The War on Drugs is a failure. Or is it?

The War on Drugs is an abject failure, at least with respect to its stated purpose. Everyone—EVERYONE—knows it:

In Congress, some are losing patience. “There is great fatigue surrounding our drug programs in the Western Hemisphere,” a staff member told me. “We don’t have good ideas. We don’t have good answers. We don’t have good anything. But we also know that doing nothing is a problem. So the whole thing is on autopilot. When you’re in the machine, it’s very difficult to say anything other than ‘Keep shooting. Keep decapitating the cartels.’ ”

“The war on drugs has simply not worked,” George P. Shultz, who served as Secretary of State under Reagan, told me. “It hasn’t kept drugs out of this country.” In 2011, Shultz, along with a committee of former heads of state, businessmen, and retired U.S. officials, called for an overhaul of U.S. drug-enforcement policy. The effects of interdiction programs like Anvil, they wrote, “are negated almost instantly,” wasting money that would be better spent on treatment and harm reduction. I asked Shultz why ineffectual policies have persisted. “We haven’t felt the full effects of it ourselves,” he said. “It took us twelve years to learn that Prohibition wasn’t working. There was Al Capone, there was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The violence was here. Now we have outsourced the violence, in effect, to Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras.”

Like the NSA’s domestic surveillance that has not kept us safe (see e.g. the Boston Marathon bombings), and our illegal wars and drone bombings that create more terrorists than one could ever hope to capture or kill, the drug war is emblematic of policies that are epic failures by the standards of their own alleged purposes.

They are all wildly successful for other purposes, though. It isn’t hard to figure out who benefits.

Schwartz’s piece in The New Yorker provides a detailed map of the interlocking aspects of the drug war in Honduras from the social to the military to the political, but it fails to connect the dots. C’mon, Schwartz: who benefits?

(See also: Colombia.)

Syrians.

2 Million Syrians Are Now Refugees And More Are ‘On The Way’: UNICEF has reported that over one million Syrian children live as refugees in other countries, and two million children are displaced within Syria itself.

Let me just ‘splain something. I am a pacifist because violence begets violence, and there is always—always—a better way to ease human conflict, if not resolve it. Aside from avoiding the evils of war and needless human suffering, that better way is quite frequently more cost-effective for those who would intervene, too.

Here are some pictures of Syrians. Perhaps one might consider these faces when contemplating whether a country that executes its own citizens with drone bombs has any fucking business teaching Assad or anyone else a lesson about how best to kill his own people. Or whether, you know, violent U.S. action just might make a bad situation worse (see, e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Columbia, Palestine, Chile, etc.).

Syrians.

Syrians.

Syrians.

Syrians.

We are all terrorists now.

On Sunday, August 18, The Guardian reported that David Miranda, the long-term partner of its journalist Glenn Greenwald who lives with him in Brazil, was detained for almost nine hours during a stopover at London’s Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

[He] was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

Greenwald, of course, has recently written a series of stories revealing the NSA‘s massive surveillance, based on information passed to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. As British Labour MP Tom Watson said in response to the news, “It’s almost impossible, even without full knowledge of the case, to conclude that Glenn Greenwald’s partner was a terrorist suspect.”

Of course he’s a terrorist! Everyone’s a terrorist. Aside from America’s Owners, certain heads of state and a handful of top officials, it’s hard to imagine anyone who does not potentially fall within the scope of anti-terror laws as they now operate in practice. Once a citizenry is made sufficiently fearful to give up fundamental rights and freedoms in the name of fighting terror—or communism, or drugs, or the next Sooper Skareey bogeyman—governments are always eager to expand their new powers beyond their original targets. it’s what they always do. Why wouldn’t they? Authoritarian sickos really seem to enjoy it for some reason, and doing so is extremely lucrative. Win-win!

And what possible coherent justification can there be anyway, for laws and powers supposedly targeting only suspected terrorists not to be used against ordinary citizens suspected of minor crimes? That is the very reason to object to unconstitutional surveillance in the first place: because we already know how this movie ends from, you know, all of history—including the recent history of the United States. That is what governments invariably do whenever they can get away with it: entrench their own power and suppress dissent.

