Snoop Drones: First Texas, Now Florida

Kurt Nimmo TruthNews Thursday November 29, 2007

“The Miami-Dade police department will begin experimenting with high-tech drones as law enforcement tools beginning next year,” reports Local 10. “Although the military has been using unmanned aircraft systems for years, this will be the first time they are used in law enforcement…. Only the Miami-Dade police department and the Houston police department were given permission by the FAA to experiment with the drones.”

All of this is just the beginning, of course. Next up, a special “agile air traffic system” which establishes “routine access to the national airspace for UAVs and other new vehicles,” according to Next Generation Air Transportation System, a plan enacted in 2003 by Bush and Congress under VISION 100 – Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act (P.L. 108-176).

In 2004, “Access 5, a joint government-industry program was initiated. The program brings together NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Defense and six major industry members. Their goal: to plan the safe, orderly and efficient integration of UAVs into civil airspace over the next five years.” In other words, expect UAVs in your neighborhood in the future.

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In March of last year, a House of Representatives panel “heard testimony from police agencies that envision using UAVs for everything from border security to domestic surveillance high above American cities. Private companies also hope to use UAVs for tasks such as aerial photography and pipeline monitoring,” Declan McCullagh wrote for CNET News at the time.

In a scene that could have been inspired by the movie “Minority Report,” one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air–close enough to identify faces–and many more uses, such as the aerial detection of marijuana fields, are planned.

Or, as well, photographing those pesky antiwar and anti-globalization demonstrators. In fact, it appears the Pentagon or the Ministry of Homeland Security is one step ahead of local police departments. In September, during an antiwar demo in Lafayette Square, people reported “dragonflies or little helicopters” buzzing around, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

Call them “beamed power micro UAVs,” as blogger David Hambling does. “Beamed power micro UAVs would have obvious limitations — they’re not going to be flying hundreds of miles away over enemy territory. But for covert surveillance in the domestic arena, they might be just the thing. I have no idea whether there are any dragonfly spies out there yet; but if there aren’t now, there soon will be.”

If the antiwar people in Washington are to believed, little dragonfly-sized snoop drones are already a reality. But then the CIA was cranking out similar devices more than a decade ago.

As for the larger cousins of the micro UAVs, back in December of 2002 Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner said “UAVs could be an effective means of watching the home front in the war on terror” while admitting “they’re quite intrusive,” not that intrusiveness and violating privacy ever concerned our rulers.

Among the agencies now committed to deploying UAVs are the Coast Guard and Border Patrol, both of which are moving to the Homeland Security Department. Other non-Defense Department agencies, such as the Transportation Department, are in the early stages of exploring possible security roles for drones. Meanwhile, the Energy Department, which set up a UAV program in 1993 to study clouds and climate change, has been developing high-altitude instruments to measure radiation in the atmosphere….

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, interest in UAVs among federal agencies has swelled, industry sources said. “There’s been a lot more activity over the last couple of months,” said one manufacturing executive who asked not to be named. “It’s been really intense. We’re doing things now that we wouldn’t have been doing a year ago.”

It appears everybody’s getting in on the action, so why not the local cops?

If you think they government will limit itself to studying clouds and so-called climate change, think again. Remember Operation TIPS, the supposedly stillborn effort to usher in a chapter out of George Orwell’s 1984? The FBI, CIA and NSA have snooped on — and infiltrated and sabotaged — the political opposition for decades (recall COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos, Project MERRIMAC, Project MINARET, Project SHAMROCK, ECHELON, NSA warrantless surveillance, etc., on and on, ad nauseam).

And then there was that confidential FBI memorandum sent to over 15,000 local law enforcement agencies back in October, 2003, urging them to be on the look-out for the “criminal activities” of protesters (for instance, using the “internet to recruit, raise funds, and coordinate … activities prior to demonstrations,” and “[d]uring the course of a demonstration … using cell phones or radios to coordinate activities or to update colleagues about ongoing events,” and other such suspicious behavior). During COINTELPRO in the 60s and early 70s, the FBI kept over 500,000 domestic intelligence files at their headquarters and an undetermined amount at regional offices.

Of course, we are told the drones in Texas — the maiden flight was supposed to be a secret, but an intrepid news team put the kibosh to that — will be used for monitoring traffic. No doubt the UAVs will be used for traffic, as local police are keen to increase revenues, but if history is any indicator, they will be taking orders from the feds as well — and the federal government, like any self-perpetuating leviathan, is interested in not only keeping tabs on political opponents but also destroying them, same as any other criminal organization does to the competition or those who might endanger their livelihood.

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