DHS is lending drones to police across the country.
Far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, a Predator drone was summoned into action last year to spy on a North Dakota farmer who allegedly refused to return a half dozen of his neighbor’s cows that had strayed onto his pastures.
The farmer had become engaged in a standoff with the Grand Forks police SWAT team and the sheriff’s department. So the local authorities decided to call on their friends at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy a multimillion dollar, unarmed drone to surveil the farmer and his family.
The little-noticed August 2011 incident at the Lakota, N.D., ranch, which ended peacefully, was a watershed moment for Americans: it was one of the first known times an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) owned by the U.S. government was used against civilians for local police work.
Since then, the Washington Guardian has confirmed, DHS and its Customs and Border Protection agency have deployed drones — originally bought to guard America’s borders — to assist local law enforcement and other federal agencies on several occasions.
The practice is raising questions inside and outside government about whether federal officials may be creating an ad-hoc, loan-a-drone program without formal rules for engagement, privacy protection or taxpayer reimbursements. The drones used by CPB can cost between $15 million and $34 million each to buy, and have hourly operational costs as well.
In addition, DHS recently began distributing $4 million in grants to help local law enforcement buy its own, smaller versions of drones, opening a new market for politically connected drone makers as the wars overseas shrink.
The double-barreled lending and purchasing have some concerned that federal taxpayers may be subsidizing the militarization of local police forces and creating new threats to average Americans’ privacy.
“We’ve seen bits and pieces of information on CBP’s Predator drones, but Americans deserve the full story,” said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that studies privacy issues and has sought information on drone use in the United States. “Drones are a powerful surveillance tool that can be used to gather extensive data about you and your activities. The public needs to know more about how and why these Predator drones are being used to watch U.S. citizens.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), another privacy advocate which is pursuing litigation to force the disclosure of more information from DHS on drones, says it has found that the government has no official policies for how the drones can be used by local police, does not seek compensation from local law enforcement to recoup taxpayers’ expenses and claims it doesn’t keep records on how many times its drones have been deployed for local use.
“CBP’s drone program is shrouded in secrecy and legal ambiguity. Despite a specific mission to protect the border from illegal immigration and drug smuggling, CBP continues to let other federal agencies and local law enforcement bureaus use (its drones) for unrelated purposes,” said Amie Stepanvich, Associate Litigation Counsel for EPIC.
Indeed, when the Washington Guardian inquired about how many times DHS or CPB lent drones to local authorities, officials responded they didn’t have a formal loan-a-drone program but did on occasion lend the UAVs to help local police. But they declined to provide an exact number or a list of localities.
“While CBP does not have a ‘loan a drone’ program, we do work with national and sometimes state and local agencies for assistance,” said Ian Phillips, a spokesman for Customs Border and Protection.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/10/homeland-security-increasingly-loaning-drones-to-l/