And so David Miranda, who—let’s be clear here—was, at worst, suspected of participating in acts of investigative journalism, detained under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. This nifty law gives the police at UK ports of entry power to stop, search and detain anyone, without reasonable suspicion, for up to nine hours, and to confiscate their property. It provides no automatic right to legal counsel, and it is a criminal offense to refuse to cooperate with questioning.

This tactic is nothing new. Laura Poitras, David House, Lisa M. Wayne, Pascal Abidor, and Jacob Applebaum have all been detained without warrants at U.S. borders, questioned, and had their possessions searched or confiscated. (Poitras alone has been stopped more than forty times.) None of them have been accused of a crime, much less anything terrorism-related.

For a two month period, the Justice Department captured the records of more than 20 phone lines of reporters and editors at The Associated Press, including their personal phones. There must be suspected terrorists working at the AP. Obviously.

Earlier in August, Reuters revealed that a division of the Drug Enforcement Administration has access to NSA’s data that it uses to tip off local police to launch criminal investigations of ordinary Americans suspected of drug activity. The cops can never reveal the source of the tips, because these vast surveillance programs are only ever going to be used to Keep Us Safe™ from The Terrorists, remember? So they engineer a ruse, for example a supposedly routine traffic stop, to make the investigation seem otherwise legitimate. These cases almost never have anything to do with terrorism or national security whatsoever. But at least we are all Safe™ from weed dealers.

Non-violent Occupy protesters are also terrorists, according to the NYPD, which has also used counterterrorism tactics to infiltrate and monitor liberal political groups including anti-war organizations, environmental activists, groups opposed to U.S. immigration policy, labor laws and racial profiling, supporters of Palestinians and the Israeli divestment campaign, and anti-NAFTA activists. Other law enforcement agencies around the country have spied on anti-death penalty groups, Ron Paul supporters and pro-Muslim lobbyists. The NYPD also monitored unspecified “church groups.” (Terrorists for Jeezus?)

In recent months The Atlantic’s James Fallows has reported on a rash of elaborate, warrantless detentions of small aircraft pilots. Fallows, a Cirrus SP-22 pilot himself, notes about private aviation that “demographically it skews toward older white males who are politically conservative, have money, and often have military experience.” After perfectly ordinary flights to and from points within the continental United States, pilots have been suddenly surrounded by caravans of police vehicles, detained for hours (without warrants, naturally) and repeatedly interrogated by multiple law enforcement agencies: FBI, DEA, DHS, Border Patrol, local police and the occasional county sheriff. Their planes and possessions are searched — again, without warrants — by federal agents and sometimes by dog teams. These pilots include: Clay Phillips, a retired US Navy officer and engineer for a defense contractor with security clearances; Robin Fleming, a 70-year-old glider pilot in South Carolina who was almost shot down; and a real estate investor who has been detained in this manner twice. This practically screams the question: if “older white males who are politically conservative, have money, and often have military experience” can be targeted with anti-terrorism tactics, who can’t be?

The most tragically ironic part of this is that all of this ridiculous, invasive surveillance doesn’t even work to Keep Us Safe™. Sure, NSA Director Keith Alexander says “dozens of terror plots” were thwarted by secret surveillance. I call shenanigans. If the feds had captured a single aspiring terrorist, the story would have been purposefully leaked and splashed all over the news. Yet somehow there were dozens of thwarted plots that no one has ever heard of before—and that could not possibly have been prevented using traditional, constitutional law enforcement methods? Yeah…no I don’t think so. And I doubt we can ever know for sure, given that the highest officials defending these programs are lying liars.

What we do know is that terrorist attacks have indeed been thwarted—by ordinary citizens. Despite NSA’s massive surveillance operations, Richard Reid, the would-be “Shoe Bomber” managed to get a bomb on board an American Airlines flight to Miami. When he tried to set it off, passengers smelled smoke, subdued him and bound him up. Hello? NSA? Hello?

Then, with their amazing and vast surveillance powers and a heads up from CIA, US intelligence officials actually let suspected al-Qaeda collaborator Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab board a flight to the US. They were planning to let him into the states, too: they knew he was coming, but refused to let his visa be revoked. Unfortunately, he had a bomb in his underwear on the flight. Fortunately, passengers subdued him, too. Thanks, NSA.

