Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent

Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent

Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism – 'disposition matrix' – the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a government can claim



Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 October 2012 08.17 EDT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list


The National Counterterrorism Center, the site of a new bureaucracy to institutionalize the "kill list" Photograph: FBI

<p>A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign. The Washington Post has a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html">crucial and disturbing story</a> this morning by Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully institutionalize - to make officially permanent - the most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on terror. </p><p>Based on interviews with "current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies", Miller reports that as "the United States' conventional wars are winding down", the Obama administration "expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more than symbolic, as the US focus is <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/chomsky_on_obama/">overwhelmingly on the "kill" part</a>). Specifically, "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."</p><p>In pursuit of this goal, "White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is seeking to codify the administration's approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced." All of this, writes Miller, demonstrates "the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war." </p><p>The Post article cites numerous recent developments reflecting this Obama effort, including the fact that "CIA Director David H. Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones", which "reflects the agency's transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence." The article also describes rapid expansion of commando operations by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and, perhaps most disturbingly, the creation of a permanent bureaucratic infrastructure to allow the president to assassinate at will:</p><blockquote><p>"JSOC also has established a secret targeting center across the Potomac River from Washington, current and former U.S. officials said. The elite command's targeting cells have traditionally been located near the front lines of its missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. But JSOC created a 'national capital region' task force that is a 15-minute commute from the White House so it could be more directly involved in deliberations about al-Qaeda lists."</p></blockquote><p>The creepiest aspect of this development is the christening of a new Orwellian euphemism for due-process-free presidential assassinations: "disposition matrix". Writes Miller:</p><blockquote><p>"Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'.</p><p>"The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."</p></blockquote><p>The "disposition matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to augment" the "separate but overlapping kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for determining who will be executed without due process based upon how one fits into the executive branch's "matrix". As Miller describes it, it is "a single, continually evolving database" which includes "biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations" as well as "strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols". This analytical system that determines people's "disposition" will undoubtedly be kept completely secret; Marcy Wheeler <a href="https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/260906328980086786">sardonically said</a> that she was "looking forward to the government's arguments explaining why it won't release the disposition matrix to ACLU under FOIA".</p><p>This was all motivated by Obama's refusal to arrest or detain terrorist suspects, and his resulting commitment simply to killing them at will (his will). Miller quotes "a former U.S. counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix" as explaining the impetus behind the program this way: "We had a disposition problem."</p><p>The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed - "It is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to the Post - is, by itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts <a href="http://privacysos.org/node/857">noted in response to this story</a>, the ACLU <a href="http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/biggest-new-spying-program-youve-probably-never-heard">has long warned</a> that the real purpose of the NCTC - despite its nominal focus on terrorism - is the "massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States". </p><p>In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records" - "literally anything the government collects would be fair game". In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.</p><p>Worse still, as the ACLU's legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July <a href="http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/biggest-new-spying-program-youve-probably-never-heard">in a must-read analysis</a>, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days - a limit which "meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans" - it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC "to collect and 'continually assess' information on innocent Americans for up to five years". </p><p>And, as usual, this agency engages in these incredibly powerful and invasive processes with virtually no democratic accountability:</p><blockquote><p>"All of this is happening with very little oversight. Controls over the NCTC are mostly internal to the DNI's office, and important oversight bodies such as Congress and the President's Intelligence Oversight Board aren't notified even of 'significant' failures to comply with the Guidelines. Fundamental legal protections are being sidestepped. For example, under the new guidelines, Privacy Act notices (legal requirements to describe how databases are used) must be completed by the agency that collected the information. This is in spite of the fact that those agencies have no idea what NCTC is actually doing with the information once it collects it.