Monday, October 29, 2012

Pigeon Spy

This seems to be the month of interesting winged rats. Another use for pigeons is that you can strap small cameras to them.

This is a use for which they would now be much better suited for than in 1908. The quality of camera a pigeon can hold would be quite impressive. They don't fly so high up, so you should be able to get good quality pictures of the ground.

Spying on a facility would be easy. Train a few dozen birds to return to a facility a few hundred miles away from what you want to spy on. Drive to a few dozen sites on the opposite side of the facility and release a couple birds with cameras taking a picture every couple seconds. Assuming you camouflaged the camera well enough and made sure it couldn't be traced to you there is little risk of detection. Who checks every bird which flies over a facility for cameras? 

The birds also seem to have a history of use for smuggling drugs and other small objects.  This is harder. The problem is that not only can a pigeon not carry much weight, they only return to one location. So in order to smuggle drugs across a border or into a prison, first you would need to smuggle pigeons  the other way across the border or out of the prison.

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