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.

Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening

One winter afternoon in a conference room in Taipei, a pair of twentysomething women dragged their friend across the floor. Lying on the ground in checkered pants and a brown sweatshirt, she was pretending to be either injured or dead. One friend picked her up by her arms, the other grabbed hold of her legs, and they managed to move her, despite momentarily breaking character to laugh at the awkwardness of the exercise. The three women had paid approximately $40 to spend their Sunday here, undergoing basic training to prepare for a possibility every Taiwanese citizen has an opinion about: Will China invade? 

Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around that question. China’s ruling party has wanted to seize Taiwan for more than half a century. But in recent years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has placed greater emphasis on the idea of “taking back” the island (which the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, has never controlled). As China’s economic and military might has grown, some analysts believe the country now has the capacity to quarantine Taiwan whenever it wants, making the decision a calculation of costs and benefits.

Many in Taiwan and elsewhere think one major deterrent has to do with the island’s critical role in semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips needed for AI applications. Bloomberg Economics estimates that a blockade would cost the global economy, including China, $5 trillion in the first year alone.

“The international community must certainly do everything in its power to avoid a conflict in the Taiwan Strait; there is too great a cost.”

Lai Ching-te, Taiwanese president

The island, which is approximately the size of Maryland, owes its remarkably disproportionate chip dominance to the inventiveness and prowess of one company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. The chipmaker, which reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion in July, has contributed more than any other to Taiwan’s irreplaceable role in the global semiconductor supply chain. Its clients include Apple and the leading chip designer Nvidia. Its chips are in your iPhone, your laptop, and the data centers that run ChatGPT. 

For a company that makes what amounts to an invisible product, TSMC holds a remarkably prominent role in Taiwanese society. I’ve heard people talk about it over background noise in loud bars in the southern city of Tainan and listened to Taipei cab drivers connect Taiwan’s security situation to the company, unprompted. “Taiwan will be okay,” one driver told me as we sped by the national legislature, “because TSMC.” 

The idea is that world leaders (particularly the United States)—aware of the island’s critical role in the semiconductor supply chain—would retaliate economically, and perhaps militarily, if China were to attack Taiwan. That, in turn, deters Beijing. “Because TSMC is now the most recognizable company of Taiwan, it has embedded itself in a notion of Taiwan’s sovereignty,” says Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council. 

Now some Taiwan specialists and some of the island’s citi­zens are worried that this “silicon shield,” if it ever existed, is cracking. Facing pressure from Washington, TSMC is investing heavily in building out manufacturing capacity at its US hub in Arizona. It is also building facilities in Japan and Germany in addition to maintaining a factory in mainland China, where it has been producing less advanced legacy chips since 2016. 

In Taiwan, there is a worry that expansion abroad will dilute the company’s power at home, making the US and other countries less inclined to feel Taiwan is worthy of defense. TSMC’s investments in the US have come with no guarantees for Taiwan in return, and high-ranking members of Taiwan’s opposition party have accused the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of gambling with the future of the island. It doesn’t help that TSMC’s expansion abroad coincides with what many see as a worrying attitude in the White House. On top of his overarching “America First” philosophy, Donald Trump has declined to comment on the specific question of whether the US would intervene if China attempted to take Taiwan by force. “I don’t want to ever put myself in that position,” he said in February. 

At the same time, Beijing’s interest in Taiwan has continued unabated. While China is making progress toward semiconductor self-­sufficiency, it’s currently in a transition period, with companies relying on foreign-made chips manufactured in Taiwan—some in compliance with export controls and some smuggled in. Meanwhile, the CCP persistently suggests that seizing the island would bring about a kind of family reunion. “It is the common aspiration and sacred responsibility of all Chinese sons and daughters to realize the complete reunification of the motherland,” reads a statement released by the foreign ministry after Nancy Pelosi’s controversial 2022 visit to Taiwan. Though it’s impossible to know the full scope of Beijing’s motivations, there is also obvious strategic appeal: Controlling the island would give China deep-water access, which is critical for naval routes and submarines. Plus, it could significantly disrupt American AI firms’ access to advanced chips.  

