DHS drones equipped to eavesdrop on Americans

March 05, 2013 — from RT.com — The US Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity already has an arse­nal of drones to be deployed for what­ever the agency deems fit, but the actual capa­bil­i­ties of those vehi­cles exceed what many Amer­i­cans may expect.The unmanned drones being used inside of the United States right now can’t shoot Hell­fire mis­siles like their over­seas coun­ter­parts. They can, how­ever, con­duct sur­veil­lance, inter­cept com­mu­ni­ca­tions and even deter­mine whether or not a per­son thou­sands of feet below the air­craft is armed.

The lat­est rev­e­la­tion comes cour­tesy of a DHS doc­u­ment that was recently obtained by the Elec­tronic Pri­vacy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, or EPIC, through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request. After ana­lyz­ing a partially-redacted drone “per­for­mance spec­i­fi­ca­tion” file received through their FOIA plea, EPIC said that records indi­cate “the Bureau of Cus­toms and Bor­der Pro­tec­tion is oper­at­ing drones in the United States capa­ble of inter­cept­ing elec­tronic communications.”

Of the ten Preda­tor B drones cur­rently main­tained by the agency, EPIC adds that the doc­u­ment con­firms that those air­craft “have the capac­ity to rec­og­nize and iden­tify a per­son on the ground.”

“The records obtained by EPIC raise ques­tions about the agency’s com­pli­ance with fed­eral pri­vacy laws and the scope of domes­tic sur­veil­lance,” the cen­ter writes on their web­site this week.

Speak­ing to CNet, EPIC’s Open Gov­ern­ment Project direc­tor, Gin­ger McCall, says the dis­cov­ery shows just how dan­ger­ous drones could be to the pri­vacy of the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who could have drones over­head right this moment.

“The doc­u­ments clearly evi­dence that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity is devel­op­ing drones with sig­nals inter­cep­tion tech­nol­ogy and the capa­bil­ity to iden­tify peo­ple on the ground,” McCall says. “This allows for inva­sive sur­veil­lance, includ­ing poten­tial com­mu­ni­ca­tions sur­veil­lance, that could run afoul of fed­eral pri­vacy laws.”

Since EPIC pub­lished their FOID’d doc­u­ments last week, Cnet has man­aged to scrounge up an unredacted copy that out­lines what the DHS was look­ing for in drones when the report was writ­ten in 2010. Specif­i­cally, the per­for­mance spec­i­fi­ca­tions note that while the DHS is not imple­ment­ing drones for eaves­drop­ping on Amer­ica right now, “Fur­ther tasks, such as com­mu­ni­ca­tion relay and inter­cep­tion, although not yet eval­u­ated in the field, are assessed to also be best per­formed” by the unmanned aer­ial vehicles.

Addi­tion­ally, DHS drones must “be capa­ble of iden­ti­fy­ing a stand­ing human being at night as likely armed or not” and “be capa­ble of mark­ing a tar­get into a retriev­able data­base.” No infor­ma­tion is given as to what data­base that refers to, but a Home­land Secu­rity offi­cial speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymity tells DHS that the drones lack — for now, at least — the abil­ity to read a subject’s face to find out who they are.

“The drones are able to iden­tify whether move­ment on the ground comes from a human or an ani­mal, but that they do not per­form facial recog­ni­tion,” Cnet reporter Declan McCul­lagh says the DHS source’s claims.

“Any poten­tial deploy­ment of such tech­nol­ogy in the future would be imple­mented in full con­sid­er­a­tion of civil rights, civil lib­er­ties, and pri­vacy inter­ests and in a man­ner con­sis­tent with the law and long stand­ing law enforce­ment prac­tices,” the source adds.

The Home­land Secu­rity department’s drones are cur­rently used to allow fed­eral offi­cials to mon­i­tor any crim­i­nal activ­ity on America’s bor­ders to the north and south. As RT reported recently, how­ever, a 2012 Supreme Court rul­ing deter­mined that the gov­ern­ment can con­duct bor­der patrol oper­a­tions within 100 miles of an inter­na­tional cross­ing. By that logic, the approx­i­mately 200 mil­lion Amer­i­cans resid­ing within that para­me­ter are sub­ject to Bor­der Patrol searches and, per­haps soon enough, sur­veil­lance drones.