But the continued fortification of the border (and the profits that accompany it) caught only one as

Drones are nothing new. The first of them took to America's skies before the Wright Brothers plane lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903. In the years since, "unmanned air systems" (UAS) have played a relatively minor role in domestic aviation. All that, however, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes is about to change in a major way.
"UAS have evolved from simple radio controlled model airplanes to sophisticated aircraft that today play a unique role in many public missions such as border surveillance, weather monitoring, military training, wildlife surveys and local law enforcement, and have the potential to do so for many civil missions as well." So reads part of a research and development " roadmap " put out earlier this year by the U.S. Joint Planning and Development Office (a multiagency initiative that includes the Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and White House Office enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes of Science and Technology Policy). "According to industry forecasts," the report notes, "UAS operations will increase exponentially in a variety of key military and civil areas. About 50 U.S. companies, universities, and government enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes organizations… are developing over 150 different unmanned aircraft designs. Projections for 2010 to 2019 predict more than 20,000 UAS produced in the U.S."
It was only in the 1990s that the U.S. Border Patrol first began considering the use of remotely piloted aircraft. After the attacks of 9/11, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the funding bonanza enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes that followed, the DHS's Customs and Border Protection Office began experimenting enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes with unmanned planes. In 2005, it settled on using General Atomics' Reaper and today a fleet of nine of these drones patrol the northern and southern U.S. borders. Their brethren in America's war zones have tended to crash at an alarming rate due to weather, mechanical failures, and computer glitches, have proven vulnerable compared to manned jets, and are susceptible to all manner of electronic attack. The domestic drones, too, have failed to impress. As a recent Los Angeles Times article noted : "The border drones require an hour of maintenance for every hour they fly, cost more to operate than anticipated, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes and are frequently grounded by rain or other bad weather, according to a draft audit of the program last month by the Homeland Security enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes Department's inspector general."
But don't expect such hard truths to have much impact. enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes After all, as Todd Miller demonstrates in his inaugural TomDispatch post, border security is an arena for true believers. And despite every indication of their crash-and-burn future, expect ever more overhead, up north and down south and in-between, in the years ahead. Nick Turse
William "Drew" enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes developments on the southern border of the United States in football terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the technology his company is trying to sell -- a mobile surveillance system named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller -- acts like a "roving linebacker."
As Dodds describes it, unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers often cross the line of scrimmage undetected. At best, they are seldom caught until the "last mile," far from the boundary line. His surveillance system, he claims, will cover a lot more of that ground in very little time and from multiple angles. It will become the border-enforcement equivalent of New York Giants' linebacking great, Lawrence Taylor.
enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes To listen to Dodds, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes an ex-Marine -- Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001-2004 -- with the hulking physique of a linebacker himself, is to experience a new worldview being constructed on the run. Even a decade or so ago, it might have seemed like a mad dream from the American fringe. These days, his all-the-world's-a-football-field vision seemed perfectly mainstream inside the brightly-lit convention hall in Phoenix, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes Arizona, where the seventh annual Border Security Expo took place this March. Dodds was just one of hundreds of salespeople enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes peddling their border-enforcement products and national security wares, and StrongWatch but one of more than 100 companies scrambling for a profitable enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes edge in an exploding market.
Vivid as he is, Dodds is speaking a new corporate language embedded in an ever-more powerful universe in which the need to build up "boundary enforcement" is accepted, even celebrated, rather than debated. It's a world where billions of dollars are potentially enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes at stake, and one in which nothing is more important than creating, testing, and even flaunting increasingly sophisticated and expensive technologies meant for border patrol and social control, without serious thought as to what they might really enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes portend.
After all, the Arizona-Mexico border region is Ground Zero for the development of an immigration enforcement apparatus which soon enough may travel from the southern border to a neighborhood near you.
