They are most likely not 'armed drones,' but news has surfaced that the U.S. Air Force is training drone pilots to trail civilian auto traffic on New Mexico's highways.
In a 'lifestyles-of-video-game-war' piece by Mazzetti that appears in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, Mazzetti writes:
When I visited the base [Holloman Air Force Base, NM] earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at. A white S.U.V. traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs in the center of the screen and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road. When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.
"Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?" a reporter asked. One Air Force officer responded that this was only a training mission, and then the group was quickly hustled out of the room.
Some may shrug and say that the undisclosed high-altitude tracking of U.S. vehicles for training purposes is harmless, but the line between civilian privacy and an increasingly Orwellian capacity of the U.S. federal government to track its own citizens is blurred just a bit more by this practice.
There are already serious concerns about U.S. military drones -- designed for warfare abroad -- being repurposed for civilian purposes.
The blog Loss of Privacy reports that unarmed drones at Grand Forks Air Force Base, ND are being used for civilian surveillance. And, according to the same report, former California Congresswoman and now Wilson Center for International Scholars President Jane Harman helped lead efforts to block expansion of drone hardware and related intelligence to the U.S. domestic theater:
In 2008 and 2010, Harman helped beat back efforts by Homeland Security officials to use imagery from military satellites to help domestic terrorism investigations. Congress blocked the proposal on grounds it would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from
taking a police role on U.S. soil.
The problem with an ever powerful national government with more and more tools to control and track its citizenry is that these powers, legal and technical, are often abused and used in ways not originally intended.
Tools developed for the so-called war on terror are now used to spy on Americans -- and not enough, Dana Priest and Shane Harris excepted, are blowing the whistle on this creeping intelligence capacity that is now using Americans as unwitting guinea pigs before the video-trained pilots go track and destroy similar SUVs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
This should not be happening. There should be controls on what the U.S. Air Force can target. The Department of Defense has no shortage of vehicles and enormous swaths of federal land for their own staff to traverse.
If Air Force video pilots need to train by tracking something from the air, they should target soldiers in their ranks.
-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons