Feature: Border Hawk drone flies

LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- There's something about the idea of pilotless drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, that makes them seem both ominous and cool.

So, I was intrigued to hear from Glenn Spencer, head of a group of activists opposed to illegal immigration, that he was testing surveillance drones over the Arizona-Mexico frontier. He said his private volunteer organization American Border Patrol is developing a UAV they call the Border Hawk. Their plan is to deliver live over the Internet aerial coverage of illegal aliens slipping into the United States, and their purpose is to both assist and prod the federal U.S. Border Patrol in sealing the southern border against illegal aliens.

Some have denounced Spencer's team as "vigilantes" who are "militarizing the border." Others think that's just what the border needs. The reality turned out to look a little different than either view.

The concept of drones seems to inspire both moralistic shock and technophile awe.

Automated surveillance craft, such as the Sentinels in "The Matrix," are the stuff of science fiction paranoia, perfect for Philip K. Dick movies.

Yet, judging from the lavish multipage spreads that the newsweeklies have devoted to the U.S. armed forces' use of pilotless drones since Sept. 11, 2001, a lot of Tom Clancy wannabes view UAVs as the sexiest high-tech weapon, the ideal fashion accessory for Jack Ryan. On the morning of last November's Election Day, the news broke that a missile-firing Predator drone operated by the CIA had blown up a car carrying a leading al-Qaida member. Those reports certainly didn't hurt the Republican administration's candidates at the polls later that day.

Perhaps "war nerds" like me love the notion of drones because we imagine ourselves using our video game joystick skills to search and destroy America's enemies from the comfort of our dens.

I got a look at American Border Patrol's first-generation drone on a dusty ranch outside Palominas, Ariz., a few hundred yards from where the San Pedro River flows north from Mexico into the United States.

East of the Mississippi, the San Pedro River would be considered a creek, but in the semi-arid high plains of southeastern Arizona, it's a major ecological resource. The San Pedro serves as a north-south freeway for an extraordinary number of migratory bird species, including at least a dozen kinds of hummingbirds.

The San Pedro is also a north-only freeway for illegal migrants fleeing Mexico. They use the verdant cottonwood and sycamore trees that line its banks for cover from government agents in their green-striped sport utility vehicles. The border-crossers often wander onto Wes Flowers' small ranch alongside the San Pedro, breaking down the fences that keep his cattle home, setting the occasional brush fire and stealing or breaking his water faucets.

It's tough making a living as an Arizona rancher even without constant trespassers. Therefore, Flowers has been letting ABP use a big dirt field on his ranch.

When I arrived, about a dozen volunteers were purposefully milling about a few trucks and vans, peering at laptops and prepping motion detector sensors.

My experience with flight-testing was limited to multiple viewings of "The Right Stuff," so maybe I was expecting to see Sam Shepherd stride bravely across a beautifully stark dry lakebed while liquid fuel boils off from his X-1 rocket plane. Or perhaps, ABP's critics were right about its militarist ambitions and this would be some kind of nascent version of Darth Vader's Death Star.

Well ... it turned out that the current incarnation of the Border Hawk looks like a hobbyist's radio-controlled model airplane. In fact, that's what it is. Granted, with its almost 6-foot wingspan, it's a really big model airplane, the kind that a divorced dad with a Platinum Card and an extremely bad conscience might buy his 12-year-old son at FAO Schwarz. Still, it's hard to think of what looks like a Piper Cub model as technohip.

But that's the point, according to Spencer, a youngish-looking 65, who was a longtime executive and consultant in the data-modeling business before becoming a professional opponent of illegal immigration. He doesn't want to reinvent the drone wheel. He can buy sophisticated model airplanes off the shelf and then have his technical staff modify them with bigger fuel tanks and custom electronics.

Later this summer, Spencer said, they'll have a 10-foot plane that can stay aloft for four hours, three times longer than rather than the current craft's 80-minute limit.

But war nerds and vigilantes will remain disappointed because, unlike the $4.5 million Predator with its 49-foot wingspan, the Border Hawk is never going to be a weapons platform.