While China ramps up militarily, Taiwan is trying to make itself hard to ignore. The government is increasingly portraying the island as strategically essential to the global community, with semiconductors as its primary offering. “The international community must certainly do everything in its power to avoid a conflict in the Taiwan Strait; there is too great a cost,” Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te said in an interview earlier this year with Japan’s Nippon Television. Parts of the international community are hearing that message—and seizing the opportunity it presents: earlier this month, defense tech company Anduril Industries announced it is opening a new office in Taiwan, where it will be expanding partnerships and selling autonomous munitions. 

For its part, the chip industry is actively showing its commitment to Taiwan. While other tech CEOs attended Trump’s second inauguration, for instance, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang met instead with TSMC’s chairman, and the company announced in May that its overseas headquarters would be in Taipei. In recent years, US government officials have also started paying more attention to Taiwan’s security situation and its interconnectedness with the chip industry. “There was a moment when everybody started waking up to the dependence on TSMC,” says Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific Program. The realization emerged, she says, over the last decade but was underscored in March of 2021, when Phil Davidson, then leader of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that there could be an invasion by 2027. Parallel to the security threat is the potential issue of overdependence, since so much chipmaking capability is concentrated in Taiwan.

For now, Taiwan is facing a tangle of interests and time frames. China presents its claim to Taiwan as a historical inevitability, albeit one with an uncertain timeline, while the United States’ relationship with the island is focused on an AI-driven future. But from Taiwan’s perspective, the fight for its fate is playing out right now, amid unprecedented geopolitical instability. The next few years will likely determine whether TSMC’s chipmaking dominance is enough to convince the world Taiwan is worth protecting.

Innovation built on interconnectivity 

TSMC is an uncontested success story. Its founder, Morris Chang, studied and worked in the United States before he was lured to Taiwan to start a new business on the promise of state support and inexpensive yet qualified labor. Chang founded TSMC in 1987 on the basis of his innovative business model. Rather than design and produce chips in-house, as was the norm, TSMC would act as a foundry: Clients would design the chips, and TSMC would make them. 

This focus on manufacturing allowed TSMC to optimize its operations, building up process knowledge and, eventually, outperforming competitors like Intel. It also freed up other businesses to go “fabless,” meaning they could stop maintaining their own semiconductor factories, or fabs, and throw their resources behind other parts of the chipmaking enterprise. Tapping into Taiwan’s domestic electronics supply chain proved effective and efficient for TSMC. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, global demand for semiconductors powering personal computers and other devices continued to grow. TSMC thrived.

Then, in 2022, the US imposed export controls on China that restricted its access to advanced chips. Taiwan was forced to either comply, by cutting off Chinese clients, or risk losing the support of the country that was home to 70% of its client base—and, possibly, 100% of its hopes for external military support in the event of an attack. 

Soon after, Chang announced that he believed globalization and free markets were “almost dead.” The nearly three years since have shown he was onto something. For one thing, in contrast to President Biden’s pursuit of supply chain integration with democratic allies, President Trump’s foreign policy is characterized by respect for big, undemocratic powers and punitive tariffs against both America’s rivals and its friends. Trump has largely abandoned Biden’s economic diplomacy with European and Asian allies but kept his China-targeted protectionism—and added his trademark transactionalism. In an unprecedented move earlier this month, the administration allowed Nvidia and AMD to sell previously banned chips to China on the condition that the companies pay the government 15% of revenues made from China sales. 

Protectionism, it turns out, spurs self-reliance. China’s government has been making a massive effort to build up its domestic chip production capabilities—a goal that was identified at the beginning of Xi’s rise but has been turbocharged in the wake of Washington’s export controls. 

Any hope the US has for significantly expanding domestic chip production comes from its friends—TSMC first among them. The semiconductor industry developed as a global endeavor out of practicality, playing to the strengths of each region: design in the US and manufacturing in Asia, with key inputs from Europe central to the process. Yet the US government, entrenched in its “tech war” with China, is now dead set on deglobalizing the chip supply chain, or at least onshoring as much of it as possible. There’s just one hiccup: The best chip manufacturer isn’t American. It’s TSMC. Even if some manufacturing happens in Arizona, the US still relies on Taiwan’s chipmaking ecosystem. And copying that supply chain outside Taiwan could be harder than the current administration imagines.

