Digital
watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published several thousand
pages of new drone license records on Wednesday confirming innumerable
theorists' fears: that drones "regularly fly" in "national airspace all around
the country."
The records,
which were obtained by way of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law
enforcement agencies, universities and-for the first time-three branches of the
U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency), the group writes on their Deeplinks blog.
According to the
records, the Air Force has been testing out a variety of drones, from the
smaller, hand-launched Raven, Puma and Wasp drones to the larger Predator and
Reaper models largely responsible for countless civilian and foreign military
deaths.
Breaking down
the shocking capabilities of the various machines, Deeplinks writes that the
technologies "take surveillance to a whole new level."
According to a
recent Gizmodo article, the Puma AE (“All Environment”) drone can land anywhere,
“either in tight city streets or onto a water surface if the mission dictates,
even after a near-vertical ‘deep stall’ final approach.”
Another drone,
Insitu’s ScanEagle, which the Air Force has flown near Virginia Beach, sports an
“inertial-stabilized camera turret, [that] allows for the tracking of a target
of interest for extended periods of time, even when the target is moving and the
aircraft nose is seldom pointed at the target.”
Boeing’s A160
Hummingbird, which the Air Force has flown near Victorville, California, is
capable of staying in the air for 16-24 hours at a time and carries a gigapixel
camera and a “Forester foliage-penetration radar” system designed by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Perhaps the
scariest is the technology carried by a Reaper drone the Air Force is flying
near Lincoln, Nevada and in areas of California and Utah. This drone uses
"Gorgon Stare" technology, which Wikipedia defines as “a spherical array of nine
cameras attached to an aerial drone capable of capturing motion imagery of an
entire city.” This imagery “can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial
intelligence, such as the Mind's Eye project” being developed by
DARPA.
Also Wednesday,
the watchdog group published a new map that tracks the location of drone flights
across the United States. Common Dreams
Despite renewed
criticism from both parties in Congress that domestic drones pose a privacy
danger to U.S. citizens—and a report from its own Inspector General recommending
to stop buying them—the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated it
wants to more than double its fleet of Predator drones used to fly surveillance
missions inside the United States. Common Dreams A data dump of
government documents secured via the Freedom of Information Act, released in
August shows that the roll out of domestic unmanned drones will, for the most
part, be focused solely on the mass surveillance of the American people.
Prison
Planet Drones would now
be able to fly in the same airspace as commercial airliners, private planes, and
cargo jets. Up to 30,000 drones could be allowed in U.S. airspace by the end of
the decade. More than a
third of Americans worry their privacy will suffer if drones become the latest
police tool for tracking suspected criminals at home, according to an Associated
Press-National Constitution Center poll conducted in September.
AHT/HJ
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