Instead, Spencer's group is testing a concept for a cheap data collection network that could conceivably monitor the entire 1,852-mile border with flying television cameras directed to illegal border crossers by in-ground motion detectors.

Spencer showed no desire to physically confront the illegal immigrants who pour across the border each night. He maintains a "no contact" policy with the illegal aliens his organization videotapes. He said ABP's goal is to take pictures and let the government do the apprehending. "Was Ansel Adams a vigilante?" Spencer asked rhetorically.

His plan, he noted, is to narrowcast live coverage nightly over the AmericanBorderPatrol.com Web site, using low-light and thermal imaging cameras, of what he carefully calls "suspected border intruders." However, he intends to only report their global positioning satellite coordinates to the Department of Homeland Security to prevent vigilantes and other hotheads from beating the government agents to them.

Spencer claimed his goals are two-fold: to help the DHS's Border Patrol do a better job, and to make vivid to the public the extent of the illegal immigration problem in order to build political pressure for stronger enforcement of immigration laws.

In his research and development efforts, employs full time two genial younger men. The goateed and tanned "two Mikes" -- technical director Mike King and operations director Mike Christie -- are best friends from 15 years back. Both are recent refugees from the high-tech industry in expensive Santa Cruz, Calif., the seacoast of Silicon Valley.

Christie proudly told me, "The first thing you need to know about Mike King is that he was a U.S. Army sniper."

King enthusiastically described the focus of their research and development efforts -- not on the drone, but on creating footstep sensors superior to the government's detectors, and on the software to interface the devices with the camera planes. "If we had a government contract, we'd be bogged down in bureaucracy," King claimed.

In the field test, King buried two of his new sensors in the ground so their devices' antennas stuck up a few inches. He measured each one's precise latitude and longitude with a Global Positioning System gadget and entered the coordinates in his laptop.

While the Border Hawk circled a couple of hundred feet overhead, buzzing like a large mosquito, four APB members and myself walked past the hidden motion detectors single file. ("SBIs always walk single file," I was told.) The two gizmos successfully reported by radio our direction and speed, although they overestimated our numbers, signaling that there were 11 of us instead of five.

Our GPS coordinates showed up on a map on King's wireless-networked laptop and a volunteer, who is a model airplane hobbyist, piloted the Border Hawk to our location to record our presence. Somebody who happened to be logged onto ABP's Web site at that moment could have watched live aerial pictures of me squinting up at the drone.

As you can see, this is already a complex system. Several more elements must be added and interconnected to allow it to accomplish Spencer's goals. For example, the great majority of illegal immigrants walk north after dark, so night-vision cameras would be critical. Further, a remote-control pilot would be hard pressed to fly by eye at night, so King hopes to add a GPS system to the drone this summer.

Then there are the legal, political and economic issues. If the drones take pictures of other ranches, could that be a violation of privacy? (In a somewhat similar case, Barbra Streisand is threatening a lawsuit against an environmental activist who has posted on the Web aerial photographs of the entire California coastline, including her beachfront mansion.)

Further, much of the borderlands are owned by either the federal government or Indian nations. Would they be interested? Spencer is unsure whether federal agencies have a positive attitude toward his project. "The government doesn't want a report card. We're kind of a watchdog on the U.S. Border Patrol," he said.

Spencer hopes to raise money from property owners and the general public to carry on testing, but probably only governments could afford a massive deployment of this technology were it to prove effective.

Spencer hates it when his group is lumped with the more militaristic, high-powered rifle-carrying volunteer organizations that have sprung up along the border in the last couple of years. "We get smeared as a militia," he said.

One of his volunteers, Richard Humphries, a retired military pilot and law enforcement officer who imports the famous handmade pottery from the Mexican village of Juan Mata Ortiz, told me, "All we are is a neighborhood watch group. Except we are concerned with our whole country."

Spencer acidly remarked about a couple of other well-publicized anti-illegal immigration groups that pursue physical encounters with trespassers, "As Goethe said, 'Nothing is more frightening than ignorance in action,'"

He went on, "They are accidents waiting to happen. This is no longer John Wayne Country. It's Litigation Nation. The Mexican government wants to hit them with a law suit."