Squarely in the middle

Taiwan’s modern security uncertainties stem from the long-­contested issue of the island’s sovereignty. After losing the first Sino-Japanese War in the late 1800s, the Qing dynasty forfeited Taiwan to Japanese imperial control. It was Japan’s “model colony” until 1945, when postwar negotiations resulted in its transfer to the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek of the Nationalist Party, known as the KMT. The insurgent CCP under Mao Zedong ultimately defeated the Nationalists in a civil war fought on the mainland until 1949. Chiang and many of his party’s defeated generals decamped to Taiwan, controlling it under martial law for nearly 40 years. 

Taiwan held its first free democratic elections in 1996, kicking off a two-party rivalry between the KMT, which favors closer relations with Beijing, and the DPP, which opposes integration with China. Kitchen-table issues like economic growth are central to Taiwanese elections, but so is the overarching question of how best to handle the threat of invasion, which has persisted for nearly 80 years. The DPP is increasingly calling for raising defense spending and civilian preparedness to make sure Taiwan is ready for the worst, while the KMT supports direct talks with Beijing.  

REBECCA NOBLE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Meanwhile, Chinese military incursions around Taiwan—known as “gray zone” tactics because they fall short of acts of war—are increasingly frequent. In May, Taiwan’s defense ministry reportedly estimated that Chinese warplanes were entering Taiwan’s air defense zone more than 200 times a month, up from fewer than 10 times per month five years ago. China has conducted drills mirroring the actions needed for a full-scale invasion or a blockade, which would cut Taiwan off from the outside world. Chinese military officials are now publicly talking about achieving a blockade, says Lyle Morris, an expert on foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “They’re punishing Lai and the DPP,” Morris says. Meanwhile, the CCP has its own people to answer to: When it comes to the Taiwan issue, Morris says, “Beijing is probably quite worried about the people of China being upset if they aren’t hawkish enough or if they come out looking weak.” Indeed, in response to Lai’s recent policy statements, including one declaring that China is a “hostile foreign force,” Gao Zhikai, a prominent scholar in China who opposes Taiwanese independence, recently wrote, “The reunification with the motherland cannot be endlessly delayed. Decisive action must be taken.” 

Intimidation from China has made some ordinary Taiwanese citizens more concerned; according to a recent poll conducted by a defense-focused think tank, 51% think defense spending should be increased (although 65% of respondents said they thought an attack within five years was “unlikely”). No matter how much money Taipei spends, the sheer military imbalance between China and Taiwan means Taiwan would need help. But especially in the wake of Ukraine’s experience, many believe US aid would be contingent on whether Taiwan demonstrates the will to defend itself. “Based on war games, Taiwan would have to hold out for a month before the US could potentially intervene,” says Iris Shaw, director of the DPP mission in the US. And support from Taiwan’s neighbors like Japan might be contingent on US involvement.

But how likely is the US to intervene in such a scenario? The author Craig Addison popularized the argument that Taiwan’s fate is tied to its chip production prowess in his 2001 book Silicon Shield: Taiwan’s Protection Against Chinese Attack. Back then, Addison wrote that although the US had been intentionally vague about whether it would go to war to protect the island, America’s technological reliance on “a safe and productive Taiwan” made it highly probable that Washington would intervene. President Joe Biden deviated from those decades of calculated ambiguity by asserting multiple times that America would defend the island in the event of an attack. Yet now, Trump seems to have taken the opposite position, possibly presenting an opportunity for Beijing. 

TSMC in the Trump era 

In many ways, Taiwan finds itself in a catch-22. It feels the need to cozy up to the US for protection, yet that defensive maneuver is arguably risky in itself. It’s a common belief in Taiwan that forging stronger ties to the US could be dangerous. According to a public opinion poll released in January, 34.7% of Taiwanese believe that a “pro-US” policy provokes China and will cause a war. 

But the Lai administration’s foreign policy is “inexorably intertwined with the notion that a strong relationship with the US is essential,” says Hammond-Chambers.

Bolstering US support may not be the only reason TSMC is building fabs outside Taiwan. As the company readily points out, the majority of its customers are American. TSMC is also responding to its home base’s increasingly apparent land and energy limitations: finding land to build new fabs sometimes causes rifts with Taiwanese people who, for example, don’t want their temples and ancestral burial sites repurposed as science parks. Taiwan also relies on imports to meet more than 95% of its energy needs, and the dominant DPP has pledged to phase out nuclear, Taiwan’s most viable yet most hotly contested renewable energy source. Geopolitical tensions compound these physical restraints: Even if TSMC would never say as much, it’s fairly likely that if China did attack Taiwan, the firm would rather remain operational in other countries than be wiped out completely. 

