BRATTLEBORO — In my five years living at the corner of Elliot Street and the Harmony Lot, I've noticed a great paucity of air traffic compared to the many other places in the U.S. and Canada where I've lived. I enjoy a fairly unobstructed view of the sky south and east of downtown Brattleboro.
On the afternoon of (I believe) Tuesday, July 10, I had the displeasure of seeing my first domestic surveillance drone.
Likely launched from the Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass., it went west-to-east south of the Vermont border and, once it was east of the the Connecticut River, it turned due north, heading into New Hampshire, flying east and above Wantastiquet, until it faded from view, continuing north. Conspicuously, it avoided Green Mountain airspace.
With the right commercially available hardware and software, this craft had 15 minutes to spy through my unblinded windows and use facial-recognition software, along with my passport photo, to establish my whereabouts.
This theory, of course, vainly assumes they're interested in me at this time. I believe it was simply a dry run as part of a dress rehearsal for full-on drone surveillance by 2014.
While Rand Paul has offended me early and often as the junior senator from Kentucky, I have to admire the terse wording and firm moral foundation in his recent introduction of “The Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act of 2012.”
Readers of The Commons, you've been given fair warning: in the words of The Ruts, “They're watching us.”