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New Spy Technology Pursued by DARPA

A new generation of spy technology designed to strengthen the U.S. military’s ability to detect and eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere based on computer analyses of their movements and activities is being developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has begun granting contracts to software firms to create algorithms that can be applied to the real-time video feeds from drone aircraft so the data can be sorted and stored on a wide range of human activities, from digging a ditch to climbing into a car to kissing someone.

The contracts represent the latest step in the Bush administration’s seven-year drive to develop high-tech spying capabilities that can be applied to a variety of situations and locales to detect terrorist or insurgent activities.

The new DARPA project would develop algorithms that would identify specific human activities – both by individuals and by groups – and evaluate if these actions suggested behavior that would justify a military response.

The list of activities that would draw attention to a single person include “digging, loitering, picking up, throwing, exploding/burning, carrying, shooting, launching, walking, limping, running, kicking, smoking, gesturing,” according to DARPA’s contract description.

For person-to-person activities, the project would identify and catalogue cases of “following, meeting, gathering, moving in a group, dispersing, shaking hands, kissing, exchanging objects, kicking, carrying together.”

Categories relating to vehicles include getting into or out of a car, opening or closing the trunk, driving, accelerating, turning, stopping, passing and maintaining distances.

According to DARPA’s description, the research project addresses challenges faced by intelligence analysts in processing and retrieving the vast amounts of visual data created by live video feeds from Predator drones and other aerial surveillance over Iraq and Afghanistan. By identifying and indexing specific actions, the analysts would be helped in evaluating potential threats and could retrieve video regarding similar behavior.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” said the DARPA document, written in March but withheld from the public until September.

Kitware, a software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, won an initial $6.7 million contract for what is technically called Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool, or VIRAT.

In a statement about the contract award, Kitware projected that through its proposed system, “the most high-value intelligence content will be clearly and intuitively presented to the video analyst, resulting in substantial reductions in analyst workload per mission as well as increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.”

Anthony Hoogs, Kitware’s project leader, said, ”This project will really make a difference to the war fighter.”

To carry out the project, Kitware said it was teaming up with two leading military technology companies, Honeywell and General Dynamics, as well as a number of academic researchers. [See Kitware Awarded $6.7M DARPA Contract.]

Repression Works

Though this DARPA project is not expected to be completed until early next decade, other technological breakthroughs reportedly have helped U.S. forces identify and kill insurgents in Iraq.

In his latest book, The War Within, Bob Woodward writes that highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics allowed for rapid targeting and killing of Iraqi insurgent leaders, representing a more important factor in undermining the insurgency than President George W. Bush’s much touted troop “surge.” However, Woodward withheld details of these secret techniques so as not to undermine their effectiveness.

Still, there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspected insurgents. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]

However, the marriage of advanced technology and military repression has raised concerns among some human rights advocates that these techniques could open the door to an Orwellian future in which authoritarian regimes repress popular resistance.

DARPA, with its mandate to push the envelope on the application of technology for military and intelligence purposes, also has been caught up before in controversies about balancing security against liberty.

In 2002, DARPA came under criticism when it unveiled plans for Total Information Awareness, a project that sought to detect terrorist activities by mining electronic data about virtually everyone on earth, anyone who participated in the modern economy.

The plan was to map out “transactional data” collected from every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to the DARPA Web site.

The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. To run the sensitive project, the Bush administration selected retired Admiral John Poindexter, who was convicted of five felony counts in the Iran-Contra Affair (though a conservative-dominated appeals court later reversed the jury verdicts).

Public and congressional outrage over this massive data-mining operation supposedly killed the TIA program in 2003, but the National Journal revealed in February 2006 that the project was ended in name only, kept alive within the secret budget of the National Security Agency.

One TIA component, called the Information Awareness Prototype System, was renamed “Basketball” at NSA, but still provided the basic architecture tying together information extraction, analysis and dissemination tools developed under TIA.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration began deploying similar advanced technology to Iraq with the goal of throttling the insurgency that was challenging the U.S. military occupation.

In effect, Iraq was transformed into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, including use of night-vision optics on drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging, and firepower that is both deadly and precise.

