In a statement, Democratic Senator Mark Udall questioned whether drone spying is constitutional, saying, “I am concerned the FBI is deploying drone technology while only being in the ‘initial stages’ of developing guidelines to protect Americans’ privacy rights,” Udall said.
Meanwhile, in the latest leak of classified NSA material, The Guardian reported Thursday the NSA can keep copies of intercepted communications from or about U.S. citizens if the material contains significant intelligence or evidence of crimes. According to the report, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, signed off on rules that appear to grant wide latitude to the NSA in making use of data, rather than minimizing its usage.
Heidi Boghosian talking:
conservative and liberals have been claiming for years that drone use in the United States is rife for abuse. The reason is, they can be made in any size. Researchers at Johns Hopkins are looking into how butterflies move, so that they can craft drones the size of mosquitoes or birds. They have the ability to have infrared cameras on them, heat sensors, and also the ability to stay airborne—they call it “loitering”—for long periods of time. Contractors such as Raytheon and Boeing are working into ways to keep them airborne even longer—the danger, of course, being that with small drones, they can pass in dense urban areas such as New York City into an apartment building, stay there, conduct surveillance. Even now, drones have the capacity, through heat sensors, to determine, I think through a one-foot concrete wall, if people are moving around inside.
Drones do not require a space from which to depart, the way manned vehicles do, so they can be deployed virtually in any area. Furthermore, technology has not kept abreast with developments in the law. And, as was cited earlier, the regulations are really lagging behind. Safeguards about how they can be used need to be developed. There’s a rush right now by military contractors and law enforcement agencies around the country to tell the FAA how they can integrate drones into domestic airspace in the next two years. And billions of dollars have been given to contractors for that purpose.
It benefits large corporations who have a very snug relationship with government intelligence agencies to develop drones and to deploy them wide-scale over United States airs. Privacy protections—we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes. If small aircraft are flying around and able to monitor us over long periods of time, track us, track our associations, that presents a huge problem.
Fusion centers were created around 2003 to 2007 as a way to better coordinate intelligence across the country. The problem is they partner with the private sector, the business industry, so they share intelligence with one another. It’s obviously to businesses’ best interest to increase the amount of data that they get, because they are also improving analytics for the government to avail themselves of in order to make sense of the vast amounts of data that’s being collected. So technology is being developed that the government relies on. Big money is pouring into corporations. And in exchange, private sector is giving that information to the government.
In fact, a lot of government agencies hire people from the private sector, and vice versa. At DEF CON, the hacker convention every year, you’ll see a lot of government officials there. They rely on individuals with technological expertise. They really need each other. I think one of the dangers is that private sector can operate with impunity in terms of skirting the Constitution. The government needs that. It’s helpful to them.
HP scandal. In fact, Hewlett-Packard hired a private contractor—I believe there were two of them—to do what’s called pretexting, which is now illegal in many areas. Basically, they pretended they were someone else, called up, you know, records-keeping places to find out information about prospective—the people who had leaked criticism of HP. We see a lot of that. Leaked it to journalists, exactly. And we see under the Obama administration an increasingly secret classifying of more information, declassifying fewer documents, and cracking down on journalists, which, of course, goes to the heart of our democracy. Without the free exchange of information, we become a very repressive state.
Max Kelly, the former chief security officer for Facebook, went on to work for—well, since 2010, he’s been working for the NSA.
When many people say, during the revelations of NSA spying, “I don’t need to worry; I have nothing to hide,” I think it goes to the critical question of: What does the government do with this information? And one of the first things they do is target individuals who challenge not only government policies, but corporate policies. Animal rights activists, environmental activists were labeled the top domestic terrorism threat in 2005. The danger of even getting metadata, where you can track associations and patterns that people engage in, is that those who are critical of the government will be sought out, even criminalized, for engaging in robust speech. And we’ve seen new legislation, such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, that in fact does criminalize a lot of First Amendment-protected activities.
We’re seeing that also with the use of biometrics. For example, people arrested in Occupy New York City were asked if they would submit to iris scans. Now, we’re also seeing that they were held longer when they said no. But if you go to a hospital, for example, they might ask you to put your palm under a scanner. They’ll say it’s for expediency; you can see the doctor faster. But you’re giving up personal information that is stored. And I think it’s really important to realize all the information gathered electronically or through biometrics is stored and can be accessed and used for purposes other than what it was originally intended for at a point down the road.
This from The New York Times: “To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, [U.S.] intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups … The sums the N.S.A. spends in Silicon Valley are classified, as is the agency’s total budget, which independent analysts [put at something like] $8 billion to $10 billion a year.” Also, “the American intelligence community has its own in-house venture capital company, In-Q-Tel, financed by the Central Intelligence Agency to invest in high-tech start-ups.”
Since the events of 9/11, we’ve seen a few developments that allow the government to listen in on what are supposed to be private, privileged conversations between attorneys and their clients. The problem is, organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the People’s Law Office in Chicago, even the National Lawyers Guild, talk a lot with clients who are critical of the government. The government then has an interest in listening in, monitoring their conversations. It has what we call the chilling effect on free speech. And when you know you’re being listened in on, it inexorably alters the way that you’re going to communicate with your attorney, just as a confidential source talking to a journalist, once suspecting that they’re being monitored, may not be able to speak as freely. So, I think that by going after attorneys and their clients, as well as journalists, it further constricts the exercise of free speech and really goes at the core of our legal system and protection of the rights of anyone, no matter how unpopular to the government, to have a zealous advocate on their behalf.
it’s being done in border control and also for things, emergencies such as floods, fires, situations where they claim it’s too dangerous to have a personed aircraft fly over. And I think that the argument that it’s safer, less costly, is something that’s going to allow more and more of these functions to be increasingly taken over. And the FAA has said outright they believe drones should be used increasingly for law enforcement purposes.
Corporations are such a huge part of our life and are now developing their own intelligence branches, as well as giving information over to the government. They need to silence their critics quickly and efficiently. And we’ve seen them do that, spying on PETA, spying on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.
In Florida, Burger King actually used a private security company that infiltrated, monitored Burger King. Even one of Burger King’s vice presidents posted derogatory comments online. And the activists found that out.
– source democracynow.org
Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the co-host of the weekly civil liberties radio show, Law and Disorder. She is author of the forthcoming book, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance.