Domestic drones are “Air NSA”, but worse

It was going to happen sooner or later. In Lakota, North Dakota, a Predator drone’s use helped to send a farmer to jail for menacing police. The drone in question was being used for border security at the time but was repurposed to help local police track down individuals involved in a crime. Undoubtedly, this is the first of what will become a very common story and it raises questions about how much we’re willing to give up in the name of security.

Not a helicopter

Sure, some will argue that a drone is merely an unmanned way to conduct surveillance, but that’s not an accurate statement. First, we know a helicopter is there because we can hear it, where a drone will be unheard. Another subtle but important distinction is that drones are packed full of highly sophisticated sensors that amass levels of data that was never available to police before. As Michael Peck points out in Forbes, aerial surveillance was once so expensive that its use was limited, but today’s drones have leading-edge technology video and electronic equipment that can sense, process, and relay a level of information that makes drone use an “NSA in the Sky.” And that data never goes away.

VADER

One of the systems contained on the Predator drone is VADER, or Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar. VADER was created for tracking Taliban in Afghanistan that can watch an area for 24 straight hours and see every vehicle, human or animal that moves in relatively good detail from altitudes as high as 25,000 feet. This is a far cry from a squad car with a spotlight. VADER is called “man-hunting radar” for a very good reason. Also unlike the squad car, the data that it captures is continuously fed live to ground stations that can keep that information for future correlations and “playback.”

Video

The cameras on the Predator are some of the most sophisticated every mounted on an aircraft. The images that are captured are also fed real-time and just like VADER, are available as a historical record that can be used indefinitely for almost any purpose (that isn’t explicitly prohibited and/or prevented). The cameras are sophisticated enough to read street names from their operating altitude.

This is the equipment that’s published, but there are a variety of sensors that can look for chemical compositions, heat signatures and a variety of other information, from the sky, for hours on end.

Where’s the oversight?

That the Customs and Border Protection people can lend their equipment to any police department that requests means that Customs, an agency that operates with relative secrecy and outside of policing rules, is amassing data without reasonable oversight. Budgets that were approved to track foreign threats are being spent in ways that closely track ordinary citizens. Sound familiar?

At least the NSA had a secret court…I think there needs to be a public conversation.