Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon

Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, a Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line train was the scene of a random and horrific mass shooting. Four people were shot and killed on a westbound train as it approached the suburb of Forest Park. 

The police swiftly activated a digital dragnet—a surveillance network that connects thousands of cameras in the city. 

The process began with a quick review of the transit agency’s surveillance cameras, which captured the alleged gunman shooting the victims execution style. Law enforcement followed the suspect, through real-time footage, across the rapid-­transit system. Police officials circulated the images to transit staff and to thousands of officers. An officer in the adjacent suburb of Riverdale recognized the suspect from a previous arrest. By the time he was captured at another train station, just 90 minutes after the shooting, authorities already had his name, address, and previous arrest history.

Little of this process would come as much surprise to Chicagoans. The city has tens of thousands of surveillance cameras—up to 45,000, by some estimates. That’s among the highest numbers per capita in the US. Chicago boasts one of the largest license plate reader systems in the country, and the ability to access audio and video surveillance from independent agencies such as the Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Park District, and the public transportation system as well as many residential and commercial security systems such as Ring doorbell cameras. 

Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech. 

Black and Latino communities in Chicago have historically been targeted by excessive policing and surveillance, says Lance Williams, a scholar of urban violence at Northeastern Illinois University. That scrutiny has created new problems without delivering the promised safety, he suggests. In order to “solve the problem of crime or violence and make these communities safer,” he says, “you have to deal with structural problems,” such as the shortage of livable-wage jobs, affordable housing, and mental-health services across the city.

Recent years have seen some effective pushback against the surveillance. Until recently, for example, the city was the largest customer of ShotSpotter acoustic sensors, which are designed to detect gunfire and alert police. The system was introduced in a small area on the South Side in 2012. By 2018, an area of about 136 square miles—some 60% of the city—was covered by the acoustic surveillance network.

Critics questioned ShotSpotter’s effectiveness and objected that the sensors were installed largely in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Those critiques gained urgency with the fatal shooting in March 2021 of a 13-year-old, Adam Toledo, by police responding to a ShotSpotter alert. The tragedy became the touchstone of the #StopShotSpotter protest movement and one of the major issues in Brandon Johnson’s successful mayoral campaign in 2023. When he reached office, Johnson followed through, ending the city’s contract with SoundThinking, the San Francisco Bay Area company behind ShotSpotter. In total, it’s estimated, the city paid more than $53 million for the system. 

In response to a request for comment, SoundThinking said that ShotSpotter enables law enforcement “to reach the scene faster, render aid to victims, and locate evidence more effectively.” It said the company “plays no part in the selection of deployment areas” but added: “We believe communities experiencing the highest levels of gun violence deserve the same rapid emergency response as any other neighborhood.” 

Alejandro Ruizesparza and Freddy Martinez
Cofounders, Lucy Parsons Labs

Oak Park, a quiet suburb at Chicago’s western border, is the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. It includes the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings and homes. 

Until recently, the village of Oak Park was also the center of a three-year-long campaign against an unwelcome addition to its manicured lawns and Prairie-style architecture: automated license plate readers from a company called Flock Safety. These are high-speed cameras that automatically scan license plates to look for stolen or wanted vehicles, or for drivers with outstanding warrants. 

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An Oak Park group called Freedom to Thrive—made up of parents, activists, lawyers, data scientists, and many others—suspected that this technology was not a good or equitable addition to their neighborhood. So the group engaged the Chicago-based nonprofit Lucy Parsons Labs to help navigate the often intimidating process of requesting license plate reader data under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

Lucy Parsons Labs, which is named for a turn-of-the-century Chicago labor organizer, investigates technologies such as license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and police bodycams. 

LPL provides digital security and public records training to a variety of groups and is frequently called on to help community members audit and analyze surveillance systems that are targeting their neighborhoods. It’s led by two first-­generation Mexican-Americans from the city’s Southwest Side. Alejandro Ruizesparza has a background in community organizing and data science. Freddy Martinez was also a community organizer and has a background in physics. 

The group is now approaching its 10th year, but it was an all-volunteer effort until 2022. That’s when LPL received its first unrestricted, multi-year operational grant from a large foundation: the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known worldwide for its so-called “genius grants.” A grant from the Ford Foundation followed the next year. 

The additional resources—a significant amount compared with the previous all-volunteer budget, acknowledges Ruizesparza—meant the two cofounders and two volunteers became full-time employees. But the group is determined not to become “too comfortable” and lose its edge. There is a tenacity to Lucy Parsons Labs’ work—a “sense of scrappiness,” they say—because “we did so much of this work with no money.” 

One of LPL’s primary strategies is filing extensive FOIA requests for raw data sets of police surveillance. The process can take a while, but it often reveals issues. 

In the case of Oak Park, the FOIA requests were just one tool that Freedom to Thrive and LPL used to sort out what was going on. The data revealed that in the first 10 months of operation, the eight Flock license plate readers the town had deployed scanned 3,000,000 plates. But only 42 scans led to an alert—an infinitesimal yield of 0.000014%. 

At the same time, the impact was disproportionate. While Oak Park’s population of about 53,000 is only 19% Black, Black drivers made up 85% of those flagged by the Flock cameras, seemingly amplifying what were already concerning racial disparities in the village’s traffic stops. Flock did not respond to a request for comment.

“We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.”

Freddy Martinez, cofounder, Lucy Parsons Labs

LPL brings a mix of radical politics and critical theory to its mission. Most surveillance technologies are “largely extensions of the plantation systems,” says Ruizesparza. 

The comparison makes sense: Many slaveholding communities required enslaved persons to carry signed documents to leave plantations and wear badges with numbers sewn to their clothing. The group says it aims to empower local communities to push back against biased policing technologies through technical assistance, training, and litigation—and to de­mystify algorithms and surveillance tools in the process.

“When we talk to people, they realize that you don’t need to know how to run a regression to understand that a technology has negative implications on your life,” says Ruizesparza. “You don’t need to understand how circuits work to understand that you probably shouldn’t have all of these cameras embedded in only Black and brown regions of a city.”

The group came by some of its techniques through experimentation. “When LPL was first getting started, we didn’t really feel like FOIA would have been a good way of getting information. We didn’t know anything about it,” says Martinez. “Along the way, we were very successful in uncovering a lot of surveillance practices.” 

Since then, community-­based groups from across the country—as far away as California—have contacted LPL to say the Chicago collective’s work has inspired their own efforts, says Martinez: “We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.”

Brian Strockis
Chief, Oak Brook Police Department

If you drive about 20 miles west of Chicago, you’ll find Oakbrook Center, one of the nation’s leading luxury shopping destinations. The open-air mall includes Neiman-Marcus, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci and attracts high-end shoppers from across the region. It’s also become a destination for retail theft crews that coordinate “smash and grabs” and often escape with thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory that can be quickly sold, such as sunglasses or luxury handbags. 

In early December, police say, a Chicago man tried to lead officers on what could have been a dangerous high-speed chase from the mall. Patrol cars raced to the scene. So did a “first responder drone,” built by Flock Safety and deployed by the Oak Brook Police Department.  

The drone identified the suspect vehicle from the mall parking lot using its license plate reader and snapped high-definition photos that were texted to officers on the ground. The suspect was later tracked to Chicago, where he was arrested. 

AKILAH TOWNSEND

This was the type of outcome that Brian Strockis, chief of the Oak Brook Police Department, hoped for when he pioneered the “drone as first responder,” or DFR, program in Illinois. A longtime member of the force, he joined the department almost 25 years ago as a patrol officer, worked his way up the brass ladder, and was awarded the top job in 2022. 

Oak Brook was the first municipality in Illinois to deploy a drone as a first responder. One of the main reasons, says Strockis, was to reduce the number of high-speed chases, which are potentially dangerous to officers, suspects, and civilians. A drone is also a more effective and cost-efficient way to deal with suspects in fleeing vehicles, says Strockis.

Police say there was the potential for a dangerous high-speed chase. Patrol cars raced to the scene. But the first unit to arrive was a drone.

“It’s a force multiplier in that we’re able to do more with less,” says the chief, who spoke with me in his office at Oak Brook’s Village Hall. 

The department’s drone autonomously launches from the roof of the building and responds to about 10 to 12 service calls per day, at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. It arrives at crime scenes before patrol officers in nine out of every 10 cases.