No. Then again, nobody would call the ABP men a bunch of wimps, either. Many of the volunteers made their careers in law enforcement or the military, or both. Like lots of ranchers in this lightly populated area, a couple of the fellows at the flight test wore gun belts with holstered pistols. This proved rather reassuring to me in this rattlesnake-infested region, especially because I couldn't see any sticks within reach in case I felt a sudden need to whack a venomous reptile.

In terms of personal style, Spencer is the odd man out among the ranchers and retired cops who look to him for leadership. He has a soft-spoken Southern California accent that he acquired growing up in Hollywood, where his father was a musician. (He recently moved from Los Angeles to Sierra Vista, saying, "California is finished.") Spencer has the manner of a professor at an MBA school, one with a predilection for jargon such as, "We'll need to run some Monte Carlo simulations to model how many drones we'd need to cover the whole border."

His eyes lit up whenever the talk turned to numerical analysis. Statistics are how he became a crusader against illegal immigration in 1991. "I looked at the numbers, and I just couldn't let this issue go," he said.

Spencer frequently debates the Rev. Dr. Robin Hoover, pastor of a Disciples of Christ church in Tucson, Ariz., and founder of Humane Borders, which maintains 38 water tanks in the Arizona desert to prevent illegal immigrants from dying of thirst.

Ironically, if you didn't know which was which, you might well guess that the gruff Reverend Hoover, with his thick West Texas cowboy accent, PG-13-rated vocabulary and love of pickup trucks, was the conservative activist, and the intellectual Spencer was the liberal Protestant minister with a Ph.D.

In an interview, Hoover admitted that unlike the Ranch Rescue organization in Texas, American Border Patrol has no interest in armed confrontations. But the liberal minister claims that "American Border Patrol is actually the most dangerous organization of all," calling Spencer an ideologue who advocates "culture war."

He (Spencer) went on, "They are accidents waiting to happen. This is no longer John Wayne Country. It's Litigation Nation. The Mexican government wants to hit them with a law suit."

Hey, now there's an idea. Let's hit the racist, corrupt, elitist Mexican government with hundreds of lawsuits charging it with being involved with drug smuggling into the United States, illegal alien smuggling into the United States, meddling in a sovereign country's domestic affairs (United States), harboring fugitives from crimes that they've committed in the United States, etc.

Their plan is to deliver live over the Internet aerial coverage of illegal aliens slipping into the United States, and their purpose is to both assist and prod the federal U.S. Border Patrol in sealing the southern border against illegal aliens.

Great. We'll now have videotape of 50,000 Mexicans a day flipping the bird at the camera as they stroll across the border unimpeded.

nothing matches the up-close "deer-in-the-headlights' look when a bunch of illegals find themselves staring into a video camera from ten feet away. Especially if the camera man is flanked by several ugly loco gringos and Border Patrol agents."

That's great. I'm glad you're keeping the ugly loco gringos employed.

What are you planning on using - a ReFLEX 50 network?

No.

A commercially available thermal camera. A commericially avaliable lasing rangefinder. A proprietary, 3 axis, gimbal mount for the imaging and ranging systems. A commerically available GPS receiver. A proprietary board containing local, 3 dimensional, terrain maps, a small number crunching chip and a 3-6 watt transmitter. A proprietary board for propulsion mangement, navigation and flight control. The rest is straight forward materials and equipment found in RC soaring supply catalogs. About the only other item that's expensive is the refractive, absorbing paint if you'd like to remain beyond the eyes of big brother.

The resultant system weighs less than 15 pounds, is silent beyond 100 meters, has an extremly small radar cross section and an endurance of about 45 minutes. Images acquired at a silent range are suitable for recognition software analysis and target position is real time to about 1 meter.

If the trekkers are less than 15 miles from the launch point the system can produce useable still images and video clips of the coyote(s) and the age and gender of the clients so the BP can take a head count after the round up.

The point of this expalnation is that the systems are readily available to the private sector, for a price, but the system raises a whole host of other issues, the least of which is privacy litigation.

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