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I mean, come on. You knew it had to happen, didn't you? In a 2010 Department of Homeland Security report, wrested from the bowels of the secrecy/surveillance state (thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation), the Customs and Border Protection agency suggests arming their small fleet of surveillance drones. The purpose: to "immobilize TOIs," or targets of interest, along the U.S.-Mexican border. Those arms would, of course, be "non-lethal" in nature. It's all so civilized. Kinda like the Star Trek folks putting their phasers on "stun," not kill. And count on it, sooner or later it will happen. And then, of course, the lethal weapons will follow. Otherwise, how in the world could we track and eliminate terrorists in "the homeland" efficiently?
All of this comes under the heading of self-fulfilling prophecy. You create and take to your battle zones a wonder weapon that, according to the promotional materials, will make the targeting of human beings so surgically precise it might even end the war on terror as we know it. (Forget the fact that, in the field, drones turn out, according to the latest military study of Afghanistan, to be far less precise than manned aircraft if you're measuring by how many civilians are knocked off, how much "collateral damage" is done.) Anyway, you use that weapon ever more profligately on distant battlefields in distant wars. You come to rely on it, even if it doesn't exactly work as advertised. And then, like the soldiers you sent into the same war zones (who didn't exactly work as advertised either), the weaponry begins to come home.
Drones? You can rant about them, write about them, organize against them, try to stop them from flying over your hometown. And still, like the implacable Terminators of film fame, they will arrive in "the homeland." Will? Have. As FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee recently, the Bureau is already using them. In a coda meant to relieve us all of drone anxiety, however, he pointed out that it's employing them "in a very, very minimal way and very seldom... we have very few." And, oh yes, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are testing drones for similar use. Also undoubtedly very minimally and very few, so don't fret (for now). As for police departments wielding armed drones, count on that, too, sooner or later.
In the meantime, those Border Patrol types, according to the New York Times, have been oh-so-happy to lend their military-grade Predator B drones to, among others, the North Dakota Army National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Forest Service. In 2012, they loaned their robotic planes out 250 times.
And these days, drones are the least of it. Lots of stuff is "coming home." As Todd Miller, who covers the U.S. borderlands for TomDispatch, makes clear, sometimes you just have to change the label on the package to suddenly find reality staring you in the face. Call it "immigration reform" and it looks like you're dealing with enormous numbers of human beings in this country illegally. Think of it as "surveillance reform" and you'll see that, as Miller points out, we're using our borderlands and those undocumented migrants as an excuse to build, experiment with, and test out a new kind of surveillance state, drones included. And count on it, too: one of these days, maybe tomorrow, some version of that surveillance state will make it to your hometown, no matter how far you are from any border. Tom
Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex
How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone
By Todd MillerThe first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown "explosion-resistant" tower, 30 feet high and 10 feet wide, directly in the center of the spacious room that holds this annual trade show. From a platform where, assumedly, a border guard would stand, you could take in the constellation of small booths offering the surveillance industry's finest products, including a staggering multitude of ways to monitor, chase, capture, or even kill people, thanks to modernistic arrays of cameras and sensors, up-armored jeeps, the latest in guns, and even surveillance balloons.
Although at the time, headlines in the Southwest emphasized potential cuts to future border-security budgets thanks to Congress's "sequester," the vast Phoenix Convention Center hall -- where the defense and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) -- told quite a different story. Clearly, the expanding global industry of border security wasn't about to go anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were about to be truly in the money thanks to "immigration reform," no matter what version of it did or didn't pass Congress. And it looks like they were absolutely right.
All around me in that tower were poster-sized fiery photos demonstrating ways it could help thwart massive attacks and fireball-style explosions. A border like the one just over 100 miles away between the United States and Mexico, it seemed to say, was not so much a place that divided people in situations of unprecedented global inequality, but a site of constant war-like danger.
Below me were booths as far as the eye could see surrounded by Disneyesque fake desert shrubbery, barbed wire, sand bags, and desert camouflage. Throw in the products on display and you could almost believe that you were wandering through a militarized border zone with a Hollywood flair.
To an awed potential customer, a salesman in a suit and tie demonstrated a mini-drone that fits in your hand like a Frisbee. It seemed to catch the technological fetishism that makes Expo the extravaganza it is. Later I asked him what such a drone would be used for. "To see what's over the next hill," he replied.
Until you visit the yearly Expo, it's easy enough to forget that the U.S. borderlands are today ground zero for the rise, growth, and spread of a domestic surveillance state. On June 27th, the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. Along with the claim that it offers a path to citizenship to millions of the undocumented living in the United States (with many stringent requirements), in its more than 1,000 pages it promises to build the largest border-policing and surveillance apparatus ever seen in the United States. The result, Senator John McCain proudly said, will be the "most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall."
This "border surge," a phrase coined by Senator Chuck Schumer, is also a surveillance surge. The Senate bill provides for the hiring of almost 19,000 new Border Patrol agents, the building of 700 additional miles of walls, fences, and barriers, and an investment of billions of dollars in the latest surveillance technologies, including drones.
In this, the bill only continues in a post-9/11 tradition in which our southern divide has become an on-the-ground laboratory for the development of a surveillance state whose mission is already moving well beyond those borderlands. Calling this "immigration reform" is like calling the National Security Agency's expanding global surveillance system a domestic telecommunications upgrade. It's really all about the country that the United States is becoming -- one of the police and the policed.
Low-Intensity War Zone
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