Drones: how much longer will it take...

2. The solution posed here seems to be giving Americans anti-aircraft artillery.
That is truly scary.

A passenger carrying drone would not have a pilot at the controls. It is conceivable that a helicopter could operate as a drone. It could also be piloted.

Brinc, a rising star among the many companies jockeying to sell drones to police, has a compelling founding mythology: In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, its young founder decided to aid law enforcement agencies through the use of nonviolent robots. A company promotional video obtained by The Intercept, however, reveals a different vision: Selling stun gun-armed drones to attack migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The company’s ascendant founder and CEO, Blake Resnick, recently appeared on Fox Business News to celebrate a venture capital coup: $25 million from Silicon Valley A-listers like Sam Altman, ex-LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures, and former acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan. The 21-year-old Resnick, a Thiel fellow and a new inductee to the prestigious Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the category of social impact, told Fox Business’s Stuart Varney that Brinc’s quadcopter drones are helping police defuse dangerous hostage situations on a near-daily basis. Resnick repeated his longtime claim that the company had been founded “in large part” as a lifesaving response to the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, an inspirational story that’s made its way into press coverage of the startup. With increased scrutiny paid to the moral and bodily harms posed by autonomous militarized robots, Brinc’s “Values & Ethics” webpage offers a salve, asserting a “duty to bring these technologies into the world responsibly” and a commitment to “never build technologies designed to hurt or kill.”

But a 2018 promotional video for an unreleased border security product shows that the startup’s original technological goals did involve hurting people. In the video, Resnick, standing at an unnamed stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, demonstrates how his company’s flying bots could be used to detect, track, interrogate, and ultimately physically attack would-be migrants. “This is one of the most desolate parts of our southern border,” a blazer-clad Resnick says in the video, standing beside a large metallic box adorned with solar panels. “Every year, over $100 billion of narcotics and half a million people flow through areas just like this one.” When the video was made, the Trump administration had begun investing in so-called virtual wall surveillance technologies to obviate the need for the physical wall that Donald Trump had promised during his presidential campaign, inking contracts with Brinc competitors like Anduril Industries (also linked to Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder behind the Thiel Fellowship). “There’s no wall here,” notes Resnick, “and it probably wouldn’t work anyway because of the rough terrain and eminent domain issues.” Luckily, “there is a solution,” says Resnick, gesturing to the metal chest.

Resnick would have been about 18 at the time the video was made.

In the video, Resnick calls that solution the “Wall of Drones,” in which the glinting boxes would be deployed across the border, each harboring a small robotic quadcopter with high-definition and thermal sensors, self-piloting abilities, human-detection software, and, crucially, a stun gun. Once Brinc’s border drone detected a “suspicious” person, it was to connect its sensors and built-in speaker with a Border Patrol agent, who would then remotely “interrogate” the “perpetrator.” In the video demonstration, a Latino actor referred to as “José” is walking in the middle of the desert when he is approached by the Brinc drone. José then refuses to show identification to the drone, points a gun at it, and walks away, whereupon the drone is depicted firing a Taser into his back and shooting an electrical current through him. José crumples into the dirt.

Fully realized, the Wall of Drones would have entailed hundreds or thousands of these armed robots constantly searching for targets along the border, adding more weapons to an already highly militarized stretch of the Earth.

The artificial intelligence-powered hunting and tasing of a wandering migrant isn’t a scene that’s immediately easy to reconcile with Brinc’s corporate vow: “Be mindful of the implications of our work — we won’t build a dystopia.” Today the company is still engineering sophisticated security-oriented drones with an eye toward police, the Department of Homeland Security, and defense customers but without the weaponized variant shown off in the desert. Brinc’s current main offering to police and other first responders is the LEMUR S drone, which closely resembles the Wall of Drones unit but does not have a weapon installed. It’s described by the company as a “tactical tool that can help to de-escalate, reduce risk, and save lives.” The company also sells the BRINC BALL, a spherical cellphone-like device that can be tossed into dangerous situations by police to listen and communicate remotely.

