Home
Contact Us
Donate
Support Us
Store
Books
Videos
Global Political Awakening and the New World Order
Quotes
Translate
GPA Store: Featured Products
Friday, June 21, 2013
Why Won’t The FBI Tell the Public About its Drone Program?
Jennifer Lynch
EFF
Today
we’re publishing
—
for the first time
—the
FBI’s drone licenses
and supporting records for the last several years. Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement.
Just yesterday,
Wired
broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil. Mueller tried to reassure the senators that FBI’s drone program “is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized leads.” However, there’s no way to check the Director on these statements, given the Bureau’s extreme lack of transparency about its program.
EFF received these records as a result of our
Freedom of Information lawsuit
against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the licenses the FAA issues to all public entities wishing to fly drones in the national airspace. As detailed in
prior posts
and on our
drone map
, we have already received tens of thousands of pages of valuable information about local, state and federal agencies’ drone flights.
However, unlike other federal agencies, including the
US Air Force
, the Bureau has withheld almost all information within its documents—even including the
dates the FAA’s Certificates of Authorization (COAs)
were issued.
As you can see from the two examples linked below—the first from the Air Force and the second from the FBI—the FBI is withholding information, including something as basic as the city and state of the Bureau’s point of contact, that could in no way be expected to risk circumvention of the law (the applicable test under
FOIA
, 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(7)(E)).
Air Force COA
FBI COA
The FBI has even withheld information from standard documents that all agencies file with the FAA to support their COA applications, many of which come directly from the drone manufacturer. (Compare, for example, the Air Force’s “
LOST_LINK_MISSION
” or “
AIRCRAFT_SYSTEM
” documents with the FBI’s versions of the
same
documents
.)
One interesting fact is that the Bureau has withheld most of the records under several statutes and regulations related to the arms exports and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (see statutes and regulations
here
,
here
, and
here
.) This is surprising because, although ITAR does apply explicitly to drones, not even the US Military has claimed these statutes in withholding information from its drone records.
Given the FBI’s
past abuses
and the information
recently revealed
about how the Bureau exploits specious interpretations of federal law to help out the
NSA’s spying program
, we have good reason to be concerned about the FBI’s lack of transparency here. We hope
Senator Feinstein
will follow up on her concerns about the FBI’s apparent lack of “strictures” in place to protect Americans’ privacy in connection to FBI drone use and demand a full accounting of how, when, where and why the Bureau has been using drones to monitor the public.
Download the zip files of the documents
here
,
here
, and
here
.
Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:
Delivered by
FeedBurner
Be the Change! Share this using the tools below.
0 Comments
Disqus
Fb Comments
[Get It]
Comments :
Newer Post
Older Post
Home