</p><p>"All of this amounts to a reboot of the Total Information Awareness Program that Americans rejected so vigorously right after 9/11."</p></blockquote><p>It doesn't requiring any conspiracy theorizing to see what's happening here. Indeed, it takes extreme naiveté, or wilful blindness, not to see it.</p><p>What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and secretive, unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency. </p><p>The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But:</p><blockquote><p><br />"Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."</p></blockquote><p>To understand the Obama legacy, please re-read that sentence. As Murtaza Hussain <a href="https://twitter.com/MazMHussain/status/260898386000089091">put it</a> when reacting to the Post story: "The US agonized over the targeted killing Bin Laden at Tarnak Farms in 1998; now it kills people it barely suspects of anything on a regular basis."</p><p>The pragmatic inanity of the mentality driving this is self-evident: as I <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/klein-drones-morning-joe">discussed yesterday</a> (and many other times), continuous killing does not eliminate violence aimed at the US but rather guarantees its permanent expansion. As a result, wrote Miller, "officials said no clear end is in sight" when it comes to the war against "terrorists" because, said one official, "we can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us" but trying is "a necessary part of what we do". Of course, the more the US kills and kills and kills, the more people there are who "want to harm us". That's the logic that has resulted in a permanent war on terror.</p><p>But even more significant is the truly radical vision of government in which this is all grounded. The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the <a href="http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am5.html">Fifth Amendment to the constitution</a>: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power, being honored.</p><p>And yet what the Post is describing, what we have had for years, is a system of government that - without hyperbole - is the very antithesis of that liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all citizens and then applies a "disposition matrix" to determine what punishment should be meted out. This is classic political dystopia brought to reality (despite how compelled such a conclusion is by these indisputable facts, many Americans will view such a claim as an exaggeration, paranoia, or worse because of <a href="http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.com.br/2012/09/believing-oppression-only-happens.html">this psychological dynamic I described here</a> which leads many good passive westerners to believe that true oppression, by definition, is something that happens only elsewhere).</p><p>In response to the Post story, Chris Hayes <a href="https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/260908192643575810">asked</a>: "if you have a 'kill list', but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?" The answer all depends upon what the objective is.</p><p>As the Founders all recognized, nothing vests elites with power - and profit - more than a state of war. That is why there were supposed to be substantial barriers to having them start and continue - the need for a Congressional declaration, the <a href="http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html">constitutional bar</a> on funding the military for more than two years at a time, the prohibition on standing armies, etc. Here is how John Jay <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com.br/2006/11/following-through-on-warmongering.html">put it in Federalist No 4</a>:</p><blockquote><p>"It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people."</p></blockquote><p>In sum, there are factions in many governments that crave a state of endless war because that is when power is at its most limitless and profit at its most abundant. What the Post is reporting is yet another significant step toward that state, and it is undoubtedly driven, at least on the part of some, by a self-interested desire to ensure the continuation of endless war and the powers and benefits it vests. So to answer Hayes' question: the endless expansion of a kill list and the unaccountable, always-expanding powers needed to implement does indeed represent a great success for many. Read what John Jay wrote in the above passage to see why that is, and why few, if any, political developments should be regarded as more pernicious.</p><h2>Detention policies</h2><p>Assuming the Post's estimates are correct - that "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade" - this means that the war on terror will last for more than 20 years, far longer than any other American war. This is what has always made the rationale for indefinite detention - that it is permissible to detain people without due process until the "end of hostilities" - so warped in this context. Those who are advocating that are endorsing nothing less than life imprisonment - permanent incarceration - without any charges or opportunities to contest the accusations.</p><p>That people are <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/11/guantanamo-prisoner-death-democrats">now dying at Guantanamo</a> after almost a decade in a cage with no charges highlights just how repressive that power is. Extend that mentality to secret, due-process-free assassinations - something the US government clearly intends to convert into a permanent fixture of American political life - and it is not difficult to see just how truly extremist and anti-democratic "war on terror" proponents in both political parties have become.</p>