However, building out TSMC’s manufacturing capabilities outside Taiwan will not be easy. “The ecosystem they created is truly unique. It’s a function of the talent pipeline, the culture, and laws in Taiwan; you can’t easily replicate it anywhere,” says Glaser. TSMC has 2,500 Taiwan-based suppliers. Plenty are within a couple of hours’ drive or an even shorter trip on high-speed rail. Taiwan has built a fully operational chip cluster, the product of four decades of innovation, industrial policy, and labor.

In many ways, Taiwan finds itself in a catch-22. It feels the need to cozy up to the US for protection, yet that defensive maneuver is arguably risky in itself.

As a result, it’s unclear whether TSMC will be able to copy its model and paste it into the suburbs of Phoenix, where it has 3,000 employees working on chip manufacturing. “Putting aside the geopolitical factor, they wouldn’t have expanded abroad,” says Feifei Hung, a researcher at the Asia Society. Rather than standalone facilities, the Arizona fabs are “appendages of TSMC that happen to be in Arizona,” says Paul Triolo, partner and tech policy lead at the international consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. When the full complex is operational, it will represent only a small percentage of TSMC’s overall capacity, most of which will remain in Taiwan. Triolo doubts the US buildout will yield results similar to what TSMC has built there: “Arizona ain’t that yet, and never will be.” 

Still, the second Trump administration has placed even more pressure on the company to “friendshore”—without providing any discernible signs of friendship. During this spring’s tariff frenzy, the administration threatened to hit Taiwan with a 32% “reciprocal” tariff, a move that was then paused and revived at 20% in late July (and was still being negotiated as of press time). The administration has also announced a 100% tariff on semiconductor imports, with the caveat that companies with US-based production, like TSMC, are exempt—though it’s unclear whether imports from critical suppliers in Taiwan will be tariffed. And the threat of a chip-specific tariff remains. “This is in line with [Trump’s] rhetoric of restoring manufacturing in the US and using tariffs as a one size fits all tool to force it,” says Nancy Wei, a trade and supply chain analyst at the Eurasia Group. The US is also apparently considering levying a $1 billion fine against TSMC after TSMC-made chips were reportedly found in some Huawei devices.

Despite these kinds of maneuvers, TSMC has been steadfast in its attempts to get on Washington’s good side. In March, Trump and TSMC’s CEO, C.C. Wei, jointly announced that the firm will make an additional $100 billion investment (on top of a previously announced $65 billion) in TSMC’s US hub in Arizona. The pledge represents the largest single source of foreign direct investment into the US, ever. While the deal was negotiated during Biden’s term, Trump was happy to take credit for ensuring that “the most powerful AI chips will be made right here in America.” 

The Arizona buildout will also include an R&D facility—a critical element for tech transfer and intellectual-property development. Then there’s the very juicy cherry on top: TSMC announced in April that once all six new fabs are operational, 30% of its most advanced chips will be produced in Arizona. Up until then, the thinking was that US-based production would remain a generation or two behind. It looks as if the administration’s public and, presumably, private arm-twisting has paid off. 

Meanwhile, as Trump cuts government programs and subsidies while demanding the “return” of manufacturing to the US, it’s TSMC that is running a technician apprenticeship program in Arizona to create good American jobs. TSMC’s leaders, Triolo says, must question how serious the Trump administration is about long-term industrial policy. They’re probably asking themselves, he says, “Do they understand what it takes to support the semiconductor industry, like our government does?” 

Dealing with an administration that is so explicitly “America first” represents “one of the biggest challenges in history for Taiwanese companies,” says Thung-Hong Lin, a sociology researcher at the Taipei-based Academia Sinica. Semiconductor manufacturing relies on reliability. Trump has so far offered TSMC no additional incentives supporting its US expansion—and started a trade war that has directly affected the semiconductor industry, partly by introducing irrevocable uncertainty. “Trump’s tariffs have set off a new, more intensified bifurcation of semiconductor supply chains,” says Chris Miller, author of Chip War. For now, Miller says, TSMC must navigate a world in which the US and China are both intense competitors and, despite trade restrictions, important clients. 

