Contract-hungry tech giants like Palantir, Skydio and General Atomics have found a new market for drone warfare. More and more, the killer technology that came to embody the Forever Wars is coming home to the West. And US and UK populations are first in line for the War on Terror treatment… Once again, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Responsible Statecraft columnist Stavroula Pabst explains:

Pentagon contractors like Palantir, Skydio, and General Atomics have gained ground at home for surveillance technologies — especially drones — proliferating war-tested military tech within the domestic sphere.

Pabst explained how surveillance technology’s so-called ‘dual-push’ nature has opened the door to use these military assets at home. For example:

Palantir’s Gotham platform was initially promoted as intelligence software for defense and counter-terrorism purposes.

Piloted to predict adversaries’ use of improvised explosives during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and later adopted by Israeli defense and intelligence agencies amid war on Gaza, Palantir has simultaneously marketed Gotham as a data-centric policing tool.

Subsequently, the same technology was:

adopted among U.S. law enforcement. Hundreds of police departments can use Gotham to analyze data on civilians’ whereabouts.

Pabst added that Palantir’s tech has quickly been adopted by Trump’s door-kicking immigration goons:

Palantir has gone on to sell similar software to other government agencies, obtaining a $30 million ICE contract this spring to help the agency track undocumented immigrants.

Another example is the L3Harris Stingrays, a high tech phone tracker designed for the military:

utilized during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police departments subsequently adopted these systems to track and collect information on crime suspects, though L3Harris is slowly phasing them out.

The boomerang is boomeranging — drone Christmas special

Pabst’s report is full of examples of how the so-called ‘imperial boomerang’ is operating. Simply put, colonisers will wield technologies and methods of colonial policing against home populations.

For example:

Over 1,000 U.S. law enforcement and security agencies now use Skydio drones, which have seen combat in wars in Gaza and Ukraine, for purposes ranging from first response to crowd monitoring at public events.

Likewise:

Skydio has procured substantive contracts in the process, such as a $4.6 million contract equipping law enforcement in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota with police drones.

Drone warfare in the UK

British security forces aren’t going to miss this boat. That includes remote operated sea drones. A form with deep links to Palantir just opened up a drone factory in the UK.

As UK watchdog Drone Wars said in November, many tech firms are fighting to get a slice of new UK defence spending plans:

Defence Minister Alistair Cairns indicated in July that there would be around £4bn spending on uncrewed systems – ‘Drones, drones and drones‘ as he put it on Twitter.

Palantir-linked AI firm Helsing opened a factory in December. They’ll be developing undersea war drones:

Helsing is a new AI-focused military corporation, funded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, and keen to gain a slice of the UK government’s promised £5 billion spending on drones, AI and other emerging technology.

British cops have been using drones to monitor citizens for half a decade. The uptick was already underway in 2020:

Drones were deployed 103 times by Avon and Somerset Constabulary during the first six months of 2020. This means that at points during lockdown drone flights occurred on an almost daily basis.

Once again, if you think these war machines are something that should only concern far-off people… the next few years are going to give you a royal kick up the arse.

Increasing authoritarianism married to high-tech surveillance and weaponry, in the context of an erratic and collapsing US empire and rising fascism…. well all that isn’t going to go off quietly.  It’s well past time to get wise to what is coming down the pipe.

Featured image via Defence Industry

By Joe Glenton

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