The Blake Resnick of today, three years removed from his borderland demonstration, is contrite over having worked on the border system. He told The Intercept over email that the “video is immature, deeply regrettable and not at all representative of the direction I have taken the company in since.” He described the Wall of Drones system as a “prototype” that was “never fully developed, sold, or used operationally” and was discontinued in 2018 because it is “prone to disastrous misuse. … I agree that the technology as depicted is unethical and that is one of the reasons we created a set of Values and Ethics to guide our work,” he added, referring to the website section.

Resnick also said that “the video was faked” — the company “never built a drone with a functional taser.” The video, he said, used compressed gas to fire a Taser dart at the actor but “without actually putting high voltage through the wires.”

Still, the company did try to sell the system: Resnick noted that “BRINC had initial discussions with a very limited number of parties” about purchasing the Wall of Drones system, explaining that the idea was to build something cheaper than a border wall that would reduce “the risk of gunfights between law enforcement and armed traffickers attempting to cross into the United States.” But “nothing ever progressed” with the project, and Resnick repeated his claim that he was inspired by the Las Vegas shooting “to pivot away from these uses” to serving emergency responders, though work continued on the Wall of Drones into the year following the massacre. That pivot and the company values statement predated the startup’s first employee, revenue, product delivery, and fundraising, he said. Brinc, he said, is committed to not selling weaponized drones.

Despite Resnick’s change of heart and the company’s current unarmed tack, some who spoke to The Intercept say the fact that the technology was ever on the table raises serious concerns about the values, ambitions, and judgment of Brinc and its young CEO. And though Brinc’s founder says that he’s pivoted away from drones built to intercept and incapacitate migrants, the company’s original mission — selling flying robots to aid in state security — remains in place, situating the company in an ethically fraught new frontier of business. The company recently hired a “federal capture and strategy director,” previously employed by a defense contractor selling drones to U.S. Special Operations Command, suggesting an interest in military applications.

“He’s got this whole narrative about the shooting in Vegas, but the original idea was 100 percent to use drones to tase migrants,” a source with direct knowledge of Brinc told The Intercept. The source, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their livelihood, said that Resnick at the time showed little interest in drone “applications in the non-tasing immigrants business” even though there are “a million things you can use drones for that don’t involve electrocuting people.”

Referring to Brinc’s current emphasis on nonviolence and de-escalation, this person said, “They only made that up when they raised funds from real investors like Sam Altman. The company puts out a good front about rescuing people and doing no harm, but imagine what is said to cops behind closed doors?”

An actor depicting a migrant on the U.S.-Mexico border is struck with a stun gun, demonstrating the capabilities of Brinc’s “Wall of Drones” system.

“Startups pivot all the time to where the money is,” this source added. “Google once said ‘don’t be evil.’ When the rubber hits the road, you’ve got paying customers, and those customers want things.”

A patent in Resnick’s name protecting an expanded version of the system from the video raises further questions about both his stated motivation for pivoting away from weaponized drones and about the potential for the company to use such technology in the future. Brinc provisionally applied for the patent in 2017 but formally applied in June 2018 — seven months after the Vegas shooting that Resnick said convinced him to switch to helping emergency responders. The patent was awarded to Brinc last year. The patent application, for “Drone Implemented Border Patrol,” states: “If a person is detected, an onboard facial recognition algorithm will attempt to identify the person. … In one embodiment, the facial recognition algorithm works by comparing captured facial features with the U.S. Department of State’s facial recognition database.”

The patent specifies that the onboard stun gun is a Taser X26, a powerful, discontinued electroshock weapon associated with “higher cardiac risk than other models,” according to a 2017 Reuters investigation. But a stun gun was only one of many possible options. Other potential anti-migrant armaments described in the patent include pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, rubber buckshot, plastic bullets, beanbag rounds, sponge grenades, an “electromagnetic weapon, laser weapon, microwave weapon, particle beam weapon, sonic weapon and/or plasma weapon,” along with “a sonic approach to incapacitate a target.”

