Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The United States Federal government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance by reducing drones usage
A year
ago the UK was shaken by rioting on a scale not seen in decades, a key contributing factor to which was
the disastrous breakdown of relations between police and inner-city communities. According to the
Guardians Reading The Riots survey, many involved in the disorder cited policing as the single most
significant cause of the riots. In light of this, it seems reasonable to suggest that the kind of remote
control policing-at-arms-length that drone-based technology inevitably encourages, whereby the local
community is viewed from afar in a form of mechanised surveillance that dehumanises both the watched
and the watcher, is precisely what is not needed. Withdrawing from the beat to watch over the streets
through electronic eyes in the sky will only stand to further alienate an already overwhelmingly and
visibly homogeneous (white, male, respectable working-class) police force from the diverse inner city
communities it exists to serve. Furthermore, the use of drones by police will be seen by many as a refusal
to engage with the public at the most fundamentally human level, and thus further undermine their
already dwindling legitimacy.
Cyril 3/30
(Malkia, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice, March 30, 2015, Black
America's State of Surveillance, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance)
The ACLU's Guliani pointed out, however, that invasive forms of surveillance, especially police
surveillance, often impact communities of color disproportionately, pointing to US Customs and Border
Protections' ubiquitous use of drone surveillance in vast border regions impacting huge swaths of the
populations that live in those areas. "You're not just talking about the physical border, you're talking about an area that encompasses
many major cities that have large minority populations, and the idea that these drones can be flown with little or no privacy
protections really mean that, people, just by virtue of living in that region are somehow accepting that
they have a right to less privacy," she said. African-American communities could well feel the
disproportionate impacts of the integrated use of domestic drones and other surveillance in the coming
years, as technologies such as StingRay are already being used mostly in the ongoing war on drugs to
track those suspected of selling and buying drugs. The drug war has long negatively impacted
communities of color, based on racialized drug policies and racial discrimination by law enforcement;
two-thirds of all those convicted of drug crimes are people of color, despite similar rates of drug use
among whites and people of color. These already-existing racial disparities in intrusive policing tactics and deployment of
surveillance technologies are one of the primary reasons civil liberties experts are saying the government often gets it backward when thinking
about privacy issues: deploying intrusive technologies first, and coming up with privacy policies governing their use afterward (when they may
already be violating many people's civil rights). "What we see with StingRays is the same phenomenon that we're seeing with [UAS], where
federal agencies are using them," Guliani said. "State and local agencies are using them. There's federal dollars that are going to buy them, and
we're kind of having the privacy debate after the fact with very little information."
But the
significance of this report reaches far beyond New Yorks Muslim community and
even beyond the American Muslim community at large. The authors have provided
a needed rebuttal to the common argument that surveillance isnt a problem if you
have nothing to hide, and that spying itself is essentially value-neutral so long as you dont become a target
into the departments Demographics Unit with original interviews of 57 Muslims in New York City.
of an investigation. The Muslims interviewed in the report describe a terrifying reality where trust and privacy are
virtually impossible, and where lives are severely harmed by spying alone. The pervasive spying regime has
effectively intimidated many would-be critics. Many of the Shia organizations who were approached by activists to
speak up or speak out were hesitant to do so, says community organizer Ali Naquvi in the report. A lot of it seems
to be fear. They dont want to be targeted for additional surveillance. Discouraging this legitimate, constitutionally
protected behavior isnt simply an unfortunate by-product of total surveillance, but rather a primary and predictable
was the stated aim of the Intelligence Division doesnt really matter. That has been the effect one that was
entirely foreseeable. So what has all this surveillance, this so-called intelligence gathering, gotten us? A terrorized
local Muslim population, a police department that grossly exaggerates the terror plots it has disrupted and a crown
jewel investigation of a troubled man named Ahmed Ferhani that was so problematic even the FBI recently
dubbed the terror factory by one author because of its role in manufacturing plots that its own agents then
disrupt wanted nothing to do with it. And as the report reminds us, Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the
NYPDs Intelligence Division, admitted during sworn testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked
with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single criminal lead. While Muslims in the Northeast are the
people most directly affected by this surveillance, it is a national problem both in the sense that all of our rights
we are all at a greater risk of being illegally spied on. This report is an important document that illustrates just how
damaging that can be.