The new techniques marked a modernization of tactics used in other counterinsurgencies, such as in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1980s.

In Vietnam, U.S. forces planted sensors along infiltration routes for targeting bombing runs against North Vietnamese troops. In Guatemala, security forces were equipped with early laptop computers for use in identifying suspected subversives who would be dragged off buses and summarily executed.

Last year, a conservative counterinsurgency expert sent me a video, spliced together by the U.S. military in Iraq, showing how some of the modern techniques worked in Iraq. The video showed night-vision aerial surveillance of suspected “terrorists” as they moved in the dark with what was described as a truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun, the muzzle still warm from firing.

The tiny figures of these “terrorists” then walked into a forested area where they were mowed down by miniguns from an AC-130. Their truck also was blown to bits.

Biometrics

Besides using Predator drones to monitor the movement of Iraqis from the sky, massive amounts of biometric data have been collected on the country’s people for use in identifying suspected insurgents.

Explaining the value of this computerized database, Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post that it gave valuable information to soldiers on the ground.

“A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Duong said.

Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised this Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents.

Duong said the next step would be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed. [Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2007]

By identifying and indexing a wide range of human activities captured on surveillance videos, the new DARPA project could augment some of these other security projects, already in place or in development.

Regarding the video analysis, however, DARPA specifically prohibited inclusion of biometric algorithms for identifying people by their gaits or other individual features. However, those elements, which are being developed separately, presumably could be added to the overall technological package at a later date.

Tags: Bush, CIA, DARPA, Intelligence, Military, NSA, spy, spying

Intelligence Agencies Describe U.S. in 20 Years

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

Fingar’s remarks last week were based on a partially completed “Global Trends 2025″ report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.

“The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished,” Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.”

The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the “dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers” that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expected to receive one in the coming days, intelligence officials said.

As described by Fingar, the intelligence community’s long-term outlook has darkened somewhat since the last report in 2004, which also focused on the impact of globalization but was more upbeat about its consequences for the United States. The new view is in line with that of prominent economists and other global thinkers who have argued that America’s influence is shrinking as economic powerhouses such as China assert themselves on the global stage. The trend is described in the new book “The Post-American World,” in which author Fareed Zakaria writes that the shift is not about the “decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.”

In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.

In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. “There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system,” he said.

The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors “begins to approach one to three,” he said.

The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan — countries that are “on a good day, highly chauvinistic,” he said.

“We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth,” Fingar said.

Energy security will also become a major issue as India, China and other countries join the United States in seeking oil, gas and other sources for electricity. The Chinese get a good portion of their oil from Iran, as do many U.S. allies in Europe, limiting U.S. options on Iran. “So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing — even if we could do it — would be counterproductive.”

Nearly absent from Fingar’s survey was the topic of terrorism. Since the last such report, the intelligence community has projected a declining role for al-Qaeda, which was deemed likely to become “increasingly decentralized, evolving into an eclectic array of groups, cells, and individuals.” Inspired by al-Qaeda, “regionally based groups, and individuals labeled simply as jihadists — united by a common hatred of moderate regimes and the West — are likely to conduct terrorist attacks,” the 2004 document said.

The new assessment saw a continued threat from Iran, however. Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic’s attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year’s landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003.

He said Iran’s ultimate decision on whether to build nuclear weapons depended on how its leaders viewed their “security requirement” — whether they thought their government sufficiently safe in a region surrounded by traditional enemies.

Iranians are “more scared of their neighbors than many think they ought to be,” Fingar said. But he noted that the United States had eliminated two of Iran’s biggest enemies: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

“The United States took care of Iran’s principal security threats,” he said, “except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat.”

Tags: america, CIA, future, Intelligence, U.S., usa

Secret CIA Prison in Poland

The Polish prosecutor’s office is investigating claims there was a CIA prison in Poland for al Qaeda suspects where guards might have used methods close to torture, the prime minister’s top adviser said on Friday.

Polish media reported earlier on Friday that a classified note written by the Polish secret service had proved the existence of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency base in Poland.

“I am not familiar with such a note and I don’t think Prime Minister Donald Tusk is either,” Slawomir Nowak, who heads Tusk’s political office, said in an interview with Tok FM radio.

“But the premier asked the justice minister to clarify this matter and the country’s prosecutor’s office is investigating the potential existence of the CIA prison.”

The Washington Post reported for the first time in 2005, quoting unnamed CIA sources, that CIA prisons existed in Europe. A U.S. human rights group, Human Rights Watch, later said Poland and Romania hosted the prisons.

“There definitely was cooperation between Polish and American secret services,” a source close to the secret service told Reuters. “But whether there was torture at the base, hopefully we will learn about that soon.”

Foreign and local media speculated that the base was operational between 2002 and 2005, while Aleksander Kwasniewski was president and Poland was run by the leftist governments of Leszek Miller and Marek Belka and then a rightist administration under Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz.

DENIALS

All three former prime ministers have denied any knowledge of such a prison or base, as have many other senior officials including top secret service personnel. Tusk’s centre-right cabinet has also played down the speculation.

“I hope this will not be confirmed,” Nowak said. “It would not only have serious consequences inside the country but would also take a very serious toll on the international scene.”

“This has to be investigated very carefully, without emotions.”

Asked about the case during a visit to France, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski urged discretion.

“I think this is all speculation about things that should be kept secret among all countries which take part in such cooperation. Let’s leave it alone. The less we talk about it the better,” Sikorski told reporters in Avignon.

Since 2005, separate reports by the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the European Commission have concluded that CIA prisons did exist in Poland and Romania.

Under Polish law, a Pole who was party to an agreement allowing the CIA to torture suspects could be sued in the regular courts or even in the State Tribunal, a special court for government officials.

“We demanded official information from the prime minister about the prisons in June, but we never got it,” said Dawid Szescilo of the Polish unit of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

“This is the third government that has banned (the release of) any information about the case, and public opinion should be given knowledge of all of this.”

Tags: al qaida, CIA, cia prison, poland, terrorism

IARPA Trolls Online Gaming

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program has found a new, more accommodating home for its “mission” of “keeping America safe”–from the Constitution–at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA).According to McClatchy investigative journalist Warren Strobel, IARPA … is the U.S. intelligence community’s counterpart to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been in business for more than 35 years and is meant to be a small, flexible R&D agency that funds high-risk, but potentially high-payoff technologies. (”What’s IARPA?”, McClatchy Washington Bureau, June 30, 2008)

IARPA has been organized under the auspices of Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Mike McConnell, a former executive vice-president with spooky mega-contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. As Tim Shorrock reported in March,

As Booz Allen’s chief intelligence liaison to the Pentagon, McConnell was at the center of action, both before and after the September 11 attacks. During the first six years of the Bush administration, Booz Allen’s contracts with the U.S. government rose dramatically, from $626,000 in 2000 to $1.6 billion in 2006. McConnell and his staff at Booz Allen were deeply involved in some of the Bush administration’s most controversial counterterrorism programs. They included the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme run by former Navy Admiral John Poindexter, which was an attempt to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases. (Congress cancelled the program over civil liberties concerns, but much of the work was transferred to the NSA, where Booz Allen continued to receive the contracts.) (”Carlyle Group May Buy Major CIA Contractor: Booz Allen Hamilton, CorpWatch, March 8, 2008)

According to the agency’s website, IARPA’s brief is centered on three program areas:

Smart Collection, “The goal of the programs in this office is to dramatically improve the value of collected data from all sources.”

Incisive Analysis, “The goal of the programs in this office is to maximize insight from the information we collect, in a timely fashion.”

Safe & Secure Operations, “The goal of the programs in this office is to be able to counter new capabilities implemented by our adversaries that would threaten our ability to operate freely and effectively in a networked world.”

There’s no argument that preventing sociopaths–state-sponsored or otherwise–using malware to cause the meltdown of a nuclear power plant’s uranium core or the sudden release of methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere should be a priority of any sane government. Certainly such laudatory goals would be optimized by writing better programs rather than through intrusive data-mining ops carried out by the state’s outsourced and well-paid private “partners.”

Unfortunately, we aren’t dealing with a sane government here in the United States. According to Virtual Worlds News, one IARPA program seeks to “mine” information from virtual worlds and online gaming sites for its potential to “model” terrorist activity.

