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Privacy group seeks to lift veil on domestic drones

 
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laciefields
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Joined: 19 Jan 2010
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Location: USA

PostPosted: Mon Jan 16, 2012 1:44 am    Post subject: Privacy group seeks to lift veil on domestic drones Reply with quote

Anyone remember the movie Blue Thunder from back in the early 1980's.
Basically a chopper with lots of "surveillance toys" built into it. A foot note to the move that got down played heavily was that . . . while at the time all the "surveillance toys" could not be integrated into one nice package as it was in the blue thunder helicopter . . . all of the individual pieces of equipment and what the movie showed the equipment doing was available back in the '80s.

What do you suppose that the secret drones that they are putting around the US can do now? And more importantly who is using them and who are they watching with them?

As the old saying goes who is watching the watchers?



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/privacy-group-seeks-to-lift-veil-on-domestic-drones/2012/01/12/gIQABH6OuP_blog.html


Posted at 07:00 AM ET, 01/13/2012
Privacy group seeks to lift veil on domestic drones
By Jason Ukman

The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized the use of hundreds of drones in U.S. airspace in recent years but offered few details on who is operating them.

This week, a privacy advocacy group filed suit to force the Department of Transportation to release its records publicly.

“Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities,” said Jennifer Lynch, attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Northern California. “As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.”

The FAA regulates the operation of drones domestically, and only occasionally grants permission to the federal and local agencies seeking authority to fly unmanned vehicles. But those decisions, civil liberties groups point out, are based on safety concerns, not privacy concerns.

With growing interest in drones and their applications — to patrol U.S. borders, to search for criminal suspects, even to track the spread of forest fires — privacy advocates are now showing increasing concern about the policies guiding their use.

“In my mind, the first step is to get the information from the FAA about who has authorization,” Lynch said in an interview. “We don’t really know very much right now.”

The EFF, which advocates on behalf of “digital rights,” filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the FAA in April. According to the lawsuit, the agency has yet to process or release records in response.

A spokesman for the FAA, Les Dorr Jr., declined comment on the suit.

The Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are among the agencies that have used drones domestically. Some drone manufacturers and academic institutions have also been granted authority for research or training purposes.

But the FAA is expected to soon formulate new rules on the use of lightweight drones — perhaps by early this spring, Dorr said.

That has privacy advocates worried that the agency could dramatically expand the skies for aircraft with sophisticated surveillance capabilities. And it has them interested in knowing who will be flying them.

“My feeling and the EFF’s feeling is that this information should be public,” Lynch said.
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