Next door to Village Hall is the Oak Brook Police Department’s real-time crime center, a large room with two video walls that integrates livestreams from the first-responder drone, handheld drones, traffic cameras, license plate readers, and about a thousand private security cameras. When I visited, the two DFR operators demonstrated how the machine can fly itself or be directed to locations from a destination entered on Google Maps. They sent it off to a nearby forest preserve and then directed it to return to the rooftop base, where it docks automatically, changes batteries, and charges. After the demo, one of the drone operators logged the flight, as required by state law.

Strockis says he is aware of the privacy concerns around using this technology but that protections are in place. 

For example, the drone cannot be used for random or mass surveillance, he says, because the camera is always pointed straight ahead during flight and does not angle down until it reaches its desired location. The drone’s payload does not include facial recognition technology, which is restricted by state law, he says. 

The drone video footage is invaluable, he adds, because “you are seeing the events as they’re transpiring from an angle that you wouldn’t otherwise be privy to.” 

It’s an extra layer of protection for the public as well as for the officers, says the chief: “For every incident that an officer responds to now, you have squad car and bodycam video. You likely have cell-phone video from the public, officers, complainants, from offenders. So adding this element is probably the best video source on a scene that the police are going to anyway.”

Mark Wallace
Executive director, Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras

Mark Wallace wears several hats. By day he is a real estate investor and mortgage lender. But he is probably best known to many Chicagoans—especially across the city’s largely African-American communities on the South and West Sides—as a talk radio host for the station WVON and one of the leading voices against the city’s extensive network of red-light and speed cameras. 

For the past two decades, city officials have maintained that the cameras—which are officially known as “automated enforcement”—are a crucial safety measure. They are also a substantial revenue stream, generating around $150 million a year and a total of some $2.5 billion since they were installed.

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“The one thing that the cameras have the ability to do is generate a lot of money,” Wallace says. He describes the tickets as a “cash grab” that disproportionately affects Black and Latino communities.

A groundbreaking 2022 analysis by ProPublica found, in fact, that households in majority Black and Latino zip codes were ticketed at much higher rates than others, in part because the cameras in those areas were more likely to be installed near expressway ramps and on wider streets, which encouraged faster speeds. The tickets, which can quickly rack up late fees, were also found to cause more of a financial burden in such communities, the report found.

These were some of the same concerns that many people expressed on the radio and in meetings, Wallace says. 

Chicago’s automated traffic enforcement began in 2003, and it became the most extensive—and most lucrative—such program in the country. About 300 red-light cameras and 200 speed cameras are set up near schools and parks. The cost of the tickets can quickly double if they are not paid or contested—providing a windfall for the city.  

Wallace began his advocacy against the cameras soon after arriving at the radio station in the early 2010s. A younger listener called in and said, he recalls, “that he enjoyed the information that came from WVON but that we didn’t do anything.” The comment stuck with him, especially in light of WVON’s storied history. The station was closely involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and broadcast Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches during his Chicago campaign.

Wallace hoped to change the caller’s perception about the station. He had firsthand experience with red-light cameras,  having been ticketed himself, and decided to take them on as a cause. He scheduled a meeting at his church for a Friday night, promoting it on his show. “More than 300 people showed up,” he remembers, chatting with me in the spacious project studio and office in the basement of his townhouse on the city’s South Side. “That said to me there are a lot of people who see this in­equity and injustice.” 

Wallace began using his platform on WVON—The People’s Show—to mobilize communities around social and economic justice, and many discussions revolved around the automated enforcement program. The cause gained traction after city and state officials were found to have taken thousands of dollars from technology and surveillance companies to make sure their cameras remained on the streets.

Wallace and his group, Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras, want to repeal the ordinances authorizing the city’s camera programs. That hasn’t happened so far, but political pressure from the group paved the way for a Chicago City Council ordinance that required public meetings before any red-light cameras are installed, removed, or relocated. The group hopes for more restrictions for speed cameras, too.

“It was never about me personally. It was about ensuring that we could demonstrate to people that you have power,” says Wallace. “If you don’t like something, as Barack Obama would say, get a pen and clipboard and go to work to fight to make these changes.” 

