The unmanned planes look north toward the long, lightly defended and admittedly porous Canada-U.S. border – the best route many Americans believe for jihadists seeking to attack the United States to sneak across.
Like their missile-carrying military cousins prowling Pakistan’s skies targeting al-Qaeda suspects, the unarmed Predator aircraft that have patrolled the 49th parallel since 2009 are high-tech, sophisticated and little understood. And they are part of the same diffuse and determined effort the United States is making to secure its borders and defend itself.
“We’re here to protect the nation from bad people doing bad things,” says John Priddy, U.S. National Air Security Operations director for the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Air and Marine. He heads the Predator operation guarding American’s northern airspace.
“This is the equivalent of the Cold War in terms of a new type of vigilance,” says Mr. Priddy, who has flown everything from Boeing 747 cargo jets to Apache helicopters.
No one says “terrorism,” but no one has to. On Mr. Priddy’s office wall, there’s a fading photograph of the burned-out tail of a Pam Am Boeing 747 after it was blown up by Palestinian hijackers in Cairo in 1970. The pilot of that flight was his father, also named John Priddy.
Now, with a team of a few dozen, this John Priddy is running a futuristic – and slightly unsettling – surveillance system, a test program with only two planes operating in a relatively small zone that could grow into a fleet of unmanned aircraft watching the border day and night in all weather.
In an effort to demystify the unmanned aerial surveillance along 1,500 kilometres of the Canada-U.S. border, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security invited The Globe and Mail to visit its National Air Security Operations base in Grand Forks, N.D. There, a pair of Predators are prowling America’s northern frontier, providing protection without, the department insists, infringing on the privacy of Canadians on the other side of the border.
Eyes in the skies
On the ground, the Predator-B looks like a giant, ungainly carbon-fibre insect with a flattened hammerhead where a cockpit would usually be found. It sports a spindly undercarriage, long elegant wings and a propeller behind a V-shaped tail. Once aloft, it disappears, the sound of its single powerful engine fading even faster than the blue-grey fuselage melds with the sky. Within seconds it is gone, yet its powerful cameras and radar can peer down, beaming detailed surveillance images taken from many kilometres away.
To illustrate just how detailed and undetectable the Predators can be, Mr. Priddy described how staff watched a car stop briefly on one of the many rural roads that run parallel to the border. A handful of men got out, oblivious to the Predator circling perhaps five kilometres up. These men, like others before them, were Somalis, heading north, trying to sneak into Canada, Mr. Priddy said. The RCMP was alerted.
The full range of the planes’ capabilities is still being explored. Last spring, for instance, during the devastating floods along the Red and Souris rivers, the Predators provided real-time video of water-ravaged areas, and flew all the way up the Mississippi. Ice buildup threatening bridges showed clearly on the radar.
It feels a lot like Big Brother is watching. The data – video, radar and thermal imagery – streams back to control rooms and can be watched live or stored for later analysis. It can be delivered simultaneously to border patrol, police and other ground units, or put on the open Internet in the case of emergencies.