Warring narratives

China has been taking advantage of these changes to wage a war of disinformation. In response to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022, when she was US Speaker of the House, Beijing sent warships, aircraft, and propaganda across the Taiwan Strait. Hackers using Chinese software infiltrated the display screens in Taiwan’s 7-Eleven stores to display messages telling “warmonger Pelosi” to “get out of Taiwan.” That might not be an act of war, but it’s close; “7” is an institution of daily life on the island. It is not difficult to imagine how a similar tactic might be used to spread more devastating disinformation, falsely alleging, for example, that Taiwan’s military has surrendered to China during a future crisis. 

Taiwan is “perpetually on the front lines” of cyberattacks from China, says Francesca Chen, a cybersecurity systems analyst at Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs. According to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, instances of propaganda traceable to China grew by 60% in 2024 over the previous year, reaching 2.16 million. 

ANNABELLE CHIH/GETTY IMAGES

Over the last few years, online discussion of TSMC’s investments in the US “has become a focal point” of China’s state-­sponsored disinformation campaigns aimed at Taiwan, Chen says. They claim TSMC is transferring its most advanced technology, talent, and resources to the US, “weakening Taiwan’s economic lifeline and critical position in global supply chains.” Key terms include “hollowing out Taiwan” and “de-Taiwanization.” This framing depicts TSMC’s diversification as a symbol of Taiwan’s vulnerability, Chen says. The idea is to exploit real domestic debates in Taiwan to generate heightened levels of internal division, weakening social cohesion and undermining trust in the government.

Chinese officials haven’t been shy about echoing these messages out in the open: After the most recent US investment announcement in March, a spokesperson from China’s Taiwan Affairs Council accused Taiwan’s DPP of handing over TSMC as a “gift” to the US. (“TSMC turning into USMC?” asked a state media headline.) Former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou posted an eerily similar criticism, alleging that TSMC’s US expansion amounted to “selling” the chipmaker in exchange for protection.

TSMC’s expansion abroad could become a major issue in Taiwan’s 2028 presidential election. It plays directly into party politics: The KMT can accuse the DPP of sacrificing Taiwan’s technology assets to placate the US, and the DPP can accuse the KMT of cozying up with China, even as Beijing’s military incursions become a more evident part of daily life. It remains to be seen whether TSMC’s shift to the US will ultimately protect or weaken Taiwan—or have no effect on the island’s security and sovereignty. For now at least, China’s aspirations loom large. 

To Beijing, unequivocally, Taiwan does not equal TSMC. Instead, it represents the final, unfulfilled stage of the Communist Party’s revolutionary struggle. Framed that way, China’s resolve to take the island could very well be nonnegotiable. That would mean if Taiwan is going to maintain a shield that protects it from the full weight of China’s political orthodoxy, it may need to be made of something much stronger than silicon. 

Johanna M. Costigan is a writer and editor focused on technology and geopolitics in the US, China, and Taiwan. She writes the newsletter The Long Game.

Why Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense idea is another ripped straight from the movies

In 1940, a fresh-faced Ronald Reagan starred as US Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in Murder in the Air, an action film centered on a fictional “superweapon” that could stop enemy aircraft midflight. A mock newspaper in the movie hails it as the “greatest peace argument ever invented.” The experimental weapon is “the exclusive property of Uncle Sam,” Reagan’s character declares.

More than 40 years later, this cinematic vision—an American superweapon capable of neutralizing assaults and ushering in global peace—became a real-life centerpiece of Reagan’s presidency. Some have suggested that Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a quixotic plan for a space-based missile shield, may have been partly inspired by his silver-screen past; indeed, the concept was so fantastical it’s now better known by its Hollywood-referencing nickname, “Star Wars.”

In January 2024, Donald Trump revived the space-shield dream at a primary campaign rally in Laconia, New Hampshire, using the Star Wars nickname that Reagan hated. It didn’t work in the 1980s, Trump said, because the technology wasn’t there. But times have changed. 

Whether in Golden Age Hollywood or Trump’s impromptu dramatizations, the dream of a missile shield is animated by its sheer cinematic allure.