Jonathan Manes
Senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center

Derick Scruggs, a 30-year-old father and licensed armed security guard, was working in the parking lot of an AutoZone on Chicago’s Southwest Side on April 19, 2021. That’s when he was detained, interrogated, and subjected to a “humiliating body search” by two Chicago police officers, Scruggs later attested. “I was just doing my job when police officers came at me, handcuffed me, and treated me like a criminal—just because I was near a ShotSpotter alert,” he says.

The officers found no evidence of a shooting and released Scruggs. But the next day, the police returned and arrested him for an alleged violation related to his security guard paperwork. Prosecutors later dismissed the charges, but he was held in custody overnight and was then fired from his job. “Because of what they did,” he says, “I lost my job, couldn’t work for months, and got evicted from my apartment.”

AKILAH TOWNSEND

Scruggs is believed to be among thousands of Chicagoans who’ve been questioned, detained, or arrested by police because they were near the location of a ShotSpotter alert, according to an analysis by the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General. The case caught the attention of Jonathan Manes, a law professor at Northwestern and senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, a public interest law firm. 

Manes previously worked in national security law, but when he joined the justice center about six years ago, he chose to focus squarely on the intersection of civil rights with police surveillance and technology. “My goal was to identify areas that weren’t well covered by other civil rights organizations but were a concern for people here in Chicago,” he says. 

“There is a need for much broader structural change to how the city chooses to use surveillance technology and then deploys it.”

Jonathan Manes, senior counsel, MacArthur Justice Center

And when he and his colleagues looked into ShotSpotter, they revealed a disturbing problem: The system generated alerts that yielded no evidence of gun-­related crimes but were used by police as a pretext for other actions. There seemed to be “a pattern of people being stopped, detained, questioned, sometimes arrested, in response to a ShotSpotter alert—often resulting in charges that have nothing to do with guns,” Manes says. 

The system also directed a “massive number of police deployments onto the South and West Sides of the city,” Manes says. Those regions are home to most of Chicago’s Black and Latino residents. The research showed that 80% of the city’s Black population but only 30% of its white population lived in districts covered by the system. 

Manes brought Scruggs’s case into a lawsuit that he was already developing against the city’s use of ShotSpotter. In late 2025, he and his colleagues reached a settlement that prohibits police officers from doing what they did in Scruggs’s case—stopping or searching people simply because they are near the location of a gunshot detection alert. 

Chicago had already decommissioned ShotSpotter in 2024, but the agreement will cover any future gunshot detection systems. Manes is carefully watching to see what happens next.

Though Manes is pleased with the settlement, he points out that it narrowly focused on how police resources were used after the gunshot detection system was operational. “There is a need for much broader structural change to how the city chooses to use surveillance technology and then deploys it,” he adds. He supports laws that require disclosure from local officials and law enforcement about what technologies are being proposed and how civil rights could be affected.  

More than two dozen jurisdictions nationwide have adopted surveillance transparency laws, including San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York City. But so far Chicago is not on that list. 

Rod McCullom is a Chicago-based science and technology writer whose focus areas include AI, biometrics, cognition, and the science of crime and violence.  

How uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade

On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a “narco sub,” a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The plane’s crew radioed it in, and eventually nearby coast guard boats got the order, routine but urgent: Intercept.

In Cartagena, about 150 miles from the action, Captain Jaime González Zamudio, commander of the regional coast guard group, sat down at his desk to watch what happened next. On his computer monitor, icons representing his patrol boats raced toward the sub’s coordinates as updates crackled over his radio from the crews at sea. This was all standard; Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and its navy has been seizing narco subs for decades. And so the captain was pretty sure what the outcome would be. His crew would catch up to the sub, just a bit of it showing above the water’s surface. They’d bring it to heel, board it, and force open the hatch to find two, three, maybe four exhausted men suffocating in a mix of diesel fumes and humidity, and a cargo compartment holding several tons of cocaine.

The boats caught up to the sub. A crew boarded, forced open the hatch, and confirmed that the vessel was secure. But from that point on, things were different.

First, some unexpected details came over the radio: There was no cocaine on board. Neither was there a crew, nor a helm, nor even enough room for a person to lie down. Instead, inside the hull the crew found a fuel tank, an autopilot system and control electronics, and a remotely monitored security camera. González Zamudio’s crew started sending pictures back to Cartagena: Bolted to the hull was another camera, as well as two plastic rectangles, each about the size of a cookie sheet—antennas for connecting to Starlink satellite internet.

The authorities towed the boat back to Cartagena, where military techs took a closer look. Weeks later, they came to an unsettling conclusion: This was Colombia’s first confirmed uncrewed narco sub. It could be operated by remote control, but it was also capable of some degree of autonomous travel. The techs concluded that the sub was likely a prototype built by the Clan del Golfo, a powerful criminal group that operates along the Caribbean coast.

For decades, handmade narco subs have been some of the cocaine trade’s most elusive and productive workhorses, ferrying multi-ton loads of illicit drugs from Colombian estuaries toward markets in North America and, increasingly, the rest of the world. Now off-the-shelf technology—Starlink terminals, plug-and-play nautical autopilots, high-resolution video cameras—may be advancing that cat-and-mouse game into a new phase.

Uncrewed subs could move more cocaine over longer distances, and they wouldn’t put human smugglers at risk of capture. Law enforcement around the world is just beginning to grapple with what the Tayrona sub means for the future—whether it was merely an isolated experiment or the opening move in a new era of autonomous drug smuggling at sea.

Drug traffickers love the ocean. “You can move drug traffic through legal and illegal routes,” says Juan Pablo Serrano, a captain in the Colombian navy and head of the operational coordination center for Orión, a multiagency, multinational counternarcotics effort. The giant container ships at the heart of global commerce offer a favorite approach, Serrano says. Bribe a chain of dockworkers and inspectors, hide a load in one of thousands of cargo boxes, and put it on a totally legal commercial vessel headed to Europe or North America. That route is slow and expensive—involving months of transit and bribes spread across a wide network—but relatively low risk. “A ship can carry 5,000 containers. Good luck finding the right one,” he says.

Far less legal, but much faster and cheaper, are small, powerful motorboats. Quick to build and cheap to crew, these “go-fasts” top out at just under 50 feet long and can move smaller loads in hours rather than days. But they’re also easy for coastal radars and patrols to spot.

Submersibles—or, more accurately, “semisubmersibles”—fit somewhere in the middle. They take more money and engineering to build than an open speedboat, but they buy stealth—even if a bit of the vessel rides at the surface, the bulk stays hidden underwater. That adds another option to a portfolio that smugglers constantly rebalance across three variables: risk, time, and cost. When US and Colombian authorities tightened control over air routes and commercial shipping in the early 1990s, subs became more attractive. The first ones were crude wooden hulls with a fiberglass shell and extra fuel tanks, cobbled together in mangrove estuaries, hidden from prying eyes. Today’s fiberglass semisubmersible designs ride mostly below the surface, relying on diesel engines that can push multi-ton loads for days at a time while presenting little more than a ripple and a hot exhaust pipe to radar and infrared sensors.

A typical semisubmersible costs under $2 million to build and can carry three metric tons of cocaine. That’s worth over $160 million in Europe—wholesale.

Most ferry between South American coasts and handoff points in Central America and Mexico, where allied criminal organizations break up the cargo and slowly funnel it toward the US. But some now go much farther. In 2019, Spanish authorities intercepted a semisubmersible after a 27-day transatlantic voyage from Brazil. In 2024, police in the Solomon Islands found the first narco sub in the Asia-Pacific region, a semisubmersible probably originating from Colombia on its way to Australia or New Zealand.

If the variables are risk, time, and cost, then the economics of a narco sub are simple. Even if they spend more time on the water than a powerboat, they’re less likely to get caught—and a relative bargain to produce. A narco sub might cost between $1 million and $2 million to build, but a kilo of cocaine costs just about $500 to make. “By the time that kilo reaches Europe, it can sell for between $44,000 and $55,000,” Serrano says. A typical semisubmersible carries up to three metric tons—cargo worth well over $160 million at European wholesale prices.

Off-the-shelf nautical autopilots, WiFi antennas, Starlink satellite internet connections, and remote cameras are all drug smugglers need to turn semisubmersibles into drone ships.

As a result, narco subs are getting more common. Seizures by authorities tripled in the last 20 years, according to Colombia’s International Center for Research and Analysis Against Maritime Drug Trafficking (CMCON), and Serrano admits that the Orión alliance has enough ships and aircraft to catch only a fraction of what sails.

Until now, though, narco subs have had one major flaw: They depended on people, usually poor fishermen or low-level recruits sealed into stifling compartments for days at a time, steering by GPS and sight, hoping not to be spotted. That made the subs expensive and a risk to drug sellers if captured. Like good capitalists, the Tayrona boat’s builders seem to have been trying to obviate labor costs with automation. No crew means more room for drugs or fuel and no sailors to pay—or to get arrested or flip if a mission goes wrong.

“If you don’t have a person or people on board, that makes the transoceanic routes much more feasible,” says Henry Shuldiner, a researcher at InSight Crime who has analyzed hundreds of narco-sub cases. It’s one thing, he notes, to persuade someone to spend a day or two going from Colombia to Panama for a big payout; it’s another to ask four people to spend three weeks sealed inside a cramped tube, sleeping, eating, and relieving themselves in the same space. “That’s a hard sell,” Shuldiner says.

An uncrewed sub doesn’t have to race to a rendezvous because its crew can endure only a few days inside. It can move more slowly and stealthily. It can wait out patrols or bad weather, loiter near a meeting point, or take longer and less well-monitored routes. And if something goes wrong—if a military plane appears or navigation fails—its owners can simply scuttle the vessel from afar.

Meanwhile, the basic technology to make all that work is getting more and more affordable, and the potential profit margins are rising. “The rapidly approaching universality of autonomous technology could be a nightmare for the U.S. Coast Guard,” wrote two Coast Guard officers in the US Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings in 2021. And as if to prove how good an idea drone narco subs are, the US Marine Corps and the weapons builder Leidos are testing a low-profile uncrewed vessel called the Sea Specter, which they describe as being “inspired” by narco-sub design.

The possibility that drug smugglers are experimenting with autonomous subs isn’t just theoretical. Law enforcement agencies on other smuggling routes have found signs the Tayrona sub isn’t an isolated case. In 2022, Spanish police seized three small submersible drones near Cádiz, on Spain’s southern coast. Two years later, Italian authorities confiscated a remote-­controlled minisubmarine they believed was intended for drug runs. “The probability of expansion is high,” says Diego Cánovas, a port and maritime security expert in Spain. Tayrona, the biggest and most technologically advanced uncrewed narco sub found so far, is more likely a preview than an anomaly.

Today, the Tayrona semisubmersible sits on a strip of grass at the ARC Bolívar naval base in Cartagena. It’s exposed to the elements; rain has streaked its paint. To one side lies an older, bulkier narco sub seized a decade ago, a blue cylinder with a clumsy profile. The Tayrona’s hull looks lower, leaner, and more refined.

Up close, it is also unmistakably handmade. The hull is a dull gray-blue, the fiberglass rough in places, with scrapes and dents from the tow that brought it into port. It has no identifying marks on the exterior—nothing that would tie it to a country, a company, or a port. On the upper surface sit the two Starlink antennas, painted over in the same gray-blue to keep them from standing out against the sea.

I climb up a ladder and drop through the small hatch near the stern. Inside, the air is damp and close, the walls beaded with condensation. Small puddles of fuel have collected in the bilge. The vessel has no seating, no helm or steering wheel, and not enough space to stand up straight or lie down. It’s clear it was never meant to carry people. A technical report by CMCON found that the sub would have enough fuel for a journey of some 800 nautical miles, and the central cargo bay would hold between 1 and 1.5 tons of cocaine.

At the aft end, the machinery compartment is a tangle of hardware: diesel engine, batteries, pumps, and a chaotic bundle of cables feeding an electronics rack. All the core components are still there. Inside that rack, investigators identified a NAC-3 autopilot processor, a commercial unit designed to steer midsize boats by tying into standard hydraulic pumps, heading sensors, and rudder-­feedback systems. They cost about $2,200 on Amazon.

“These are plug-and-play technologies,” says Wilmar Martínez, a mechatronics professor at the University of America in Bogotá, when I show him pictures of the inside of the sub. “Midcareer mechatronics students could install them.”

For all its advantages, an autonomous drug-smuggling submarine wouldn’t be invincible. Even without a crew on board, there are still people in the chain. Every satellite internet terminal—Starlink or not—comes with a billing address, a payment method, and a log of where and when it pings the constellation. Colombian officers have begun to talk about negotiating formal agreements with providers, asking them to alert authorities when a transceiver’s movements match known smuggling patterns. Brazil’s government has already cut a deal with Starlink to curb criminal use of its service in the Amazon.

