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From Afghanistan to Texas, Surveillance Blimps Are on the Rise

The low-tech-meets-high-tech surveillance tool patrols some of the world's most dangerous locales.
Image: Defense.gov/Wikimedia

Long thought of as just a convenient way to both advertise tires and provide aerial coverage of football games, blimps have become a low-tech-meets-high-tech surveillance tool in some of the world's most dangerous locations. The Royal Singapore Air Force just announced that it will send a tethered aerostat platform aloft in early 2015 to "complement the RSAF's suite of airborne and ground-based radars."

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Singapore's aerostat comprises a 55 meter helium balloon that's tethered to a military camp. Operating up to 2,000 feet in the air, the blimp will allow the RSAF to monitor threats from the air or sea that are up to 200 kilometers away.

"In order to see far, you have to be very high with no buildings to block you …Our ground-based radar systems can only operate above high-rise buildings," Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen said at his ministry's PRoductivity and Innovation in Daily Efforts (PRIDE) Day awards ceremony, according to The Straits Times.

Image: MINDEF Singapore

Located just off the coast of Malaysia, and next to one of the world's piracy hotspots, the Strait of Malacca, Singapore has a lot of recent history to justify deploying the aerostat. Bloomberg quoted Rohan Gunaratna, the head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, as saying that "both aviation and maritime domains have to be closely monitored in the light of the more recent developments, for instance the MH370."

Blimps, as it turns out, are one of the cheapest means of maintaining continuous airborne radar coverage. As Ng explained, the aerostat will save an estimated $23 million a year in operating costs.

The aerostat platform has proven its mettle in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing surveillance around bases by spotting would-be attackers with high-tech cameras, and aerostats have been working there way back to America. One or two blimps were planned to be deployed over Baltimore by the end of the year, to watch for enemy fighter jets or missiles coming for the eastern seaboard.

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At least five blimps have been deployed along the US-Mexico border to watch for illegal immigration and drug trafficking where the border has no fence. "They have been extremely successful," a border patrol spokesman told The Monitor. "It's opened our eyes to the amount of traffic. As soon as the aerostat went up, we saw more apprehensions."

As the balloons rise, so do security concerns. In Texas, Tom Hargis, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union in Houston, said the aerial surveillance cameras pose a threat to freedom and privacy.

"For border residents, more mass surveillance gadgets in the sky simply add to the sense of being under siege," Hargis told The Monitor.

Bernard Loo, assistant professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said pretty much the same thing in response to the RSAF's new blimp. "Privacy has basically gone out the window," he told Bloomberg. "There's nothing private any longer. Everything is essentially going to be out in the open."

Just as terrorism opened the door for unprecedented violations of civil liberties, the surveillance state grows in response to threats of piracy and lost airliners—or in Texas, because the Department of Defense has a bunch of leftover blimps after a war. Aren't there any football games we can send them to?