My first reaction to local news items last week announcing the cancellation by the mayor of Seattle to cancel the drone program was one of jubilation over a rare citizen's victory. However, upon further reflection, I am skeptical--that it only constitutes a temporary victory. More likely, the mayor did this because of city wide protests, and the fact that he and several council members are up for re-election this year. After the hubbub dies down, a carefully crafted public relations campaign will likely be implemented to gain more public support. It would not be terribly surprising if we saw some suspicious "terrorist" incidents happen in Seattle. Then the surveillance drones will be re-introduced. Forgive my cynicism.
No doubt the Occupy movement's vigorous protest demonstrations of 2011 has impressed upon our masters in the One Percent the need to develop increased security measures, that is, to increase their security. Also, there is just too much motivation for existing among members of our ruling class to use these and other methods of spying on their subjects. As Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat writes:
There’s an entire industry of what could be called “soft-military” companies selling these gadgets to cities, financed by federal post-9/11 security grants. Congress encourages this, to the point that there’s a congressional “drone caucus,” with 60 U.S. House members, dedicated to pushing drones and other surveillance devices for domestic purposes. It’s sort of a next-gen military-industrial complex.News of the drones first began leaking out to the public in March of last year in local small publications like The Daily Weekly. I noticed last fall that the Seattle police were going to have public demonstrations of the drones, no doubt, as a public relations exercise to gain public support after-the-fact for their use.
It was soon learned that the drones were obtained through a grant from the Department of Homeland Security applied for by the Seattle police department. No doubt, all the police departments across the nations are induced by these grants to obtain the drones. This, I believe, is another illustration of how this federal agency is subverting local control over police departments--a very dangerous development.
Another example of this ominous trend is the appearance of surveillance cameras appearing in various neighborhoods in Seattle. As Westneat writes:
Last month residents noticed the city is installing 30 surveillance cameras along the waterfront, from Alki through downtown to Golden Gardens. The premise, as with the drones, is perfectly reasonable at first blush: to safeguard the Port of Seattle and other maritime spots from natural disaster or sabotage.
Except that this project was never vetted with the public, either. When it was approved by the Seattle City Council last May, it was discussed for less than two minutes before being approved unanimously. The agenda that day made no mention of a waterfront-surveillance project, only the “authorizing of an application for allocation of funds” from a grant “relating to security from terrorism.”
