WAITER, THERE'S A DRONE IN MY SOUP

There was a drone sighting recently by the White House. This wasn’t a Russian-made high altitude high tech surveillance device discovered by CIA secret intelligence services. This drone was discovered by the White House on the White House lawn. According to sources it was something you could buy at Radio Shack. Their newest ad campaign: If you can’t visit Washington yourself, let Radio Shack do it for you.

This drone was unarmed but the implications are ominous and not simply for White House security but for the entire country. We tend to think of drones as the terror-inflicting devices we use to frighten “suspected Islamic militants” and innocent civilians in Yemen, Pakistan or other misbehaving Muslim nations, but the technological advances in today’s warfare have resulted in the development of eavesdropping, privacy-piercing drones the size of a fly, complete with flapping wings.

Dronegate, as this event is now termed, along with revelations of CIA spying brought to light by Edward Snowden, and White House spying on high-level European officials, bring us to the uncomfortable but unassailable fact that privacy and security are vanishing; illusions promised to a cowering public by bureaucrats with feet firmly cemented in a past century.

Referring to the drone incident, in a comment certain to reassure the public, President Obama declared, “We don’t really have any kind of regulatory structure for it at all.” So it is not just the Secret Service that displays total incompetence. How close are we to a chaotic coup engineered by state-of-the-art robotics? It is hard to overstate the precarious position of civilization today.

We give up our rights in the hope for sanctuary. We shred our Constitution in the name of defense. To paraphrase Shakespeare: Surrender and surrender and surrender to the last syllable of the Bill of Rights.

Still there will be those that can take advantage of the situation. Radio Shack will not be alone. I imagine the newest Raid commercial:

Spray that bug with Raid alone,

If the fly doesn’t die you’ve found a drone.