Photo: U.S. Air Force
As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn’t mean to, its drone
fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the
battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on
them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally
spied upon are actually
legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.
The Air Force, like the rest of the military and the CIA, isn’t
supposed to conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans
domestically, according to an Apr. 23 instruction from the flying
service. But should the drones taking off over American soil
accidentally keep their cameras rolling and their sensors engaged, well …
that’s a different story.
“
Collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent,”
reads the instruction (.pdf), unearthed by the secrecy scholar Steven
Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That kind of
“incidental” spying won’t be immediately purged, however. The Air Force
has “a period not to exceed 90 days” to get rid of it — while it
determines “whether that information may be collected under the
provisions” of
a Pentagon directive that authorizes limited domestic spying.
In other words, if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an
American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if
it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the
first place.
Not all domestic drone surveillance is that ominous. “Air Force
components may, at times, require newly collected or archived domestic
imagery to perform certain missions,” the Air Force concluded.
Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters;
studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic
military base. Even those missions, however, raise “policy and legal
concerns that require careful consideration, analysis and coordination
with legal counsel.”
The potential trouble with those local intelligence missions is once
the drones’ powerful sensors and cameras sweep up imagery and other data
from Americans nearby, the Air Force won’t simply erase the tapes.
It’ll start analyzing whether the people it’s recorded are, among other
things, “persons or organizations reasonably believed to be engaged or
about to engage, in international terrorist or international narcotics
activities.” Suddenly, accidental spying provides an entrance point into
deliberate investigations, all done without a warrant.
And it doesn’t stop with the Air Force. “U.S. person information in
the possession of an Air Force intelligence component may be
disseminated pursuant to law, a court order,” or the Pentagon directive
that governs acceptable domestic surveillance. So what begins as a drone
flight over, say, a national park to spot forest fires could end up
with a dossier on campers getting passed on to law enforcement.
All this is sure to spark a greater debate about the use of drones
and other military surveillance migrating from the warzones of Iraq and
Afghanistan back home. The Department of Homeland Security — which is
lukewarm on its fleet of spy drones — is expanding its use of
powerful, military-grade camera systems. And
police departments across the country
are beginning to buy and fly drones from the military. Now the Air
Force’s powerful spy tools could creep into your backyard in a different
way.
There’s an irony here. The directive is actually designed to make
sure that Air Force personnel involved in surveillance don’t start
spying on their fellow citizens. It instructs that “Questionable
Intelligence Activities … that may violate the law, any executive order
or Presidential directive” have to be reported immediately up the chain
of command. But what’s most questionable might be the kind of local
spying the Air Force considers legit.
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