Migrant and civil liberties advocates decried the technology demonstrated in the video.

“The Biden administration and Congress must not contract with companies like Brinc,” said Mitra Ebadolahi, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, after reviewing the video. “Doing so promotes profits over people and does nothing to further human safety or security.” Ebadolah added that the Wall of Drones system is “particularly horrifying when one considers potential targets: unaccompanied children, pregnant people, and asylum-seekers searching for safety.”

She echoed the source’s concerns about a pivot back to weaponized drones, stating: “In an unregulated market, tech executives follow the money, and they engineer their products for buyers that promise large profits and little scrutiny. The most attractive government contracts are with our most over-funded and under-scrutinized agencies: law enforcement.”

Jacinta Gonzalez of Mijente, a Latino advocacy and migrant rights group, described the Wall of Drones video as “absolutely horrifying” in an interview with The Intercept. “It’s terrifying to think that this is not just an awful idea that someone brings up in a brainstorming session, but [Brinc has] gone so far as to make the video,” which she says is illustrative of “how blurry the line has become between war zones and a militarized border. You can tell very clearly that these companies are getting their inspiration from the killer drones that are used in other parts of the world.”

Gonzalez said that she was disturbed by the scenario depicted in the video, which she described as a “racist fantasy” and not representative of the true humanitarian problems along the border. “If there was a drone flying over, they would most likely be finding families and people who are going through a very difficult health crisis. … They would be confronting folks that might not be speaking English.” Forcing the average southern border migrant into an interrogation with a robot designed to electrocute them “just makes a dangerous journey all the more violent, all the more likely to result in death or harm.”

Gonzalez shared skepticism over how Brinc’s current pledge to not help build a robotic police dystopia might fare in the longer term: “You cannot trust a company that is even putting ideas like this out into the world.” Avoiding a future in which the southern border is patrolled by armed flying robots “not only requires commitments from this company to say that they won’t produce this type of drone, but it also requires local police departments, and ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and Border Patrol to all proactively say, ‘This is not the type of technology that we want to invest in, we would absolutely never implement something like this.’”

Weeks of mysterious drone sightings across New Jersey are prompting heightened security concerns – and mounting frustrations – from residents, military personnel and federal, state and local officials.

While the state’s governor says there’s no threat to public safety, other state officials and local mayors are alarmed.

“I’m legitimately concerned for what the hell is going on because nobody knows,” state Assemblyman Brian Bergen told CNN affiliate News 12 New Jersey after a briefing at state police headquarters on Wednesday.

“We are literally being invaded by drones. We have no idea who is doing it and where they’re coming from,” Pequannock Mayor Ryan Herb told the station after the briefing.

Law enforcement has not identified the origin or landing sites of the drones, Mayor Michael Melham of Belleville Township said in a Facebook video update on Wednesday. He added that the drones primarily operate at night, often displaying flashing lights, but they turn off the lights and evade police helicopters when approached.

According to Melham, the drones have eluded radar detection, possibly because they do not emit frequencies or possess evasion capabilities.

He also raised alarm over where some of the drones have been spotted.

“One of the takeaways today was that these drones statewide are hovering and appearing to be surveilling New Jersey’s critical infrastructure,” Melham said.

The mayor of West Milford, Michele Dale, reported 60 drones hovering over local reservoirs.

Some members of Congress have speculated that a foreign entity may be involved in the drones, something the Pentagon rebuffed Wednesday.

The denial came hours after US Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey Republican, told Fox News the drones were from “a mothership” from Iran that is “off the East Coast of the United States of America.”

“There is not any truth to that,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”

Meanwhile, US Northern Command, which oversees the Defense Department’s homeland security efforts, said in statement Wednesday that it had “conducted a deliberate analysis of the events” regarding the drone sightings but had not been asked “to assist with these events.”

