Every morning when I go down to the lobby of the hotel to get some coffee I pick up a free copy of USA Today. Usually it is worth what I pay for it. The Headline today was “Inmates use drones to smuggle”. My first response is that the editors of USA Today are continuing to dumb down the population by refusing to follow the rules of capitalization, but that is another rant.
Evidently prisoners are using drones to access all the contraband they have been denied. It almost seems a no-brainer. I am not so sure why it is supposed to be so hard to stop. I assume that drone controllers operate on specific frequencies. Locating the controllers is simply a matter of triangulating on the broadcast. I would also think that scanners could locate the controllers with little trouble.
The bigger problem, which is not mentioned in the article, is smuggling drugs across the border using drones. It is probably happening as we post. The border is so long and so desolate that it would not be hard to find locations free of surveillance and launch a drone to a specific location. It would also be easy to program them to go to a specific location or hone in on a specific broadcast. It would be risk free.
We have the technology to take drones out of the sky. We have the technology to make it impossible to use cell phones. We have a lot of technology we do not use. Cell phones are extremely disruptive to the school environment. We could set up jammers to keep them from working. We could get the kids focused again. The problem is that the parents would complain. They want to be able to text and call their children any time they want. We could do it in theaters and any other place that needs a lack of disruption. But we don’t.
We have the means to stop a lot of abuses. What we are lacking is the will to make them happen. We forget that our freedom stops at the edge of another persons freedom. One of the principles of liberty is that in our quest for fulfillment we need to allow others the same options and fences that we expect for ourselves.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.