xxdr_zombiexx

Army recon drone spots smokers
From AFP | The Australian | June 14, 2004

ZEALOUS Swiss soldiers called the police when the infra-red camera of a pilotless spy aircraft they were testing showed an image of two civilians smoking cannabis.

The newspaper Le Matin Dimanche said police turned out with screaming sirens and arrested the smokers after they were tipped off to the incident near the central city of Lucerne late last month.

The army had been giving a trial run to one of its seven drones, pilotless planes equipped with cameras and normally used to spy on enemy troops, when they observed the scene, the paper said.

[zombienote: Since when are marijuana smokers anything but the enemy?]

The incident caused a Socialist member of parliament to make a protest statement, noting that citizens were not supposed to be spied on from the air without their knowledge.

[zombienote: Aww... if you "advise" them then it's not spying, and you spoil all the fun...]

In reply, Defence Minister Samuel Schmid said that the drones "are not made to spy on citizens", and did not have sufficiently precise cameras to identify an individual.

However he also defended the soldiers' action. "When one is serving one's country, one is also a citizen, and a citizen has a duty to denounce whatever seems abnormal," he told parliament, according to the report.

[zombienote: Think about that for a few minutes....]

The paper said the soldiers had called the police after observing "a car and two individuals, apparently very agitated."

Although smoking cannabis is illegal in Switzerland, a survey published in 2000 found that six out of 10 people aged between 20 and 24 admitted to having partaken at least once.

The newspaper said the Swiss army had seven drones that were acquired from Israel in 1995. The craft fly at altitudes of between 300m and 900m.

__________________
Torture Good, Healthcare Bad, Marijuana Evil.

There's no money for your issue so long as we're squandering $50 billion a year on the DrugWar. Ben Masel