Predators eyeing the CAN/USA Border

MrBishop

MrBishop

Well-Known Member
WINNIPEG, Manitoba (AP) -- Unmanned surveillance aircraft will start patrolling the Canadian border by this fall, a Department of Homeland Security official said.

The propeller-driven drones, called Predators, will begin patrolling U.S. airspace along the border with Canada by September and will fly day and night, said Scott Baker, chief patrol agent of Customs and Border Protection, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

Baker recently took over the job in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and is responsible for guarding the 850-mile (1,368-kilometer) stretch of the border between Lake Superior and Montana.

"Just one of the wrong people getting through, driving through our border area, could spell catastrophe," Baker said. "So, it is a concern."

U.S. lawmakers repeatedly have voiced concerns that terrorists could exploit the remoteness of the northern border with Canada.

Predators, known by the military as unmanned aerial vehicles, have flown missions along the U.S.-Mexico border for several years, Baker said. They can cover about 850 miles (1,368 kilometers) in a five-hour mission and can remain airborne for up to 36 hours.

Depending on lighting conditions and weather, their cameras can detect a person on the ground and identify movements, but are not accurate enough to show facial features.

The patrols, which will extend along the entire 5,430 mile (8,737-kilometer) U.S.-Canadian border, initially will begin with one drone flying out of Grand Forks, said Baker. Other drones will be added later to the patrol.

The American government chose a base in Grand Forks as its Predator hub in part because of its location at the heart of the continent, Baker said.

"We're dead center on the northern border," he said. "So, they can go either way, and they're equidistant."

Many Canadians might be taken aback by the use of the Predators to track cross-border traffic, one Canadian defense analyst said.

"Didn't we have the longest undefended border for a very, very long time?" asked Ian Glenn, chairman of ING Engineering, an Ottawa consulting firm. However, he acknowledged the machines likely will be productive.

"Will it be a deterrent to terrorist activity? Yes, I guess."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.
 
their cameras can detect a person on the ground and identify movements, but are not accurate enough to show facial features.
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Translation:

There's somebody crossing the border, but we have no idea who.
 
SouthernN'Proud said:
Translation:

There's somebody crossing the border, but we have no idea who.
Click to expand...

And since its 850 miles or so away we won't be able to get there in time to do anything.The only good part is,its nice to see Timmy ,whose spent his youth playing video games finally find a job.
 
I thought this was going to be about the local hockey team.


Maybe they're just trying to crack down on the maple syrup smuggling.


[conpiracy theory]It's really not such a leap from watching who comes in to watching who goes out, is it.[/conpiracy theory]
 
RCMP and Border Guards who do fly-overs (in small planes) and drive-alongs, but it's pretty lo-tech in comparison to the Predators.
 
the band-aide on that scratch is alright, but what about the gapping gash
to the south, where our entrails are spilling out?
 
catocom said:
the band-aide on that scratch is alright, but what about the gapping gash
to the south, where our entrails are spilling out?
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Terrorists are the bogeyman du jour, please ignore anything else that you feel you might be justifiably upset by. ;)
 
Flyovers on the northern border while fencing off & putting more bodies on the soutern side seems a worthwhile start.
 
Did they get those National Guards some guns, that got runover the other day?
I didn't hear..:confused:
 
Here's something that I found accidentally.
I camped out in April 2005 a mile north of the Mexican border, in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains of Arizona, and heard two voices talking in the darkness. They were Minutemen, so-called after the nascent Minuteman Project, the “citizen border patrol” movement that wants to put a stop to illegal immigration. A wise old voice said, “Hell, when the government destroyed the unions in the 1980s, they destroyed all those protections that people had fought for to keep their wages fair. Mexicans ain’t got no protections at all. So the wages keep gettin’ pushed down and down. The Mexicans showed up twenty years ago and said, ‘What can we do?’ Dry-wall, the crap-end of the business, back-breaking, the worst. White dry-wallers charged $15 an hour. The Mexicans did it for $10 an hour. The next wave said, ‘We’ll do it for $7 an hour.’ Dry wall illegals today get $4 an hour.”

In the daylight, a Minuteman named Roy, from Midland, Tex., who voted for John Kerry, tells me he came to take a stand against the illegals who he claimed had stolen American jobs, depressed American wages, gutted the American middle class. A 33-year-old electrician named Johnny Petrello, who lives on the Arizona border, tells me, “In 1990, I was making $15 to $20 an hour on construction sites. Now I make $8 an hour. The issue is not the Mexicans: they’re good workers, they show up on time, work all day and go home.” Globalization, in short, was the issue. Globalization – labor’s global race to the bottom – was what sent the Minutemen by the hundreds to secure the borders in a borderless world, driven by the same vast pressures that drive the millions of those migrants every year inexorably northward chasing the jobs that the “free market” destroyed in their towns and on their farms.

But the Minutemen for the most part did not conceive of the problem on this scale, or if they did, it was haltingly, blindly. So instead they would seal the little stretch of fence from the Huachuca Mountains to the town of Naco, 30 miles out of 2,225, sealing it the way the Border Patrol, undermanned and overworked, could not, by standing guard at half-mile intervals all day and night, some carrying pistols, some carrying only binoculars, some holding scribbled signs, perched in lawn-chairs, some fat and stupid, some old and grim or worried and depressed, some benighted – Mexican migrants, the worst of the Minutemen cried, brought leprosy and plague and crime waves and threatened the “cultural dominance” of “white America” – and all of them angry, hating their government for a betrayal that they were only beginning to understand.

etc...
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http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/679/2/

It's a long one!
 
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