Reynard, a data-mining project from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is an exploratory effort to monitor activity in virtual worlds and online games and then model what terrorist activity in those worlds would look like. The Director of National Intelligence recently released a Congressionally mandated report on various data-mining projects of which Reynard is just one. While it’s just an early effort right now, “If it shows early promise, this small seedling effort may increase its scope to a full project.”

Data-mining is defined as “a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases” in order to “discover or locate a predictive pattern of anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity….” and will now be ongoing “in a public virtual world environment. The research will use publicly available data and begin with observational studies to establish baseline behaviors.”

No word on what world that will be in, but we already know that the CIA has a presence in Second Life and that IARPA has investigated Linden Lab’s world as well. (”U.S. Project Reynard Mines Data Looking for Virtual Spies,” Virtual Worlds News, February 25, 2008)

One can only wonder what IARPA will do once “baseline behaviors” are mapped! But apparently there’s no need to fret since “the government understands that ‘applications of results from these research projects may ultimately have implications for privacy and civil liberties,’ so ‘IARPA is also investing in projects that develop privacy protecting technologies,’” Secrecy News reports.

We bet they are! But as Strobel points out, “IARPA’s ancestry is a wee bit interesting”:

In the beginning, there was Total Information Awareness, a DARPA information-gathering program run by none other than former Iran-Contra figure and Reagan national security adviser John Poindexter. Critics saw the program as a major, post-9/11 intrusion on American’s privacy and civil liberties, and Congress killed funding for it in 2003. But there were persistent reports–confirmed by yours truly in conversations with former U.S. intelligence officials–that portions of the Total Information Awareness research had simply been shunted off to other agencies.

As readers undoubtedly recall, Total Information Awareness (TIA) was “terminated” by Congress when it learned that Poindexter was setting up a program that would sift through “public databases storing credit card purchases, rental agreements, medical histories, e-mails, airline reservations, and phone calls for electronic ‘footprints’ that might indicate a terrorist plot in the making,” according to Shorrock’s excellent read, Spies for Hire.

And to whom did DARPA turn to manage TIA? Why none other than Booz Allen Hamilton, of course! Joining SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), Booz Allen “won” some $63 million in contracts to run Poindexter’s pet project. While the program–and contracts–were allegedly cancelled, portions of TIA had simply been spun-off to other agencies including the FBI and NSA.

Where else did TIA migrate? It turns out, many of its data-mining projects, including the Scalable Social Network Analysis (SSNA) operation, which seeks to model networks of connections like social interactions, financial transactions, telephone calls, and organizational memberships into a coherent analytical tool, were “assimilated” by the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), managed by NSA.

Strobel reports that “ARDA was later renamed, given the ominous-sounding name of the Disruptive Technology Office.” And now ARDA and DTO along with a “new and improved” TIA, have apparently been folded into IAPRA.

Which just goes to show, you can’t kill off that which the state decrees is necessary for “your protection.” As Wired’s Ryan Singel advises online gaming enthusiasts, you’d better “be careful who you frag”!

Tags: CIA, DARPA, DOD, gaming, IARPA, TIA

Whitehouse Wants Spying Eye on Citizens

On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment denying money for the new domestic intelligence operation—cryptically named the “National Applications Office”—until the Homeland Security secretary certifies that any programs undertaken by the center will “comply with all existing laws, including all applicable privacy and civil liberties standards.”

Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on intelligence, told Newsweek that majorities in both the House and Senate intend to block all funding for the domestic intelligence center at least until August, when the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency that works for Congress, completes a report examining civil-liberties and privacy issues related to the domestic use of picture-taking spy satellites.

Harman, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans controlled Congress earlier in Bush’s tenure, said she still felt burned by the president’s secret expansion of domestic electronic spying after 9/11. At the time, she and other intel committee leaders were assured that the increased intelligence activity was legal, only to learn later that the basis for the new surveillance was a set of opinions by administration lawyers that are now widely considered to be legally questionable.