A spokesperson for the US Coast Guard, part of the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged an encounter by one of its assets with the drones.

“Multiple low-altitude aircraft were observed in the vicinity of one of our vessels near Island Beach State Park, Coast Guard Lt. Luke Pinneo told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The aircraft were not seen as an immediate threat and did not interfere with operations, Pinneo added.

CNN reached out to the Coast Guard but did not receive an immediate response.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told WBGO on Wednesday the public should feel secure while acknowledging their fears.

“Based on everything we know, there is no public safety risks we’re aware of,” Murphy said.

“Is it frustrating to have no answers? Is it frustrating to not have a source for these things? Yes,” the governor told the radio station.

The sightings began November 18 near Morris County, New Jersey, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. At times, large drones — some up to 6 feet in diameter — were seen nightly in New Jersey from dusk until 11 p.m., with sightings ranging from 4 to 180, according to state lawmakers who attended the briefing Wednesday.

The drones operate in a coordinated manner, turning off their lights to evade detection, complicating tracking efforts. They are not identified as hobbyist drones or linked to the Department of Homeland Security, State Assembly member Dawn Fantasia said on X.

The FBI is leading the investigation with the New Jersey State Police and the Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, while the US Coast Guard is assessing jurisdictional responses.

Federal agencies have ruled out any connections of local, state, or federal governments to the sightings.

Melham called for a temporary flight ban on all personnel and commercial drones in his video update, despite official advisories against such measures.

Concerns escalated after drones were spotted near the Picatinny Arsenal, a US military research facility, and over President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, according to military officials and state lawmakers. The sightings prompted the FAA to issue temporary flight restrictions over the properties.

Unnerved residents have described frequently seeing the drones hovering overhead, sometimes traveling in clusters.

While visiting family in New Jersey, travel content creator Katie Caf initially doubted reports of drones until she spotted several moving in a “zigzagging” pattern on Saturday. The 29-year-old noticed five potential drones, which she described as being the size of a bicycle. “They’re so weird looking and they’re much bigger than normal drones. I get why everyone is freaking out now … I think it’s kinda spooky.”

Fantasia said on X that the briefing occurred Wednesday at the New Jersey State Police headquarters and included descriptions of the aircraft’s movements and federal agencies’ response.

Though Murphy has said there is no known threat to the public, Fantasia and other local leaders have expressed doubt and are demanding more transparency into the investigation.

US Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, pushed for more information from federal investigators in a letter sent Tuesday to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

“I recognize the need to maintain operational security of ongoing investigations and that this situation requires complex interagency coordination,” Booker wrote. “However, there is a growing sense of uncertainty and urgency across the state – from constituents and local officials alike – despite assurances that the drones pose no known threats to public safety.”

The FBI in Newark has asked the public to report any information related to the drones, including in several areas along the Raritan River.

“Witnesses have spotted the cluster of what look to be drones and a possible fixed-wing aircraft. We have reports from the public and law enforcement dating back several weeks,” the FBI field office in Newark said December 3.

During a US Homeland Security Committee hearing Tuesday, Robert Wheeler, assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, called the phenomenon “concerning” but said “there is nothing that is known” that would lead him to identify a public safety risk.

CNN has sought more information from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and New Jersey State Police.

It was a dry and cool Wednesday evening outside the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, a longtime military installation that once made the bombs and shells that led to victory in World War II. A contractor there knocked off work and decided to wait out rush hour traffic. He picked up some takeout from Wawa, parked outside a nearby wildlife preserve and settled in to watch an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast on his phone. Then he saw a flash in the side mirror.

A light rising straight up from the tree line and toward the arsenal. He started recording. Could it have been a plane?

Or was it a drone?

And so began what seems to be the origin story of the ongoing drone saga. The contractor called in his sighting to his superiors on Nov. 13, and others followed quickly, first throughout the county, then the rest of New Jersey, then into neighboring states.

Countless people have reported mysterious hovering objects dotting the night skies and posted blurred images — a white light, a black background — on social media. Every day, for weeks. Drones. Drones?

