That's such am inefficient, hands-on, loud and dumb way to smuggle drugs across a border this large, this cannot be true. Unless you they are talking about submarines and land RCs, in that case sure, probably.

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carefulfungi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The statements can also be parsed as "we have thousands of detections of an unknown number of drones that are being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle".

The number of drones vs. the number of detections is ambiguous. How detections are counted is ambiguous. Whether drones are physically moving drugs or part of an intelligence network is ambiguous.

It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone. That's not great, obviously. But different from "thousands of drones are carrying contraband into the US".

	▲	JasonADrury 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Lets be realistic, at best it actually means: "We have thousands of possible detections of an unknown number of possible drones that are possibly being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle"
	▲	XorNot 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That's about 142 detections per day and yeah the big question is are they tracking unique drones (probably not) or radar contacts which appear and disappear? In which case the same drone flying around for 20 minutes and then being recharged would appear multiple times. That number breaks down to 6 detections per hour across the entire boarder.
	▲	kgwxd 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's no reason to believe a single letter or number that comes from these people, and every reason to believe it's completely made up.

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Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do you say that? Fixed wing RCs can fly fast and have long range. Anyone can buy radios for them that transmit for many kilometers. There are open source autopilot projects. Drugs like Fentanyl are so potent that each dose is less than a milligram.

It’s not far fetched at all.

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stronglikedan 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> loud and dumb way

Sounds like the perfect distraction!

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smallerize 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Quadrotors are loud, but fixed-wing drones are quieter, more efficient, and have much longer range.

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piokoch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Check what is happening in Ukraine. The war moved a field of moderately cheap and moderately powerful drones forward.

We don't understand the consequences yet... Ukraine is actively working on hunter drones that could operate on 10 km altitude to shot down enemy targets. Now, imagine that cartel, terrorists put their hands on such technology, endangering whole civilian air transport.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What about model trains?

	▲	derwiki 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Only works at the Canadian border, Jacob