lawmakers' questions about how many drones it operates and how often they are used. "It is both technologically
possible and by no means a leap to imagine that once the FAA approves broader use of drones within the US by law
enforcement, [law enforcement officials] may put StingRays on them," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney
with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, and an expert on StingRay technology. UAS have also been
outfitted with thermal sensing technologies to produce heat maps of people inside buildings. Other advocates worry
if domestic drones are deployed as a platform for providing temporary internet service to consumers, it could
potentially give corporate drone operators access to the internet data of those consumers and threaten net
neutrality. "If internet companies were to deliver internet service in hard-to-reach places, which would be a good
thing, would they then be collecting information in large quantities and would that information then be something
that their contacts would then have access to?" asked Drew Mitnick who is junior policy counsel at Access, an
organization dedicated to issues of internet freedom. It's questions like this that the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration has been ordered by the White House to answer in a collaborative process,
alongside civil society and industry groups, to develop guidelines for commercial drone use. The ACLU's Guliani
Protections' ubiquitous use of drone surveillance in vast border regions impacting huge swaths of the populations
"You're not just talking about the physical border, you're talking
about an area that encompasses many major cities that have large minority
populations, and the idea that these drones can be flown with little or no privacy
protections really mean that, people, just by virtue of living in that region are
somehow accepting that they have a right to less privacy," she said. African-American
communities could well feel the disproportionate impacts of the integrated use of
domestic drones and other surveillance in the coming years, as technologies such
as StingRay are already being used mostly in the ongoing war on drugs to track
that live in those areas.
those suspected of selling and buying drugs. The drug war has long negatively
impacted communities of color, based on racialized drug policies and racial
discrimination by law enforcement; two-thirds of all those convicted of drug crimes
are people of color, despite similar rates of drug use among whites and people of
color. These already-existing racial disparities in intrusive policing tactics and
deployment of surveillance technologies are one of the primary reasons civil
liberties experts are saying the government often gets it backward when thinking
about privacy issues: deploying intrusive technologies first, and coming up with
privacy policies governing their use afterward (when they may already be violating
many people's civil rights). "What we see with StingRays is the same phenomenon that we're seeing with
[UAS], where federal agencies are using them," Guliani said. "State and local agencies are using them. There's
federal dollars that are going to buy them, and we're kind of having the privacy debate after the fact with very little
information."
Brewer wrote a letter to Obama urging him to send also what she referred to as aviation assets,
that drones have proven effective in US military
campaigns overseas and that they would therefore assist in securing the US border : I would also ask you, as
conservative Arizona Governor Jan
overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan permit, to consider wider deployment of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] along our nations
southern border. I am aware of how effective these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and it
seems UAVs
operations would be ideal for border security and counter-drug missions. (Quoted in Lach, 2010) This appeal for
drones at the border obscures the fact that UAVs have already been providing aerial surveillance over US
border regions (Shachtman, 2005; Gilson, 2010). Since 2006, the USA has spent approximately $100 million for UAVs
on both the southern and northern US borders as part of its efforts to create a so-called virtual fence
(Canwest News Service, 2007). As of 2010 the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was operating six unarmed Predator drones for
overhead surveillance missions along the USMexico border, five of which were based in Brewers state of Arizona (Gilson, 2010). Since late
2007 or early 2008, the CBP has been testing drones in US/ Canada border regions (Canwest News Service, 2007). CBP officials
credit
their drones with helping bust 15,000 lbs of pot and 4,000 illegal immigrants ( Gilson, 2010). In the words of a
defense executive: It is quite easy to envision a future in which (UAVs), unaffected by pilot fatigue, provide
247 border and port surveillance to protect against terrorist intrusion Other examples [of possible uses] are limited
only by our imagination (McCullagh, 2006).
for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to
Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used
suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational
planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive
databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a
federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true .
at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of
throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly.
Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including
minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone
represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the