The basic playbook for finding a drone sub will look much like the one for crewed semisubmersibles. Aircraft and ships will use radar to pick out small anomalies and infrared cameras to look for the heat of a diesel engine or the turbulence of a wake. That said, it might not work. “If they wind up being smaller, they’re going to be darn near impossible to detect,” says Michael Knickerbocker, a former US Navy officer who advises defense tech firms.

Autonomous drug subs are “a great example of how resilient cocaine traffickers are, and how they’re continuously one step ahead of authorities,” says one researcher.

Even worse, navies already act on only a fraction of their intelligence leads because they don’t have enough ships and aircraft. The answer, Knickerbocker argues, is “robot on robot.” Navies and coast guards will need swarms of their own small, relatively cheap uncrewed systems—surface vessels, underwater gliders, and long-endurance aerial vehicles that can loiter, sense, and relay data back to human operators. Those experiments have already begun. The US 4th Fleet, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean, is experimenting with uncrewed platforms in counternarcotics patrols. Across the Atlantic, the European Union’s European Maritime Safety Agency operates drones for maritime surveillance.

Today, though, the major screens against oceangoing vessels of all kinds are coastal radar networks. Spain operates SIVE to watch over choke points like the Strait of Gibraltar, and in the Pacific, Australia’s over-the-horizon radar network, JORN, can spot objects hundreds of miles away, far beyond the range of conventional radar.

Even so, it’s not enough to just spot an uncrewed narco sub. Law enforcement also has to stop it—and that will be tricky.

CARLOS PARRA RIOS

With a crewed vessel, Colombian doctrine says coast guard units should try to hail the boat first with lights, sirens, radio calls, and warning shots. If that fails, interceptor crews sometimes have to jump aboard and force the hatch. Officers worry that future autonomous craft could be wired to sink or even explode if someone gets too close. “If they get destroyed, we may lose the evidence,” says Víctor González Badrán, a navy captain and director of CMCON. “That means no seizure and no legal proceedings against that organization.” 

That’s where electronic warfare enters the picture—radio-frequency jamming, cyber tools, perhaps more exotic options. In the simplest version, jamming means flooding the receiver with noise so that commands from the operator never reach the vessel. Spoofing goes a step further, feeding fake signals so that the sub thinks it’s somewhere else or obediently follows a fake set of waypoints. Cyber tools might aim higher up the chain, trying to penetrate the software that runs the vessel or the networks it uses to talk to satellite constellations. At the cutting edge of these countermeasures are electromagnetic pulses designed to fry electronics outright, turning a million-dollar narco sub into a dead hull drifting at sea.

In reality, the tools that might catch a future Tayrona sub are unevenly distributed, politically sensitive, and often experimental. Powerful cyber or electromagnetic tricks are closely guarded secrets; using them in a drug case risks exposing capabilities that militaries would rather reserve for wars. Systems like Australia’s JORN radar are tightly held national security assets, their exact performance specs classified, and sharing raw data with countries on the front lines of the cocaine trade would inevitably mean revealing hints as to how they got it. “Just because a capability exists doesn’t mean you employ it,” Knickerbocker says. 

Analysts don’t think uncrewed narco subs will reshape the global drug trade, despite the technological leap. Trafficking organizations will still hedge their bets across those three variables, hiding cocaine in shipping containers, dissolving it into liquids and paints, racing it north in fast boats. “I don’t think this is revolutionary,” Shuldiner says. “But it’s a great example of how resilient cocaine traffickers are, and how they’re continuously one step ahead of authorities.”

There’s still that chance, though, that everything international law enforcement agencies know about drug smuggling is about to change. González Zamudio says he keeps getting requests from foreign navies, coast guards, and security agencies to come see the Tayrona sub. He greets their delegations, takes them out to the strip of grass on the base, and walks them around it, gives them tours. It has become a kind of pilgrimage. Everyone who makes it worries that the next time a narco sub appears near a distant coastline, they’ll board it as usual, force the hatch—and find it full of cocaine and gadgets, but without a single human occupant. And no one knows what happens after that. 

Eduardo Echeverri López is a journalist based in Colombia.