Bzzzzz, Snapshot, bzzzzzz. You are being attacked, not by an mosquito but by an insect spy drone. You can try to squash the spy bug but it would probably just ping for another spy bug. Meanwhile, it has photographed your activities of the last 24hours.
These bugs can have unlimited capabilities, depending on their size and functions.
Spy bugs can be controlled from a great distance and are equipped with a camera, microphone and they can land on you, and use it’s needle to take a DNA sample with the pain of a mosquito bite. Or it can inject a micro RFID tracking device under your skin.
It can land on you, and you take it in your home or it can fly through a window.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined. NY Times: US Military Admits To Having Spy Drones As Small As Bugs
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies” equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.”
Within the military, no one disputes that drones save American lives. Many see them as advanced versions of “stand-off weapons systems,” like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the United States has used for decades. “There’s a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not a always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn’t have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”
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