Small drones. Drones big as vans. Blinking, stationary, speeding and zipping and buzzing.

Jeffrey Parker first saw them outside his Vineland, N.J., apartment building. He was barefoot, checking the mail, and there they were: three lights flying low and slow.

“I was like damn, that’s not airplanes,” Mr. Parker, 65, said.

Was it a foreign government? Our own government? Kids? Visitors from space?

The story grew to consume police departments, sheriffs, the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, a former reality TV star with a supposed inside line to NASA, mayors, governors, the White House and the president-elect.

But now it appears increasingly likely that if there were any drones at all, it was very few, and that most of the drones people did see — stay with this — were up there looking for the drones people thought they were seeing.

Mounting evidence, and lack thereof, suggests that perhaps the whole craze has been a sort of communal fever dream fueled by crowd mentality, confirmation bias and a general distrust in all things official.

This explanation has been widely rejected by those sharing their personal drone experiences, leaving them feeling belittled and gaslit and creating the kind of hothouse where conspiracy theories take root, grow and thrive.

‘Out in the ocean’

Five days after the arsenal sighting, on Nov. 18, multiple drones were reported, there and elsewhere in surrounding Morris County. A Facebook page called Live Storm Chasers with 1.3 million followers posted a five-drone sighting.

The Morris County Prosecutors Office issued a statement from sheriffs, police chiefs and emergency officials that simultaneously acknowledged and downplayed the sightings and urged people to “be mindful that what they read online may not be accurate.”

Still, a day later, the F.B.I. quietly opened its own investigation into the drones. The agency would later announce a drone hotline and receive some 5,000 tips.

And the Federal Aviation Administration posted temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over the arsenal and, shortly after, the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.

The owner of that club would weigh in soon enough.

November turned to December, and without any new, proven evidence or data to frame what was happening, the story exploded. A lack of facts became pure oxygen on social media and, on its heels, mainstream media. Even people’s Ring doorbells, equipped to alert users with messages from other Ring users, began to ping out drone sightings.

Jessica Fiorentino, 33, a mother of two young children in Toms River, had heard about drones, but when she went to the beach one night she couldn’t believe what she saw.

“All the way out in the ocean, drones,” she said on Friday in an interview. “Some would stay above the ocean, and some would come onto the land.” She alerted her followers on TikTok, normally filled with mom posts, and kept going out, every night, sometimes to other beaches, always posting videos.

“They are very low in Seaside Heights right now,” she said in a video on a recent December night, pointing out two lights.

“Part of me is starting to maybe think that red drone is someone’s drone, like someone here, putting it up, like police,” she reported. “And the one above it is the unidentified drone.” The video was viewed more than 393,000 times.

The federal government was widely seen as being slow to react and confusing in its messaging, which was essentially, “Don’t panic, but be vigilant.”

Then came Sunday, Dec. 8, at Island Beach State Park, a narrow stripe of coastline in southern New Jersey. A State Park Police officer contacted the local Ocean County Sheriff’s office with a frightening report right out of a summer blockbuster.

“Fifty drones were coming from the ocean toward the mainland,” the sheriff, Michael Mastronardy, told Fox News. He rushed to the beach and met the officer. “She had legitimate information she provided,” the sheriff said in a recent interview.

The following night, the sheriff was joined by a Republican congressman, Representative Chris Smith, who wanted a firsthand look.

He said the drones “have so far evaded identification, origin, mission or potential threat to Americans” and criticized the Biden administration for not taking it seriously.

Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, was frustrated by a lack of information, so he accompanied police officers on Dec. 12 to three sites that had been flooded with drone calls.

“They were kind of pointing out things that were flying,” he said. “Some, they were like, ‘That’s a drone.’ These are police officers. They’ve been out there for weeks now.”

He took videos and showed them to aviation experts, who convinced him that the objects were actually manned aircraft.

“It kind of highlighted to me: This is the information that people need,” he said.