“I’ve seen so many things. I’ve seen shots that you wouldn’t even believe,” Trump said. He acted out a scene of missile defense experts triangulating the path of an incoming weapon. “Ding, ding, ding, ding,” he said, as he mimed typing on a keyboard. “Missile launch? Psshing!!” He raised his hand to indicate the rising missile, then let it fall to signal the successful interception: “Boom.” 

Trump has often expressed admiration for Israel’s Iron Dome, an air defense system that can intercept short-range rockets and artillery over the small nation and that is funded in part by the United States. At the rally, he pledged to “build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the USA … a lot of it right here in New Hampshire, actually.” 

Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump began working toward this promise by issuing an executive order to develop “The Iron Dome for America,” which was rebranded the “Golden Dome” a month later. The eruption of a revived conflict between Israel and Iran in June—including Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities—has only strengthened the case for an American version of the Iron Dome in the eyes of the administration.

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

The Golden Dome has often been compared to SDI for its futuristic sheen, its aggressive form of protection, and its reflection of the belief that an impenetrable shield is the cheat code to global peace. Both efforts demonstrate the performative power of spectacle in defense policy, especially when wielded by deft showmen like Reagan and Trump. Whether in Golden Age Hollywood or Trump’s impromptu dramatizations, the dream of a missile shield is animated by its sheer cinematic allure, often rendered in deceptively simple concept art depicting a society made immune to catastrophic strikes. 

But in the complicated security landscape confronting the world today, is spectacle the same as safety?

“Missile defense is an area where facts and fiction blend,” says Anette Stimmer, a lecturer in international relations at the University of St Andrews who has researched SDI. “A lot is up to interpretation by all the actors involved.”

Trump’s view is simple: Space is as much a warfighting domain as land, air, and ocean, and therefore the US must assert its dominance there with advanced technologies. This position inspired the creation of the US Space Force in his first term, and Trump has now redoubled his efforts with the ongoing development of the Golden Dome.  

General Michael Guetlein, who Trump has appointed to lead the Golden Dome project, argued that America’s foes, including China and Russia, have forced the nation’s hand by continually pushing limits in their own weapons programs. “While we have been focused on peace overseas, our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads; building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 miles an hour; building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses; and building submarines that can sneak up on our shores; and, worse yet, building space weapons,” Guetlein said in May.

“It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland,” he said. “Golden Dome is a bold and aggressive approach to hurry up and protect the homeland from our adversaries. We owe it to our children and our children’s children to protect them and afford them a quality of life that we have all grown up enjoying.”

With that vision in mind, Trump’s executive order outlines a host of goals for missile defense, some of which support bipartisan priorities like protecting supply chains and upgrading sensor arrays. The specific architecture of the Golden Dome is still being hammered out, but the initial executive order envisions a multi-tiered system of new sensors and interceptors—on the ground, in the air, and in space—that would work together to counter the threat of attacks from ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles. The system would be coordinated in part by artificial-intelligence models trained for real-time threat detection and response. 

The technology that links the Golden Dome directly to SDI hinges on one key bullet point in the order that demands the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept.” This language revives Reagan’s dream of deploying hundreds of missile interceptors in orbit to target missiles in the boost phase right after liftoff, a window of just a few minutes when the projectiles are slower and still near the attacker’s territory.

Space weapons are an attractive option for targeting the boost phase because interceptors need to be close enough to the launching missile to hit it. If a nation fired off long-range missiles from deep in its territory, the nearest ground- or air-based interceptors could be thousands of miles from the launch site. Space interceptors, in contrast, would be just a few hundred miles overhead of the ascending missiles, allowing for a much faster reaction time. But though the dream of boost-phase interception dates back decades, these maneuvers have never been operationally demonstrated from ground, air, or space.

“It’s a really hard problem that hasn’t been solved,” says Laura Grego, senior scientist and research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ global security program.

The US is currently protected by the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), which consists of 44 interceptor missiles split between bases in Alaska and California, along with a network of early-­warning sensors on the ground, at sea, and in orbit. Tests suggest that the GMD would have about a 50% success rate at intercepting missiles.

Initiated by President Bill Clinton in the late ’90s and accelerated by President George W. Bush in the 2000s, the GMD is intended mainly to defend against rogue states like North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the US. A secondary focus is Iran, which does not currently have a nuclear weapon or ICBMs. Still, the GMD is built to anticipate a possible future where it develops those capabilities. 

The GMD is not designed to protect the US from the sort of large-scale and coordinated missile attacks that Russia and China could lob across the world. The Bush administration instead favored a focus on strategic deterrence with these peer nations, an approach that the Obama and Biden administrations continued. In addition to the GMD, the Pentagon and its international partners maintain regional defense systems to counter threats in conflict hot spots or attacks on critical infrastructure. All these networks are designed to intercept missiles during their midcourse cruise phase, as they hurtle through the sky or space, or during their terminal or reentry phase, as they approach their targets. The GMD has cost upward of $63 billion since it was initiated, and the US spends about an additional $20 billion to $30 billion annually on its array of other missile defense systems. 

In May, Trump was presented with several design options for the Golden Dome and selected a plan with a price tag of $175 billion and a schedule for full deployment by the end of his term. The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law on July 4, approved an initial $24.4 billion in funding for it. Space technologies and launch access have become much more affordable since the 1980s, but many analysts still think the projected cost and timeline are not realistic. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency, projected that the cost of the space-based interceptors could total from $161 billion to $542 billion over the course of 20 years. The wide range can be explained by the current lack of specifics on those orbital interceptors’ design and number.

Reintroducing the idea of space-based interceptors is “probably the most controversial piece of Golden Dome,” says Leonor Tomero, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Biden administration. 

“There are a lot of improvements that we can and should make on missile defense,” she continues. “There’s a lot of capability gaps I think we do need to address. My concern is the focus on reviving Star Wars and SDI. It’s got very significant policy implications, strategic stability implications, in addition to cost implications and technology feasibility challenges.” 

Indeed. Regardless of whether the Golden Dome materializes, the program is already raising geopolitical anxieties reminiscent of the Cold War era. Back then, the US had one main adversary: the Soviet Union. Now, it confronts a roiling multipolarity of established and nascent nuclear powers. Many of them have expressed dismay over the about-face on American missile defense strategy, which was previously predicated on arms reduction and deterrence.

“Here we are, despite years of saying we are not going to do this—that it is technically out of reach, economically unsustainable, and strategically unwise,” Grego says. “Overnight, we’re like, ‘No, actually, we’re doing it.’” 

The fact that we “blew up that logic” will “have a big impact on whether or not the program actually succeeds in creating the vision that it lays out,” she adds.

Russian and Chinese officials called the Golden Dome “deeply destabilizing in nature” in a joint statement in May, and North Korea’s foreign ministry warned it could “turn outer space into a potential nuclear war field.”  

Reagan, by all accounts, believed that SDI would be the ultimate tool of peace for all nations, and he even offered to share the technology with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump, in contrast, sees Golden Dome as part of his “America First” brand. He has lamented that past American leaders supported the development of other missile defense projects abroad while neglecting to build similar security measures for their own country. The Golden Dome is both an expression of Trump’s belief that the world is leeching off America and a bargaining chip in negotiations toward a new power balance; Canada could be covered by the shield for free, he has said—in exchange for becoming the 51st state.

Trump has argued that America has been both demographically diluted by unchecked immigration and financially depleted by freeloading allied nations—undermining its security on both internal and external fronts. His first term’s marquee promise to build a wall on the southern US border, paid for by Mexico, aimed to address the former problem. That administration did build more physical barriers along the border (though US taxpayers, not Mexico, footed the bill). But just as important, the wall emerged as a symbolic shorthand for tougher immigration control. 

The Golden Dome is the second-term amplification of that promise, a wall that expands the concept of the “border” to the entire American airspace. Trump has projected an image of his envisioned space missile shield as a literal dome that could ward off coordinated attacks, including boost-phase interceptors from space and cruise- and terminal-phase interception by ground and air assets. When he announced the selected plan from the Resolute Desk in May, he sat in front of a mockup that depicted a barrage of incoming missiles being thwarted by the nationwide shield, depicted with a golden glow.

The Golden Dome’s orbital interceptors are supposedly there to target the early boost phase of missiles on or near the launch site, not over the United States. But the image of a besieged America, repelling enemy fire from the heavens, provides the visual and cinematic idea of both threat and security that Trump hopes to impress on the public.  