Because of the administration’s poor handling of the electronic spying program (mainly conducted by the super-secret National Security Agency, which operates a worldwide web of electronic eavesdropping systems), Harman says she and other members of Congress will be more cautious about accepting civil-liberties assurances from administration officials. “We have to make sure this is not a back door for spying on Americans,” Harman told Newsweek.

Harman said that she had discussed the administration’s plans for expanding domestic use of picture-taking spy satellites—which are supposedly capable of taking very high-resolution photographs of buildings, vehicles and people—with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. According to Harman, he promised strict procedures to protect the rights of Americans, including obtaining court authorization for law enforcement-related surveillance operations where appropriate. Despite Chertoff’s assurances, however, Harman said that Congress probably would not fully approve the program until the administration is more explicit about how it would operate.

A congressional aide familiar with the views of Senate Democrats said they share Harman’s concerns. However, this aide, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, said that the administration is close to providing Capitol Hill with detailed new protocols for protecting civil rights and privacy when conducting such surveillance. A Homeland Security official said that the administration had hoped to begin full operations of the National Applications Office, which would be located at a secret facility somewhere in the Washington, D.C., area, in October. But Harman said that full congressional funding for the new center almost certainly would be held up until after the presidential election in November.

Earlier this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is supposed to manage federal disaster relief efforts, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which directs the operations of picture-taking spy satellites and analyzes their output, issued a statement describing how they were currently working together to help out with flood-relief efforts in the Midwest.

According to the statement, NGA is “providing analysis, unclassified commercial imagery of flooded areas and geospatial intelligence products to FEMA and emergency responders in the affected areas to aid in rescue and recovery efforts.” Intelligence experts note that commercial picture-taking satellites, such as one operated by a company called DigitalGlobe, already make available for public use satellite imagery with a resolution as fine as 18 inches—meaning, said one expert, that the satellite picture can zoom in on a single car.

Classified imaging satellites, operated at NGA’s direction and built by a secretive Pentagon agency called the National Reconnaissance Office, can produce pictures of even greater clarity, though precise details are state secrets. An intelligence official confirmed that information from secret Pentagon satellites is currently being made available to agencies involved in flood-relief efforts. But to protect intelligence secrets, classified spy-satellite pictures are not being provided directly to flood-relief agencies, the official said. Instead, intelligence analysts are using pictures from secret satellites to make unclassified paper maps and to produce unclassified electronic data that can be used both by emergency services and ordinary homeowners. Some of the intelligence community’s flood-relief data can be viewed on an NGA website.

The intelligence official said that domestic agencies, ranging from the FBI to the Agriculture Department, have for years been able to request spy-satellite data. Such information has been used in the past not only to help organize disaster responses (to events such as Hurricane Katrina), but also to help plan security for major public events, ranging from papal visits and presidential inaugurations to sporting championships such as the World Series and Super Bowl. The official said that before intelligence agencies can spy on individual households, they must first consult government lawyers to ensure such activities are legal.

Intelligence and law enforcement experts say that under present laws, criminal investigators or intelligence operatives would probably not need a warrant to conduct surveillance on buildings or suspects from street level—or from above, using a helicopter or airplane. Nor would they need express authority to use commercially available satellite pictures. On the other hand, in a 2001 opinion authored by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that investigators had inappropriately invaded the privacy of a marijuana grower when they used information collected by an external heat-sensing device to obtain a search warrant for the man’s home.

An intelligence official could not specify whether the new domestic intelligence office would be required to obtain a warrant before conducting particularly close satellite surveillance. A spokesman for NGA said the agency would have no comment on the program. But Russ Knocke, a Homeland Security spokesman, told Newsweek that fears about the program are unfounded. “We’ve repeatedly met with Congress to answer questions about the NAO,” he said. “As we have said, the purpose of the NAO is not to expand existing legal authorities. Rather, it will allow the government to better and more efficiently prioritize the use of scarce resources in support of major disasters, homeland security efforts and perhaps—in the future—law enforcement. We have also been clear that we would brief Congress before moving to support law enforcement. Efforts to further stall the NAO are misguided and keep us from making the best use of overhead imagery for a number of public safety and security missions.”

Tags: CIA, domestic spying, NSA, spy, spy satellite, spying