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DHS To Kill Domestic Satellite Spying Program
mcgrew writes "The Bush administration had plans in place to use spy satellites to spy on American citizens. This morning the AP reports that new DHS head Janet Napolitano has axed those plans. 'The program was announced in 2007 and was to have the Homeland Security Department use overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes. The program, called the National Applications Office, has been delayed because of privacy and civil liberty concerns. The program was included in the Obama administration's 2010 budget request, according to Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat and House homeland security committee member who was briefed on the department's classified intelligence budget.'"
DHS.
Hope is the currency of fools
Intel assets should not be used to spy on our own country. They have too much money to spend on this sort of thing. Imagine the DOD budget being spent to enforce laws. Traffic tickets being issued because a satellite saw you going too fast, or jaywalking. Obviously I'm going for histrionics here, but it's a slippery slope once you take away the absolute prohibition.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
...to contract with Google to do it for them.
Why build when you can outsource?
Do you have any idea how much red-tape laws create? It doesn't matter if people "can" still use these satellites to spy, what matters is that doing so will force people to walk through miles of red-tape. Right now, if the police knock on my door, I can tell them to **** off and there is jack crap they can do about it. If they really want in, they get to jump through hoops to do so. This is a huge deterrent for corruption. It's the same reason we lock our door -- just because someone "can" smash the window to unlock the door doesn't mean it doesn't "deter" people from doing it.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
In lots of jurisdictions, a cop could just smash through your door and chalk it up to a mistake, with few consequences.
Sure, they wouldn't be able to prosecute you, but that wouldn't make the events a whole lot more convenient to you.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Do you have any idea how much red-tape laws create? ... This is a huge deterrent for corruption
It only deters people that think they have to follow the law, not be above it, and in our government, we have more of the latter.
This is my sig.
They don't really need to prosecute you when they can just shoot you and plant some weed on your corpse.
From the article:
"Napolitano recently reached her decision after the program was discussed with law enforcement officials, and she was told it was not an urgent issue, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about it."*
Later on:
"Bratton, in his role as head of the Major City Chiefs Association, wrote on June 21 that the program, as envisioned by the Bush administration, is not an urgent need for local law enforcement."*
*(Emphasis mine)
Anonymity. Yes, we've heard of it.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
A problem with camera surveillance, is much more innocent than criminal behavior is in view, so a fairly high proportion of suspicious behavior is actually innocent behavior that looks improbably suspicious. Statistically, its the same problem as with false positives in drug tests. Compounding this problem is that when law enforcement is impersonal and from a distance, the accused often is not given a fair, face-to-face chance to defend themselves before having their lives temporarily wrecked. By the time it goes to trial, it has already cost large legal fees and possibly employment.
In my own arrest a few years ago, for innocent behavior that looked suspicious from afar, I was never once interviewed by a law enforcement officer or prosecutor and given a chance to tell my story, right up to the morning of the trial.
There was to me surprisingly little public comment when the domestic satellite surveillance program was announced a couple of years ago. Its nice that the Obama administration seems to be doing the right thing with this anyway.
Or simply lie to a judge to get a warrant. Man who beat cocaine rap sues the city; whistleblower's case survives
City's legal bills for ex-cops' defense expected to soar
Free Martian Whores!
The interesting thing here -- and this comment is partly motivated by your sig -- is that this killing of the domestic satellite spying program is not a liberal action but a conservative one. If you need an example of where real conservatives and today's Republicans differ, here it is. Republicans such as Peter King will say this is "a step back in the war on terror" but a real conservative would say the U.S. government never had any business spying on its citizens in the first place.
Not private is not the same as government recorded and analyzed.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Imagine I have a 7 foot (or higher) privacy fence around my back yard. I have an expectation of privacy. Or I happen to own 150 acres in the middle of nowhere. I have less, but still some, expectation of privacy there as well.
It's murder and conspiracy. This is the same damn thing we executed Tookie for. Death penalty. You cannot have cops murdering people and planting evidence to justify it. Absolutely not. Death penalty.
This is my sig.
The title would be less exciting if it read "Bush and Obama has never used satellites to spy on Americans".
Bush didn't use spy satellites our of privacy and civil liberty concerns. Got it.
Now that we are straight on this particular issue, let the Bush bashing begin.
"... overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes.."
From what I have heard from certain people, they already have been doing this since Regan. The largest use for this was domestically was tracking the drug trade including but not limited to:
Large distribution rings by tracking differential images for trafficing patterns (e.g. large number of cars at 2 am at a pier that only stick around for a hour or two)
Using the IR module for finding growers in remote areas with camoed green houses.
Using the information to track abnormal warehouse activity.
Spying seems a slanted term since the cops don't SPY on people, they investigate. Same with the FBI and ATF.
So what we really have is DHS decides for what appear to be largely buget issues, not taking the information, THAT IS ALREADY BEING COLLECTED, and using it for DHS purposes. Since the DHS is a new agency they probably didn't have access to that data. This sounds largely like a formality to get them access to the data. Now the DHS will have to step through the FBI and local law enforcement channels which was the whole reason we created the DHS in the first place.
Seriously, this amounts to "The cops can use it, the FBI can use it, but the 'new' intelligence community can't." Here contract a plane to get your imagining instead.
If there was a privacy issue why not raise it when ATF raids a pot grower? Why now and not under Regan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2? And why no outcry over the fact it has been used for years already? Surely the use of images from those darn helicopters and airplanes must be a privacy conern also? Right? You know those images you can get from the county and local city... Hello? Sensible Dissent where are you? (in my best Shaggy impersonation).
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
And if you aren't smuggling heroin up your ass, you won't mind an anal probe every single day from the DEA, right?
"But this one goes to 11!"
Don't start cheering how great DHS is just yet, because while they're simultaneously talking about killing this program, they're putting UAV drones in the air. http://www.newswatch50.com/news/local/story/Homeland-Security-drone-patrolling-NNY/8ujqf9M2YkCXVlOmBVxFOg.cspx
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
The program was included in the Obama administration's 2010 budget request
It seems the opening paragraph should have said, "The Obama administration had plans in place to use spy satellites to spy on American citizens." On the other hand, why let the facts get in the way of a good line?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If you need an example of where real conservatives and today's Republicans differ
Nice word game, and example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
All nice job at partisan baiting. Attribute all positives to the side you identify with, and all negatives to your mythical "liberal" enemies.
I'm getting really sick of these silly dogmatic partisan statements. 100% of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, socialists, and whatever stupid ideology people identify with are wrong. Some small amount of their greater ideology might not be wrong, but the larger corpus of ideals is always wrong. Anyone who identifies themselves within a pure ideology, probably completely divorced from reality, or at least very uninformed. Ideology blinds us to what politics is about, and should be about, PEOPLE, and more so, people in the real world, not some ideologically pure fantasy land.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey