Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, recently appeared on CNN to address the growing concern over the mysterious drone sightings across New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and near Washington, D.C. His comments, however, were a striking display of government ineffectiveness. When Wolf Blitzer pressed him on what Americans should make of the sightings, Mayorkas repeated the same dismissive response: “We have not seen anything unusual. We know of no threat or of any nefarious activity.” Rather than addressing the concerns with urgency, Mayorkas suggested that many sightings were “mistaken identity,” implying that people were confusing drones with small aircraft, and blamed multiple reports of the same drone for inflating the problem.
Mayorkas seemed focused on downplaying the situation and ignoring legitimate concerns of the public. He mentioned that experts have been in touch with the New Jersey State Police “every day,” and boasted of deploying “state-of-the-art technology” to confirm drone activity. Yet he admitted, “That’s not to say that there aren’t drones, you know, flying in the air, but we have no concern at this point with respect to a threat or any nefarious activity.”
Mayorkas continued, “The reality is you can have a 15-year-old kid who buys a drone off the shelf and puts it up in the sky. We have not seen drones turn their lights off in the dark. We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace. Those are two indicia that would give us a cause for concern.”
Does anyone believe this is caused by some kid with a store-bought drone? Mayorkas himself doesn’t seem to have a clue, either; he’s just trying to convince the public that nothing sinister is going on. But, clearly, they don’t know one way or the other, and if the government cannot determine what is flying above some of the nation’s most densely populated and strategically important areas, how can they claim there’s no threat?
Hellbound and Down 