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Tag Archives: Domestic

Boeing Helps Kill Proposed Law To Regulate Drones

April 1, 2013
News Articles

Pratap Chatterjee | Common Dreams

Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.

Local authorities in Seattle and in King county experimented with conducting surveillance from Draganfly Innovations drones last year, only to cancel both programs in the fact of public protest. “I’m not really surprised that people are upset,” said Jennifer Shaw from the American Civil Liberties Union, a human rights group that campaigned against the drones. “It’s a frightening thing to think that there’s government surveillance cameras overhead.”

On February 7, 2013, David Taylor, a Republican member of the state legislature, introduced a bill to regulate drone use. The proposed law quickly won support from several Democratic party politicians on the state Public Safety Committee.

Alarmed by the growing bipartisan coalition, Boeing jumped into the fray. “We believe that as the technology matures, best practices and new understanding will emerge, and that it would be counterproductive to rush into regulating a burgeoning industry,” Boeing spokeswoman Sue Bradley wrote in a statement. (The company makes a variety of drones from the Unmanned Little Bird and the A160 Hummingbird helicopters to the ScanEagle which has been used in Iran and Iraq and the proposed new X-45C combat aircraft)

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Editorial: Keep An Eye On Seattle’s Revised Drone Policy

March 26, 2013
News Articles

The Seattle Times

Officer Jim Britt demonstrates the unmanned aerial vehicle during an October informational meeting at the Garfield Community Center.

Officer Jim Britt demonstrates the unmanned aerial vehicle during an October informational meeting at the Garfield Community Center.

The Seattle City Council approved regulations that cover the Seattle Police Department’s use of unmanned aircraft systems. But the department has to start all over again, under the new rules.

That much has apparently not changed. Last week the SPD secured a last-minute revision of pending City Council legislation that laid out the operating conditions for the use of surveillance technology, including drones.

The unanimously approved council bill allows the police to use drones under three sets of conditions: when they have a warrant to do so; under certain “exigent” emergency circumstances; and in the course of a criminal investigation when the courts would not require a warrant for specified kinds of surveillance in public spaces.

Seattle Police Chief John Diaz asked the council for the exemptions. He noted a council requirement to always secure a warrant could create an impediment to investigations because the courts are not inclined to issue warrants when they are not needed.

The sought-after language was included in the council bill, but its last-minute inclusion offered the public virtually no opportunity to comment during a brief public hearing. Read More

Eric Holder Clarifies Policy On Drone Attacks On U.S. Soil

March 8, 2013
News Articles

Lawerence Hurley | Reuters

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder pauses during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 6, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder pauses during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 6, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday that President Barack Obama would not have the authority to order a drone to kill an American citizen on U.S. soil who was “not engaged in combat.”In a two-sentence letter to Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, Holder said he had heard Paul wanted to know if the president could use a drone to kill an American outside of an emergency situation.

“The answer to that question is no,” Holder wrote.

He was responding in part to Paul’s extensive critique of a letter the attorney general sent to the senator, which was made public on Tuesday. Holder said then that drone strikes against Americans on U.S. soil were not anticipated, but he did not rule them out in circumstances similar to the September 11 attacks in 2001.

On Wednesday, Paul spent nearly 13 hours speaking on the Senate floor in an attempt to block the confirmation of John Brennan as the next CIA director in protest at the use of drones in targeted killings.

The Obama administration has increasingly used drone strikes to target militants overseas, particularly in Pakistan and Yemen.

Holder Does Not Rule Out Drone Strike Scenario in U.S.

March 7, 2013
News Articles

Terry Frieden | CNN

A U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator UAV assigned to the California Air National Guard's 163rd Reconnaissance Wing flies near the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, on January 7, 2012. Iranian jets fired on a Predator drone on November 1 over the Persian Gulf, an incident the Air Force says took place over international waters.

A U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator UAV assigned to the California Air National Guard’s 163rd Reconnaissance Wing flies near the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, on January 7, 2012. Iranian jets fired on a Predator drone on November 1 over the Persian Gulf, an incident the Air Force says took place over international waters.

Attorney General Eric Holder is not entirely ruling out a scenario under which a drone strike would be ordered against Americans on U.S. soil, but says it has never been done previously and he could only see it being considered in an extraordinary circumstance.He began to winnow the list of those possible extraordinary circumstances Wednesday. In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, pressed Holder whether he believed it would be constitutional to target an American terror suspect “sitting at a cafe” if the suspect didn’t pose an imminent threat.

“No,” Holder replied.

But he also said the government has no intention of carrying out drone strikes inside the United States. Echoing what he said in a letter to U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, he called the possibility of domestic drone strikes “entirely hypothetical.”

That letter, released Tuesday, was prompted by questions raised over the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Specifically, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee sought the Obama administration’s legal rationale for its use of drones to kill terror suspects overseas.

But Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has said he would do what he could to hold up Brennan’s nomination until he got a full answer to his query, wanted to know whether the administration considered that policy applicable domestically.

In a letter to Paul dated on Monday, Holder said it was possible, “I suppose,” to imagine an “extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate” under U.S. law for the president to authorize the military to “use lethal force” within the United States.

However, Holder said the question was “entirely hypothetical” and “unlikely to occur.” Read More

Rand Paul: White House Should Pledge No Drone Strikes on American Soil

February 22, 2013
News Articles

Justin Sink | The Hill

Click Here to watch video

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Friday that he is demanding the White House  answer “serious constitutional questions” about whether the administration can  order a drone strike on American soil.

“We’re talking about someone eating at a cafe in Boston, or New York, and a  Hellfire missile comes raining in on them,” Paul said during an appearance on  Fox News. “There should be an easy answer from the administration on this. They  should say, ‘Absolutely no, we will not kill Americans in America without an  accusation, a trial and a jury.’ ”

The Coming Drone Attack On America

December 25, 2012
Blogs, News Articles

Naomi Wolf | The Guardian

Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/©Gulf News

By 2020, it is estimated that as many as 30,000 drones will be in use in US domestic airspace. Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/©Gulf News

People often ask me, in terms of my argument about “ten steps” that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both US military and by commercial interests, into US airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization – which is due to begin in earnest at the start of the new year – it means that the police state is now officially here.

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, “a huge push by […] the defense sector” to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds – meaning that you won’t necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs.

Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them.

An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step – one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. Read More

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