by ¡Do Not Panic! at The Grayzone
Immediately after October 7, a little know company shipped over 100 reconnaissance drones to Israel for use in its siege of Gaza. Having been battle-tested on Palestinian civilians, the UAVs are now being used to surveil protesters across the US.
This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!
AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.
The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.
The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.
Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.
And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.
According to my research,…
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