Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs

[Sequoia]

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ ”

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/10/4439/

[UnyieldingHierophant]

1. Let me mark this thread..should be fun

[kestrel91316]

2. Time to show up at anti-war rallies with butterfly nets.

And "waffle-stompers" on your feet.

BASTARDS. :grr:

[TheWraith]

3. I call bullshit.

For starters, nobody's ever really gotten one of these things to work outside of a lab. Second, even if they did, its capacity for espionage would be minimal, because it wouldn't be able to lift a decent imaging system or transmitter. Then think about the difficulty of using something like that as opposed to traditional surveilance methods if you really wanted to spy on somebody.

Sounds to me like some people are simply being paranoid.

[yellowcanine]

6. I wouldn't be so sure. The same could have been said about the A bomb in 1943.

(Not working outside of a lab). Cameras, transmitters etc getting more compact and lighter all of the time. Most traditional methods do not give you up close real time surveilance using only non-human means. I don't put a whole lot of stock in manipulating real insects for this - but the development of tiny mechanical drones that could fly over crowds and send pictures and sound to a central location? - I think it is only a matter of time.

[TheWraith]

9. Not really. The possibility of atomic bombs had been in the ether since the mid '30s.

It's sometimes exaggerated the degree to which military research can be ahead of their civilian counterparts. While it's true that the military gets, or at least implements, some things that are still only being talked about outside that circle, the level of technology generally isn't that far above what's known elsewhere. The military just has the benefits of a pretty much unlimited budget for implementation.

In any event, I still don't see there being value in this sort of thing. If you really wanted to watch a protest rally, a half-dozen guys with good telephoto lenses perched around nearby or in buildings would do better than bugcams, and would probably be less manpower-intensive, given the support crews the bugbots would need, and definitely cheaper. Hell, dress your guys up as AP photographers and nobody would ever know or care.

Matter of fact, the only reason I could see for wanting to use these things--assuming they were feasible to make--would be if you didn't care about the protest, but were using it as a convenient mass crowd as some sort of training or testing ground for your mini-robots, ala teaching them to find or track a certain person in a crowd.

Still, I don't think it's plausible, and that this story is just a bit of hysteria.

[yellowcanine]

10. I think you have hit it - it would be a test run. I don't know if it is feasible or not.

Crowds of protestors would be the perfect foils to test something like this on - you could have spotters communicating with the controllers and helping to fine tune the operation of the robots. I don't actually think this was going on at the protests in question but one entomologist did have a point - dragonflies do not fly in formation - they are loners - so it does make one wonder.


My point about the A bomb was that there were plenty of skeptics right up to the time the first one was detonated in Nevada that the things would actually work. Even after that demonstration, it was not at all clear that they could be successfully delivered to a target with conventional bombers. The Enola Gay mission was something of a crapshoot.

[Zywiec]

4. A handful of similar sightings

but no one has any pictures? No one had a camera phone to capture these nefarious creatures?

:tinfoilhat:

[leftyladyfrommo]

5. Couldn't someone just smash it with a fly swatter? n/t

[Ganja Ninja]

7. Cool! What could possibly go wrong?

[JesterCS]

8. lol

i love the Stargate SG-1, mention with that picture :)

[Loftlore]

11. spying

Mail I received today contained two open envelopes. Those letters were from
a.) 10th MI Congressional District Committee and
b.) Peace Action of Michigan.
I receive mail all the time. It is extremely rare for my mail to get to me unsealed. What are the odds that two such opened mail came to me at once? What are the odds that BOTH those opened mail would be political in their nature? I'll leave you to ponder that.
Mayhap there is no guilt in my mail coming to me opened. Maybe, but consider this. We live in a time when our government is guilty of so many crimes that one would even consider that said government to be a suspect. Could George Bush be responsible for such behavior? Would Bush have a private citizen's mail opened? You bet he could. You bet he would.

And Congress is considering expanding George Bush's right to spy on Americans. Madness. Madness.