 

It's Not a Kill List. It's a "Disposition Matrix."

Peter Suderman|Oct. 24, 2012 9:04 am

http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/24/its-not-a-kill-list-its-a-disposition-ma

Terrifying highlights from The Washington Post's new report on the Obama administration's drone-driven targeting killing program and the Obama-approved kill list — sorry, "disposition matrix" — that guides it:

We have a kill list with an Orwellian name: "Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix.' The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."

The current list is intended as a starting point, and will be with us for a long time: "Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years."

We've killed a lot of people with drones already: "The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks."

We don't know how to stop killing people with drones: Counterterrorism experts said the reliance on targeted killing is self-perpetuating, yielding undeniable short-term results that may obscure long-term costs. 'The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,' said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. 'You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.'"

We're building a big, entrenched bureaucracy around our targeting killing operations: "Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

President Obama attends frightening-sounding weekly meetings to discuss terror threats: "Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA. But aside from Obama’s presence at 'Terror Tuesday' meetings — which generally are devoted to discussing terrorism threats and trends rather than approving targets — the president’s involvement is more indirect."

Obama also approves the names on the kill lists personally: "The lists are reviewed at regular three-month intervals during meetings at the NCTC headquarters that involve analysts from other organizations, including the CIA, the State Department and JSOC. Officials stress that these sessions don’t equate to approval for additions to kill lists, an authority that rests exclusively with the White House."

Read the entire Post story here. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...89b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_print.html

 

Would you prefer a picture of Obama riding a pretty pony?

 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>If you mention this at the DNC- <a href="http://t.co/Ao0zT23E" title="http://is.gd/uLzH4t">is.gd/uLzH4t</a> - you'll hear: "eh, war is hell - collateral damage - you want carpet bombing? move on"</p>&mdash; Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/243328511690043392" data-datetime="2012-09-05T12:43:32+00:00">September 5, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

And just who is a terrorist?

Court Asks if a Gang Member Is a Terrorist

By RUSS BUETTNER
Published: October 9, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/n...f-terror-law-applies-to-gang-member.html?_r=0

There seemed to be little question that Edgar Morales was a man of ill repute back in the day. He was a member of the St. James Boys, a Mexican-American youth gang that ran roughshod over a stretch of the Bronx, and he was convicted for his role in a shooting at a church christening party that killed a 10-year-old girl.

But whether Mr. Morales was a terrorist, as the Bronx district attorney’s office had successfully asserted, was another matter — one that was the subject of a hearing on Tuesday by New York State’s highest court.

The seven judges of the Court of Appeals often seemed skeptical in asking the district attorney’s office to explain why it made sense to prosecute a street gang member in 2007 under the state’s terrorism statute. It was the first conviction under a charge that Albany lawmakers added to the state Penal Code shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“How does this relate to something like 9/11?” asked Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the State of New York.

Peter D. Coddington, chief appellate attorney in the Bronx district attorney’s office, argued that the gang’s intention was to intimidate or coerce the entire Mexican-American population in the neighborhood.

Robert S. Smith, an associate judge, asked whether that meant the members of the rival gangs were also terrorists.

“In the abstract, yes,” Mr. Coddington answered.

“So everyone is a terrorist,” Judge Smith said.

The case stemmed from an Aug. 18, 2002, fight between rival gangs at a christening party at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. Gunshots were fired, a 10-year-old girl, Malenny Mendez, was killed, and another victim was paralyzed. Mr. Morales, an admitted member of the St. James Boys, was charged with the shootings.

In addition to the terrorism charge, Mr. Morales was convicted of manslaughter and attempted murder.

A lower appellate court upheld the other counts but threw out the terrorism conviction, ruling that the facts showed that Mr. Morales acted to assert his gang’s dominance over rival gangs.

“Such conduct falls within the category of ordinary street crime, not terrorism,” ruled a panel of judges for the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in 2010.

Mr. Morales’s gang, the St. James Boys, was a menace to Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants in the area around St. James Park. The original indictment said the gang members robbed restaurant patrons, fired shots into crowds, beat and harassed strangers and slashed rivals with knives.

Mr. Morales was sentenced to 40 years to life in 2007, but the appellate panel ordered that he be sentenced again, excluding the additional time added because of the terrorism charges. The office of Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx district attorney, appealed that ruling to the Court of Appeals.

The hearing was held in Manhattan, in a courtroom of the Appellate Division. Catherine M. Amirfar, a lawyer for Mr. Morales, asked the judges to revisit his conviction on the other charges, arguing that the frequent mention of terrorism colored the jury’s impression of him and allowed evidence to be introduced that would not have otherwise been presented to the jury.

The judges also asked Ms. Amirfar questions about the definition of terrorism. She said the Legislature intended to address attacks with the “intent to intimidate” on a broad scale.

