The drone surge

The Huffington Post has a really interesting article on the current and future use of drones (whether they be UAVs, MAVs or other things) by the US military. Judging from the early comments, it seems there are some people also think these things are great because ‘they keep US soldiers safe’ – unfortunately they don’t seem to do the same for the villagers of the impoverished countries where they are deployed. As the International Campiagn for Robotic Arms Control (ICRAC) is arguing, there needs to be an international treaty or convention to regulate the use of such machines when they are used as or part of weapons systems, but beyond that, these systems, out of theline of vision of the general public, in terms of their policy development and often their physical deployment, are seen as ‘the future of surveillance’ within many nations too – as was revealed in Britain just the other day. The military-industrial complex is now the security-industrial complex and there is a decreasing gap between military tech and its civilian counterparts…

Author: David

I'm David Murakami Wood. I live on Wolfe Island, in Ontario, and am Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies and an Associate Professor at Queen's University, Kingston.

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