The sold-out convention hall was abuzz with energy befitting an industry whose time has come. Wandering its aisles, you could sense the excitement, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes the sound of money being spent, the cacophony of hundreds of voices boosting product, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes the synergy of a burgeoning marketplace of ideas and dreams. General Dynamics, FLIR thermal imaging, and Raytheon banners hung from the vast ceiling, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes competing for eyeballs with the latest in mini-surveillance blimps. NEANY Inc.'s unmanned enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes aerial drones and their water-borne equivalents sat on a thick red carpet next to desert-camouflaged trailer headquarters.
At various exhibits, mannequins dressed in camo and sporting guns with surveillance gizmos hanging off their helmets seemed as if they might walk right out of the exhibition hall and take over the sprawling city of Phoenix with brute force. Little imaginable for your futuristic fortressed border was missing from the hall. There were even ready-to-eat pocket sandwiches (with a three-year shelf life), and Brief Relief plastic urine bags. A stream of uniformed Border Patrol, military, and police officials moved from booth to booth alongside men in suits in what the sole protester outside the convention center called a "mall of death."
If there was anything that caught the control mania at the heart of this expo, it was a sign behind the DRS Technologies booth, which offered this promise: "You Draw the Line and We'll Help You Secure It." And what better place to express such a sentiment than Phoenix, the seat of Maricopa enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes County, where "America's toughest sheriff," Joe Arpaio (now being sued by the Justice Department), regularly swept through neighborhoods on a search for poor people of color who looked like they might have just slipped across the line dividing the United enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes States from Mexico.
Dodds and I stood a little more than 100 miles from that border, which has seen a staggering enforcement build-up over the last 20 years. It's distinctly a seller's market. StrongWatch enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes is typical. The company, Dodds told me, was hoping for a fat contract for its border technology. After all, everyone knew that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was about to issue a new request for proposals to build its latest version enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes of a "virtual wall" along that border -- not actual fencing, but a barrier made up of the latest in surveillance technology, including towers, cameras, sensors, and radar.
In January 2011, DHS had cancelled its previous attempt, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes known as SBInet, and the multi-billion dollar contract to the Boeing Company that went with it. Complaints were that the costly and often-delayed technological barrier was not properly enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes tailored to the rugged terrain of the borderlands, and that it had trouble distinguishing animals from humans.
But the continued fortification of the border (and the profits that accompany it) caught only one aspect of the convention's reality. After all, the Arizona portion of the U.S.-Mexican border has not only become Ground Zero for every experiment in immigration enforcement and drug interdiction, but also the incubator, testing site, showcase, and staging enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes ground enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes for ever newer versions of border-enforcement technology enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes that, sooner or later, enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes are sure to be applied globally.
As that buzzing convention floor made clear, the anything-goes enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes approach to immigration enforcement found in Arizona -- home to SB1070, the infamous anti-immigrant law now before the Supreme Court -- has generated interest from boundary-militarizers elsewhere in the country and the world. An urge for zero-tolerance-style enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes Arizona borders is spreading fast, as evidenced enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes by the convention's clientele. In addition to U.S. Border Patrol types, attendees came from law enforcement outfits and agencies nationwide, and from 18 countries around the world, including Israel and Russia.
enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes In theory, the Expo had nothing to do with SB1070, but the organizers' choice of controversial Arizona governor Jan Brewer as keynote speaker could be seen as an endorsement of the laissez-faire climate in the state. It is, in other words, the perfect place to develop and even test future technology on real people.
Brewer first assured convention-goers that the "immigration issue isn't about hate or skin color… it's about securing the border and keeping Americans safe." That out of the way, she promptly launched into one of her usual tirades, blasting the federal government enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes for not securing the border. "America's failure to understand this problem enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes at a national level and to deal with it," she insisted, "has haunted borders like mine for decades."
In fact, as Brewer well knows, the very opposite is the case. Arizona's rise to immigration importance enterprise rent car discount coupons or codes has gone hand in hand with the creation of a border version of the very homeland security state she criticizes. In reality, federal resources and De