try blaming it on some cluelessly brain dead Haji).
DanD
I’m looking forward to Apple pay being hacked.Whoo-hoo!!!
The positive? That’s easy. With more and more drones, the opportunities for espionage increase. How small do you think a skilled hobbyist could make a drone? Size of a pack of playing cards? Smaller? Imagine what happens when someone manages to sneak a pickup mike into a cop car and releases the unedited conversations online.
Privacy is essential for civilization to fumble along. As the joke goes, if people saw how I behave while driving alone down a deserted stretch of road, I’d be locked up. Removing that privacy is like pulling all the oil out of a car engine.
And (to respond to CrazyH’s question of several topics ago) that, I guess, is the reason I have such a visceral reaction to Mark Zuckerberg. When he invented Facebook, it was almost like something goofy and stupid, the kind of nonsense done by a college kid who doesn’t have to worry about making a living. And then he — his lawyers, I should type — and the PR people got going. Every scrap of information is harvested to sell crap to people. The government gets a direct feed into everything you post. Collectively, we become conditioned to think privacy is quaint and silly.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, like some idiot-king, is kept playing in his room while the business types who really know how to make the trains run on time get dug in. (Remember Dubya and his keepers?) And does Zuckerberg ever snap out of it all and realize, “My God. I’ve created the Police State’s wet dream?” No. For him it’s all about “Lookit! Lookit! Lookit how smart I am!” He never had his moment of moral introspection. He wears a faux attitude of being just an ‘umble coder, really, that’s all I is. Just an ‘umble coder, guvna. I’m perfectly okay sleeping on a couch. I wear me ‘oodies and I does me coding.
But at some level, unless he’s completely without a moral compass, he has to realize that he’s created something that not only strips away privacy, but also conditions people to see nothing wrong with having privacy stripped away. And all he can say? “Lookit! Lookit!”
About 20 years ago, a friend of mine used to talk about how the “government” was building “relocation centers” in the Midwest: giant compounds with guard towers, electrified chain link fences, barbed wire. And I used to laugh at the thought of these “secret” concentration camps.
Now I read the news and I get a little less jovial each year. Whether there are actually camps going up is no longer the issue. The point is that we’re now so much closer to that mental state as a collective group in which such a solution will be seen as perfectly reasonable. And part of how we get there is from Facebook, and the NSA, and Verizon, and all the others not just stealing our privacy but making it harder and harder to retain what little privacy remains. We’re all being pushed forward over the cliff.
Hear, hear!
Ted, when the FBI or one of the other US (in)security agencies comes knocking on or knocking down your door and you’re accused of aiding and abetting «asymmetrical warfare», the above cartoon will be produced as Evidence A. Small cheap drones against large dear ones – why that strikes at the very core of the military-industrial complex !…
Henri