“This administration, and MAGA world, thinks about itself as being victimized by immigrants, government waste, leftist professors, and so on,” says Edward Tabor Linenthal, a historian who examined public narratives about SDI in his 1989 book Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative. “It’s not much of a jump to be victimized by too many nations getting nuclear weapons.” 

Even in our era of entrenched political polarization, there is support across party lines for upgrading and optimizing America’s missile defense systems. No long-range missile has ever struck US soil, but an attack would be disastrous for the nation and the world. 

“We’ve come a long way in terms of missile defense,” says Tomero. “There has been a lot of bipartisan consensus on increasing regional missile defense, working with our allies, and making sure that the missile defense interceptors we have work.”

SHOUT

Trump has challenged that consensus with his reversion to the dream of a space shield. He is correct that SDI failed to materialize in part because its envisioned technologies were out of reach, from a financial and engineering standpoint, in the 1980s. But the controversy that erupted around SDI—and that tarnished it with the derisive name “Star Wars”—stemmed just as much from its potential geopolitical disruptiveness as from its fantastical techno-optimism. 

“This idea of a missile shield, also back when Reagan proposed it, has a huge popular appeal, because who wouldn’t want to be able to defend your country from nuclear weapons? It is a universal dream,” says Stimmer. “It requires a bit more digging in and understanding to see that actually, this vision depends a lot on technological feasibility and on how others perceive it.” 

Reagan maintained a steadfast conviction that this shield of space-based interceptors would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” ushering in “world peace,” as he said in his March 1983 speech announcing SDI. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction could be replaced by mutually assured survival, he argued.

Amid nuclear tensions, J. Robert Oppenheimer compared the US and the Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle.” Now there are many more scorpions.

But Gorbachev saw the space-based shield as an offensive weapon, since it would give the US a first-strike advantage. The imbalance, he warned, could spark a weapons race in space, a domain that had been spared from overt military conflicts. As a result, the initiative would only destabilize the world order and interrupt the progress of arms control and nuclear de-proliferation efforts. 

Reagan’s insistence on SDI as the only route to world peace may have blocked opportunities to advance that goal through more practical and cost-effective avenues, such as diplomacy and arms control. At the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, Reagan and Gorbachev came very close to an arms control agreement that might have eliminated all ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. The sticking point was Reagan’s refusal to give up SDI. 

“It is not the Strategic Defense Initiative; it’s a strategic defense ideology,” says Linenthal. He mentions the famous metaphor used by J. Robert Oppenheimer, a central figure of the Manhattan Project, who compared the United States and the Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle.” Either scorpion could kill the other, but only at the probable cost of its own life. 

Reagan felt a “tremendously powerful impetus” to escape Oppenheimer’s metaphor, Linenthal noted: “It was a new kind of deliverance that would resolve it all. Of course, now there are many more scorpions, so it has to be a bigger bottle.”

A true believer, Reagan never abandoned SDI in spite of cost overruns and public backlash. President Bill Clinton redirected the program in 1993 by shifting gears from global to regional missile defense, a focus that remained fairly consistent for decades—until Trump took center stage. Now, the Golden Dome has flipped that logic on its head, risking a possible escalation of military tensions in outer space.

Tomero describes a “nightmare scenario” in which adversaries attack the Golden Dome’s space infrastructure, leaving the orbital environment filled with debris that renders the defense system, among countless other space assets, inoperable. 

“Having a one-sided capability that is very threatening to our adversaries is obviously going to create very dangerous stability issues,” she says. It could “lead to inadvertent escalation and miscalculation and, I think, lower the threshold to conflict and nuclear war.” 

As president, Trump has channeled the boardroom antics that once resuscitated his celebrity status on The Apprentice. But armed adversaries, long wary of America’s position on missile defense, don’t have the luxury of wondering whether it’s all real or just more stagecraft. 

“What makes Trump so difficult to read for others is his unpredictability,” Stimmer says. “This, just by itself, destabilizes things, because no one knows what he’ll actually do.”

Trump has described the Golden Dome as nearly impenetrable by missile attacks, evoking a clear symbolic return to an American golden age where we can all feel safe again.

“All of them will be knocked out of the air,” as “the success rate is very close to 100%,” he said at the project’s official launch in May. “We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland.”

Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in upstate New York, and author of First Contact, a book about the search for alien life, which will be published in September.