Other lawmakers have suggested that the drones should be shot out of the sky. Some people may have tried to heed that call, in a way. Plane and helicopter pilots reported dozens of incidents of lasers being pointed at them over New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in early December. Shining a laser at an aircraft can injure or blind the pilot, and is a federal crime. The F.B.I. responded and urged people to stop.

Ms. Fiorentino, her once-MomTok now a full-time DroneTok, was still recording every night, and growing more alarmed at what she was seeing.

“There’s stuff spraying out of them — this is new to me,” she said in a video on Dec. 15. That video was viewed 485,000 times, and another she posted about spraying got 2.8 million views.

Jennifer McDonald, 48, taking her 15-minute break outside a Walmart in Pennsville, still hadn’t seen a drone well into December. Her husband kept asking her. Then she went outside and looked up.

“Hot damn,” she said. She called her husband on FaceTime and they spent her whole break watching the little lights in the sky together.

Airplanes and stars

By mid-December, after weeks of shrugs, the federal government stepped up its attempt to explain what was going on. In short, officials said: They’re not drones.

An F.B.I. representative told reporters that of the 5,000 hotline tips it received, fewer than 100 leads had been generated and deemed worthy of further investigation.

Four federal agencies quickly echoed that analysis, saying the bright lights floating or flying in the night sky above New Jersey were airplanes, helicopters, stars or drones that were not suspicious.

The messaging did not appear to resonate among the people looking up. Senator Kim, shopping with his two sons at a Lego Store in the Cherry Hill Mall recently, was approached with one question.

“What is happening with the drones?”

Bethenny Frankel, formerly of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” became another regular drone reporter on TikTok.

“I know this guy whose father worked with the Pentagon and NASA and secret projects [classic!] and he has been messaging me that he will never forgive himself if he doesn’t tell the people he knows,” she began in a post last week. “These drones are ours and quite possibly could be sniffing out something dangerous.”

The following morning, the “Good Day New York” program on Fox reported her claim, “and that it has something to do with radioactive material in New Jersey,” Rosanna Scotto, the host, said on air.

At a news conference on Dec. 16, the same day the federal agencies said most reported drone sightings were not drones, President-elect Donald J. Trump was asked about the situation, and he chuckled.

“The government knows what is happening,” he said. “For some reason, they don’t want to comment.” He seemed to allude to the airspace restrictions over his club in Bedminster, where he said he’d planned to go the following weekend.

“I think maybe I won’t spend the weekend in Bedminster,” he said. “I decided to cancel my trip.”

By the end of the week, looking to literally clear the air, the F.A.A. announced a ban on drone use in airspace above critical infrastructure in more than 90 communities in New Jersey and New York.

And Senator Kim said on Friday that federal drone detecting devices that had been put in place in hot spots in recent weeks had not detected any drones.

This will likely do little to calm a jittery public.

In Toms River, Ms. Fiorentino said she’ll keep posting TikTok videos. “We have no answers,” she said. “They’re still here. I hear more counties are getting them. More states are getting them.”

And, if she’s being honest, it’s a nice diversion after a long day of work and kids. “People are relying on me to go out there,” she said. “For me it was like, OK, I can take a break from the chaos inside.”

At Picatinny Arsenal, where it all began weeks ago, the contractor who reported what he saw in his car’s mirror has otherwise stayed quiet about the incident, telling just a few colleagues and an old college classmate. He is speaking out now on the condition that his name be withheld because he is not authorized to address the matter. As he’s watched the drone frenzy spread across the country, he said he can’t help but worry he’s to blame.

“I feel,” he said, “like I’ve caused mass hysteria.”

For readers that encounter this site later, wanting to know what was happening during this time—I feel responsible to record facts about events.

Meanwhile, you and others are providing the phenomenon of concerted attack against the people providing information.

It gives a very good example of this human era. source

Anybody watching—what is the reason Democrats like these at this site and the current administration want to deny what’s happening?

It’s more than a little psychotic. source