Most terrorism cases are prosecuted in federal courts. The state charge has been rarely used, and Mr. Morales was the first to be convicted under it.

The Court of Appeals is expected to issue a decision in the Morales case next month.

And if it is decided that YOU are a terrorist with no due process? (coming soon to a town near you)

TUESDAY, APR 24, 2012 06:37 AM CDT

Drones for “urban warfare”

Manufacturers are targeting U.S. police forces for sales, as drones move from the Middle East to Main Street

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/24/drones_for_urban_warfare/

In November 2010, a police lieutenant from Parma, Ohio, asked Vanguard Defense Industries if the Texas-based drone manufacturer could mount a “grenade launcher and/or 12-gauge shotgun” on its ShadowHawk drone for U.S. law enforcement agencies. The answer was yes.

Last month, police officers from 10 public safety departments around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area gathered at an airfield in southern Maryland to view a demonstration of a camera-equipped aerial drone — first developed for military use — that flies at speeds up to 20 knots or hovers for as long as an hour.

And in late March, South Korean police and military flew a Canadian-designed drone as part of “advance security preparations” for the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul where protesters clashed with police.

In short, the business of marketing drones to law enforcement is booming. Now that Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to open up U.S. airspace to unmanned vehicles, the aerial surveillance technology first developed in the battle space of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is fueling a burgeoning market in North America. And even though they’re moving from war zones to American markets, the language of combat and conflict remains an important part of their sales pitch — a fact that ought to concern citizens worried about the privacy implications of domestic drones.

“As part of the push to increase uses of civilian drones,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week, nearly 50 companies are developing some 150 different systems, ranging from miniature models to those with wingspans comparable to airliners.” Law enforcement and public safety agencies are a prime target of this industry, which some predict will have $6 billion in U.S. sales by 2016.

Altogether, the drone industry’s lobbying group, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, claims 507 corporate members in 55 countries. The industry proved its clout in February when Congress mandated the FAA open U.S. airspace to drones starting this year. According to the AUVSI’s annual report, the group was responsible for the legislative language ordering the FAA to expedite the applications of qualified public safety agencies seeking to fly drones weighing less than 4.4 pounds this year. Larger drones will be eligible to fly in U.S. airspace by 2015.

Perhaps the most prominent firm in the U.S. drone market is Vanguard Defense Industries in Texas, which sold a $275,000 drone called the ShadowHawk to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas last year. The company is run by CEO Michael Buscher, a 24-year veteran of U.S. Army Special Operations. In his LinkedIn profile, Buscher says that VDI offers technology “that will dramatically extend U.S. national security capabilities.”

Uniquely among U.S. manufacturers, VDI touts its ability to weaponize drones for local police departments. “If you think weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are still too new to combat zones for law enforcement to consider them for domestic use, think again,” said the editors of Special Weapons for Military and Police in February:

The Kevlar fuel tank mounted beneath the ShadowHawk allows it to stay in the air long enough to provide complete surveillance of an area and engage suspects with buckshot, tear gas, grenades and less-lethal capabilities.

Vanguard has touted the weaponized ShadowHawk to police departments in Ohio and Illinois, according to emails published online by the hackers collective AntiSec. The group hacked the email account of Richard Garcia, a VDI vice president and a former FBI agent, with the stated goal of causing “embarrassment and disruption” to the company. (VDI says a group of British hackers arrested in England were responsible for the hacking. VDI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other drone manufacturers aren’t quite as open about the machines’ weaponization capabilities. Three Israeli drone manufacturers have targeted the “homeland security” market, which seems to fall somewhere between combat and law enforcement.

Israeli Aerospace Industries, which has an office in Arlington, Va., says its “Ghost” drone is “uniquely designed to support urban warfare ISR [Intelligence, Search, Reconnaissance] missions.” A video touts the Ghost’s ability to conduct day and nighttime operations silently. IAI did not respond to request for comment.

