Monday
Recently I compared ICE agents to the firemen who destroy books in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. (“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” I hear Robert Frost saying.) Now, as if in confirmation, Rachel Maddow recently reported that ICE has put in a large order for robot dogs. A “mechanical hound” figures prominently in Bradbury’s novel.
An ABC article has the report:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to spend up to $2 million on robot dogs, according to a federal procurement notice.
The Boston Dynamic SPOT Robots will help “support public safety and law enforcement operations by providing a remotely operated robotic capability for inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment in environments that may pose risks to personnel,” according to the notice.
Adding to the dystopian feel, the ABC article reminds us that the development follows news that ICE is spending $16 million on electric shock gloves.
Bradbury’s hound is programmed to hunt down people based on their personal chemistry. As someone explains, its calculators “can be set to any combination, so many amino acids, so much sulphur, so much butterfat and alkaline.” Once it hunts down and captures its target, the hound grips it in its paws and injects massive jolts of morphine or procaine through a four-inch hollow steel needle jutting from its snout.
Normally the hound sits in a corner although it never ceases to radiate a terrifying aura:
The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast.
Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.
In the novel’s most terrifying scene, the hound goes after Montag, the fireman-turned-book reader. He saves himself only by blasting the beast with his fire hose:
It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red color like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg.
The hound can target Montag because, we learn earlier, the chemical balances and percentages of all those working in the fire station are recorded in a master file.
Turning from sci-fi to our current reality, think of how the Trump administration is attempting to set up national databases, something that Republicans used to oppose. Think also of how much misinformation is in those bases. For instance, although Trump’s Department of Homeland Security claimed that there were 185 non-citizens on Nevada’s voting roles, further examination determined that all were citizens. In other words, the actual number was zero.
Now imagine the hound going after those 185.
Time and again we’ve seen ICE and other law enforcement agents targeting the wrong person. Sometimes there has been a mistaken address (this occurred with Louisville’s Breonna Taylor); sometimes a mistaken identity (Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, shot and killed by ICE in Biddeford, Maine, had a valid work permit); sometimes flaws in face recognition technology.
Furthermore, what if the technology is deliberately tampered with? Montag mentions this possibility to his superior early in the book when the hound starts growling at him:
It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound’s ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids, perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Reacted toward me.
We’re seeing instances of bad cops using Flock surveillance technology to track down ex-girlfriends who are hiding from them. Think what people could do with access to both robot dogs and a national genetic base.
In fact, one can imagine racial profiling taken to a whole new level. What if, instead of targeting individuals, one started targeting race DNA. This is easier to imagine now than it would have been in 1953, when Bradbury wrote his novel.
Robot dogs, taser gloves, Black Hawk helicopters swooping down on Chicago apartments, innocent civilians being rounded up and shipped overseas, U.S. citizens being shot for no reason by federal agents at point blank range. A year ago author Maggie Thrash mentioned to me that dystopian novels are no longer as popular as they once were. As I summed up our conversation,
Why read dark warnings about the future when the future is here, when George Orwell’s 1984 appears to be an operations manual for the current administration and Handmaid’s Tale is a step away from becoming reality?
So yes, it comes as no surprise that ICE would want to spend some of its billions on robot dogs.
