"The Robots of Resistance": Drones and the Media

Not that we want to conflate "the Media" and resistance.
The media being such lapdogs that when it was found the U.S. government was spying on the Associated Press the media basically rolled over and gave the "scratch my tummy" eyes.

Pathetic little 'truth-to-power poseurs' is what "the media" have become.

From The Roundtable:

Why does new technology always seem to serve the rich and powerful?
Meet the MIT visionary who kept asking that question,
as long as he could get away with it

SIMULTANEOUSLY IDENTIFY A PROBLEM & PROVIDE A SOLUTION: BORDER PATROLS 

August 2005: Willcox Playa, Arizona. The air was hot and full of wind, the ground hard and full of cracks, and an aircraft of sorts was flying directly at Josh Levinger’s chest.

It was, put mildly, irregular in composition. Its fuselage was a blue, five-gallon water cooler bottle. Its two three-liter ballast tanks once contained soda, and its aluminum propeller guard came from a bicycle. The engine originally belonged to a weed-whacker and the fabric wing overhead was designed for kite surfing. The machine’s name was Freedom Flies, and almost every part of it was borrowed or homemade.

Of the four-man team testing the airworthiness of Freedom Flies, Josh Levinger, an MIT undergrad, was one of two principle players. The other, holding a radio controller, was the device’s inventor, Chris Csikszentmihályi (pronounced CHEEK sent me HIGH), then an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.

As a concession to the heat, Chris had traded his usual collared shirt—three or four buttons always undone—for a cotton tee. Otherwise, he looked like he always did at the Lab: three-day stubble, close-cropped hair, the high forehead of a man pushing forty. Perhaps the only uncharacteristic thing about him at that moment, as Freedom Flies’s propeller tunneled through the desert air, was that his tenor voice was silent. Had Chris been able to speak, or even form a coherent thought, he might reasonably have wondered whether he’d made a horrible mistake. Academia tends to frown upon injuring students.

Chris and Josh, together with two other friends—a mechanical engineer and a computer scientist—had been living out on Willcox Playa for days, launching the aircraft, crashing, repairing, launching, and crashing again. The scene, Chris later recalled, was “definitely four guys out on the desert.” Their rented RV and a tent outside provided the only shade for miles. As often as they could, the gang grilled nopales—green prickly pear cactus leaves.

It was a basic way to live, and they were answering a basic human impulse: to send something into the sky that doesn’t belong there. In fact, what was immediately remarkable about Freedom Flies’s lumpy, un-aerodynamic bulk was the degree to which it did not resemble anything in nature that soars—bird, bat, or butterfly. Still, the irregularity of the design belied the seriousness of the endeavor: a response to drone activity along the U.S.-Mexico border. Freedom Flies may have looked like the fever dream of a junkyard attendant, but its field crew was on a mission, one with ramifications beyond the edges of Willcox Playa. The goal was to level an uneven playing field, and they had come to one of the flattest places on Earth to do it.

Now, as Freedom Flies reeled towards Josh, it resembled a pilotless version of a powered paraglider, with its rainbow parafoil unfurled overhead and engine body dangling below. The blur of the propeller formed a tan circle the size of a manhole cover. Josh’s pupils constricted.

Takeoff was not supposed to go like this. Rather, the plan was as follows: Chris would pull the weed-whacker ripcord, starting the propeller and blasting backwards a column of air that would simultaneously fill the colorful parafoil tethered ten feet behind and initiate Freedom Flies’s slow crawl forward. This motion would grow faster and faster until, rainbow wing now proudly inflated overhead, Freedom Flies’s wheels would bounce once, twice, on the hard surface of the desert and then lose contact. At that point, Chris would take control—via a model airplane remote— sending radio signals to a tiny computer on the aircraft that would direct the mechanical motion of a pair of motorized winches, originally intended for a high-end sailboat. The winches would trim the lines leading to the kite overhead, promoting steady flight. Only then could the team take a breath, having made it through the risky part. They could switch Freedom Flies over to a GPS-guided autopilot mode and throw some fresh nopales on the grill. And the aircraft would hang in the Southwestern sky like an ugly Christmas ornament, casting fearful shadows or gleaming with hope, depending on the observer....MORE