BlueBird Aero Systems, also based in Israel, boasts in a promotional video that it is “leveraging military UAS [unmanned aviation systems] know-how and innovative approaches to the military, homeland security and civilian markets.” The company says its MicroB drone can be used for “urban environment monitoring for homeland security and law enforcement.” The two-pound craft “can be autonomously launched within seconds even in a crowded urban environment, and provides up to one hour of real-time, enhanced visual intelligence of stringent situations.”

Military expertise is part of the firms’ pitch to homeland security and law enforcement customers. BlueBird says its leadership is “comprised of high-ranking military veterans as well as experts of the defense and security industries in both Israel and North America. ” Aeronautics, another Israeli drone manufacturer, touts an advisory committee that includes a former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Major defense contractors are also beginning to move into the U.S. domestic market. Jeff Brody, a vice president of AAI, a Maryland-based division of Textron that supplies unmanned aviation systems to the Pentagon, says there is “pent-up demand and an insatiable desire” for the FAA to clarify the rules. While AAI has talked to law enforcement agencies about its products, Brody said the company needs to see new FAA regulations before it can modify war-zone drones for domestic use.

Other Pentagon contractors are already marketing to U.S. public safety agencies. Insitu, a Washington state-based subsidiary of Boeing, touts its “Inceptor” drone as an all-weather instantaneous “eye in the sky” for U.S. police, fire and rescue workers. The Virginia-based Aurora Flight Sciences offers the Skate drone with three full-motion video cameras for police departments looking to conduct search and rescue operations and perform accident investigations. BAE Systems, another Pentagon contractor, says it has tested a small drone for civil use but a spokesman declined to answer questions about its other products for the domestic market.

With 56 domestic government agencies now authorized by the FAA to fly drones in U.S. airspace, law enforcement is leading the way in the adoption of unmanned vehicles. According to documents published last week by Electronic Frontier Foundation, 22 of the authorized agencies are primarily law enforcement departments, while another 24 entities (mainly universities) have law enforcement functions under them.

Among the domestic users are the Department of Homeland Security, which flies a fleet of nine drones over the country’s northern and southern borders, and the FBI. A Bureau spokesman declined to comment on the nature and purpose of the FBI’s drones saying that he could not discuss “investigative techniques.”

While industry spokesmen say existing laws will adequately protect civil liberties and privacy, Congress held no hearings on the implications of domestic drones, and a wide range of opponents insist the drones pose a threat to privacy.

In Washington, activist groups Code Pink, Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights are holding a “drone summit” this week, declaring it is “time to organize to end current abuses and to prevent the potentially widespread misuse both overseas and here at home.”

The FAA “has the opportunity and the responsibility to ensure that the privacy of individuals is protected and that the public is fully informed about who is using drones in public airspace and why,” said U.S. Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, in a letter to the FAA last week.

“How will the public be notified about when and where drones are used, who will operate the drones, what data will be collected, how the data will be used, how the data will be retained and who will have access to the date?” they asked.

Carl Schaefer , director of small UAS products for Aurora Flight Sciences, in Manassas, Va., says he isn’t worried.

“My personal view is that complaints about privacy are overblown and unfounded,” he said in a telephone interview. “Police departments want UAVs to increase awareness more quickly whether at a crime scene or a hostage situation. These guys want to see around a corner. They aren’t peering in windows. We’ve never got a request to do that kind of stuff and we’ve had very extensive discussions with potential customers.”

Ian McDonald, a vice president at Aeryon Labs, a Canadian unmanned vehicle firm, discounted concerns about the weaponization of drones. “That’s not a request we’ve had from our customers,” he said. Aeryon’s customers, which include Canadian law enforcement agencies, “want a close-in aerial perspective and to remove officers or responders from danger.”

But with a technology born in combat zones and marketed by defense contractors from countries that don’t have baseline privacy laws (U.S.) or have poor human rights records justified in the name of “homeland security” (Israel), the American public may want more explicit guarantees that they will be the beneficiaries, not the target, of drones over America.

 

Who says I didn't?

Why don't you care now that Obama is president?

 

So you don't care because it's "less"?

You don't care about a permanent war on terror, drone bombs on children and funerals, extension of patriot act, the create of the NDAA / indefinite detention, massive warrantless wiretapping because it's less. (even though its not)

The only real reason you don't care because it's your messiah Obama doing it.