ICE's plan to buy Boston Dynamics robot dogs sparks controversy

This is Up Next. I'm Tisiana Dearing. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, is planning to spend up to two million dollars on robot dogs from Waltham-based Boston Dynamics. The federal agency recently posted the plan on a public website. The plan raises questions about how immigration officers might deploy the robots and whether selling them to ICE could violate a pledge Boston Dynamics made about the use of its technology. Scott Kirsner is columnist with our editorial partner, MassLive. Good morning. Good morning. So Homeland Security says these are for things like inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment. Tell us what Spot can do. Spot is a four-legged robot that is about the size of a small Great Dane, maybe a German Shepherd. It's bright yellow. It can walk over uneven terrain. If you put a robot arm attachment on it, it can manipulate things, pick up things, open doors. And there's also a whole bunch of sensors that you could put on it for potentially radioactivity or chemical or biological weapons or doing 3D mapping of a space. So who's looking then? Is it carrying a camera and somebody's looking sort of through Spot's eyes in that case? Yeah, a controller can see what Spot's seeing. You can record it. You can have AI analyze the images. So there's a lot of different features that can potentially be added to Spot. Which raises the question, are any versions of Spot designed with offensive capabilities that we know about? There aren't any weaponized Spots that we know about. I mean, there's hackers who have bought them and attached all kinds of things to them, pellet guns or, you know, small arms on it to sort of show the weaponization capability. But Boston Amics does have this ethics policy that's been in place for a few years that says we will not weaponize our robots. And secondarily, this is the part where they may get into hot water with ICE, no violations of privacy or civil rights laws with our robots. And ICE has been accused of violations of civil rights laws. ICE told WBUR in a statement in part that the robots will be consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards. Do we have any indication of how ICE actually will use the robot dogs? ICE is already using airborne drones to kind of understand what is happening, whether it's a protest or maybe it's someone that is running away from their agents in a car. And so this is going to be a walking version of that kind of monitoring, assessment, surveillance bot. I also should point out that while $2 million worth of robots sounds like a lot of money, these robots probably cost $125,000, $150,000 each. And so we're really talking about 15 or 16 robots, not thousands. We also got a statement from Boston Dynamics, a spokesperson said in part that they sell to many government agencies and the robots are used to, quote, keep people out of harm's way. What else are you hearing from employees inside Boston Dynamics, if anything, about this agreement? There's been a lot of turnover inside Boston Dynamics over the last year or two. So some of the people that I knew are no longer at the company. And one person I talked to who's a former employee, but who did work on the dog project, kind of painted that there are conscientious objectors inside the company that have said in the past, if one of our clients sounds like they're talking about weaponizing a product or putting some kind of offensive capabilities on it, we don't want to work on that project. But the interesting backstory with Boston Dynamics is that so much of their funding has come from government research grants and government contracts in the past, by my count, at least $150 million. This is a company that would not have existed without government support, now kind of having to assess the optics of selling to different government agencies. Scott Kirsner is Innovation Columnist with our editorial partner, MassLive. Scott, thanks. Thanks so much.