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The Minnesota Daily

Serving the UMN community since 1900

The Minnesota Daily

Serving the UMN community since 1900

The Minnesota Daily

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Has Minneapolis become another Mogadishu?

The mysterious plane tracked circling over [the] Twin Cities Friday was both horrifying and incomprehensible. Stamped N361DB and linked to LCB Leasing of Bristow, Va., according to the records of the FAA, the plane was said to have been gathering intelligence information. By all standards, spying on citizens is a sad and hard-to-swallow fact.
 
However, anyone who has lived recently in Mogadishu for even a short period of time wouldn’t wonder why a surveillance plane circles over downtown Minneapolis at low altitude in the middle of the night. The problem for most Americans is that they don’t realize the nation is in an unconventional war.
 
Back in 2013, in my third night in Mogadishu, I was awakened by the noise of a plane at three in the morning. While I knew the area was home to a lot of bad guys who engaged in dirty activity in the dark, what scared me most was the motive of the plane flying over my guesthouse. The situation got worse when a colleague told me “it is conducting surveillance business.”
 
Now, two years later, spotting a surveillance plane over an American city to capture images of pedestrian and vehicle movements that come to its attention is not fun either. It shows the inability of our law enforcement system to keep us safe. Similarly, such an operation reveals another truth: The situation is worse than meets the eye.
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