The Future, It Is Here

Headline: Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies.

Sounds like the Department of Fatherland Security is pushing for this one, "to ensure more effective monitoring of United States territory." Like for instance:

...one North Carolina county is using a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air— close enough to identify faces...

Put enough of them UAVs up there in the air— gee, why not design them as hovering metal "saturn" globes while you're at it?— beef up their surveillance capabilities by a few orders of magnitude, and route all the data gathered by them all over the country to a central AI for cataloging and analysis... and you've got pretty much the hyper-Orwellian situation I envisioned in my recent story about the "Sadrins."

("Sadrin" was how my brother and I used to pronounce "Saturn" when we were kids.)

A "Sadrin" over every neighborhood and district in the country. Won't you feel safe then? Looks like the day may be coming.