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The lower Niagara River (below/north of Niagara Falls and the Rapids) has been a favored location for trade and smuggling for centuries. It seems to have taken a new turn recently, per this story, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/01/17/drones-carry-mdma-into-america-via-niagara-falls/?sh=7b39ea602c83 [forbes.com] also covered by BuffaloNews.com and other outlets.

The neighbors thought it odd that no one seemed to live in the capacious, quintessential American family house in Lewiston, New York, a small town that sits on the Niagara River, just east of Ontario, Canada. Whoever owned the $650,000 property appeared neither to reside there nor care about upkeep, its lawn unmowed to the point of being “unmanageable,” locals later told police. Even odder, they told the cops, were the monthly arrivals of individuals driving expensive-looking cars, only for the visitors to leave a few days later.

Then in the early hours of September 21 last year, the house became the subject of a police raid, according to a recently unsealed search warrant obtained by Forbes. In the middle of the night, using a surveillance tool that could “recognize drone signatures, map their flight path and identify starting and stopping points via GPS,” border patrol watched an unmanned aerial vehicle flying over the Niagara River and into the house’s garden, according to the warrant. When the cops arrived, the pilot and two other individuals tried to flee, but were caught and taken in for questioning. The police found that attached to the drone was a package of MDMA with an approximate street value of $110,000. A subsequent search of the house recovered multiple webcams watching over entrances and exits, a number of commercial drones and paracord, a kind of rope originally designed for parachutes.

The case reveals the government’s investment in drone surveillance, in particular at the border. “The border entities are much better at it,” said Mary-Lou Smulders, chief marketing officer at drone detection contractor Dedrone, a provider to various U.S. federal government agencies.

The investigators in the Niagara River probe likely used radio frequency signals to tag and track the unmanned flying vehicle, Smulders said. That involves setting up sensors across a given area and triangulating the drone’s signals to get a relatively precise location. There are other ways to monitor drones, however, from radar to listening for the machines’ noises using arrays of microphones.

A google search for: smuggling lewiston ny
turns up human trafficking, un-taxed cigarettes, and a variety of drugs -- all recently, by boat. Going back even further to US Prohibition, plenty of alcohol came in by this route. Civil War era? Last stop on the Underground Railroad for slaves escaping to Canada. Pre-US Revolution? Fur traders -- some history here, https://historiclewiston.org/history/ [historiclewiston.org]

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