US COAST GUARD DEPLOYS SURVEILLANCE DRONES ACROSS GREAT LAKES

The United States Coast Guard has deployed at least six sailing drones across the Great Lakes this summer to, in part, track what it describes as illicit activity. The vessels are manufactured by Saildrone Inc, a California-based company, under a $15.5 million contract funded by Donald Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Each Saildrone Voyager vessel measures 33 feet in length and can operate continuously for up to 100 days without servicing. The drones are equipped with radar, cameras, and artificial intelligence systems.

Anthony Popiel, a US Coast Guard UAS programme coordinator based in the Great Lakes, said the drones help the Coast Guard detect or deter vessels involved in illegal fishing, human trafficking, and narcotics trafficking. Saildrone Inc states its vessels can operate for months without refuelling and are capable of tracking ships across wide maritime regions. The programme operates under a contractor-owned and contractor-operated model, meaning Saildrone collects the surveillance data and sells it to the government. Petra Molnar, associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University in Toronto and author of The Walls Have Eyes, describes this arrangement as troubling from a privacy and accountability standpoint.

Rights groups and some local residents have raised concerns that the programme could develop into a broad data collection project. Molnar highlights that there is little publicly available information on data retention policies or who can access the information gathered. Recreational users of the Great Lakes have expressed concern about being swept into a surveillance system designed for border monitoring. Questions remain, according to critics, about the oversight mechanisms governing how the private contractor handles the data it collects.