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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"... 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? ]=-
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.