The U.S. military may have orders to withdraw forces from Afghanistan by 2014, but it also has plans to leave behind thousands of devices intended to track the movements of Afghan citizens for decades to come, Wired reports.
The “unattended ground sensors” or UGSs will not cause physical damage in Afghanistan like leftover landmines have in other war-torn countries. The primary use of these sensors will be to aid operatives who remain in Afghanistan to assist with post-war recovery.
A basic form of the UGS has been used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War, but until recent technological developments the sensors were unreliable and lacked long-lasting batteries. The batteries in the sensors are solar powered and now can last as long as twenty years.
Soon the technology behind the sensors will be able to automatically trigger satellite surveillance of the area around a sensor.
If the remote tracking of Afghan sheepherders seems irrelevant, note that the U.S. government has pumped up to $200 billion into development of these sensors, and that they are already in use on American soil.
More than 7,500 UGSs are currently in place on the U.S.-Mexico border, tracking the movement of suspected illegal immigrants.
Matt Plyburn, an executive at Lockheed Martin, mused that the sensors could be used “even around corporate headquarters” — but surveillance of civilians in America with the devices would almost certainly cause a public uproar reminiscent of previous concerns with the government spying on civilians through wiretapping and the Internet.