Then there was Faisal Shahzad, the would-be “Times Square Bomber.” A t-shirt vendor noticed smoke coming out of an awkwardly parked SUV and alerted a mounted police officer, who called for assistance. The area was safely cleared and the bomb was defused. Law enforcement investigated over the next few days and narrowed in on Shahzad as the prime suspect. They put his name on the No Fly List (which even a known al-Qaeda collaborator wasn’t put on). Still, Shahzad was nonetheless able to buy a ticket to Dubai with cash at JFK airport, and board the plane. The flight was a few minutes from takeoff before the authorities caught up with him. The plane returned to the gate and he was arrested without incident.

T-shirt vendor: 1. NSA surveillance: 0.

For a more recent and far more devastating example, consider the Boston Marathon Bombers. The U.S. government was tipped off twice about Tamerlan Tsarnaev by the Russian Federal Security Bureau. He had been on a terrorist watch list watch for eighteen months before he and his brother set off bombs that killed three people and injured 264 others at the scene. Way to go, NSA. Really.

All of which is to say that in at least these four instances, the NSA’s invasive surveillance did not, in fact, Keep Us Safe™. But at least we can all take solace in the fact that these super awesome programs are Keeping Us Safe™ from documentary filmmakers like Laura Poitras. Oh, and rich old white conservative d00ds with little airplanes, weed dealers and the AP. These terrorist menaces are the real threats to Americans, people.

So I guess I’ll see all you fellow terrorists in Gitmo! That is, if we don’t get assassinated by drone strikes first!

I’m just joking about the drone strikes. Hahaha. That could never happen here.

Casualties of war.

The War on Drugs is not a war on drugs, at least not as that phrase is commonly understood in the English language. Assess the misery associated with the drug trade, and you would have to be on drugs yourself to believe the War on Drugs is anything other than a total, abject failure. From measures of public health, addiction rates, narco-terrorism, police corruption, gang violence, vast criminal networks spanning the globe to the inhumane prison-industrial complex here at home, the War on Drugs has made the world a far worse place.

Of course the U.S. government has long known that (a) military strategies do not work and may actually boost profits for drug traffickers, and (b) drug treatment is far cheaper and twenty-three times more effective than supply-side approaches. If the War on Drugs is such a spectacular failure in every respect, why would the feds continue to perpetrate it? The answer is that it is not a failure in every respect: the War on Drugs provides an excellent pretext for violent action by the U.S. and its client states in the Western hemisphere. Not in service to democracy, freedom and human rights, mind you—strictly for the benefit of elite U.S. business interests.

Since 1946, the U.S. Army has been training Latin American government and military officials at its School of the Americas (now WHINSEC) in “counterinsurgency,” for the purpose of suppressing leftist movements that might interfere with the unimpeded exploitation of natural resources by U.S.-based conglomerates. We helpfully trained these people in various torture techniques, civilian targeting, extrajudicial executions and extortion. We enthusiastically encouraged terrorism, sabotage, arresting people’s relatives and blackmail. We have engineered violent coups and murders to keep in power cooperative governments. We have deposed, assassinated and otherwise interfered with democratically elected officials and other leaders who exhibit the merest hint of socialism.

In recent decades in Colombia alone, the U.S.-trained army and its allied right-wing paramilitary groups have killed thousands upon thousands of union organizers, peasant and indigenous leaders, human rights workers, land reform activists, religious leaders, leftist politicians and their supporters. Some paramilitary leaders have attempted to “cleanse” Colombian society by murdering drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, petty criminals and the homeless. It’s true that some Colombian presidents have attempted to address the social, political and economic issues that the guerrillas claim are their grievances. But the United States government will not have any of that. With assistance from its allies in the Colombian political, economic and military elite, efforts at meaningful reform have all been thwarted. And so those pesky guerrillas—who have no love for the drug trade—will continue to strike back the only way they can: by blowing up oil pipelines. That is why there is a “War on Drugs” in Colombia.

Sound familiar? It should. The War on Terror works exactly the same way in the Middle East. That is, it doesn’t work, at least not for its stated purposes. No one seriously doubts that our policies create far more terrorists than we could ever capture or kill, or that we have long supported and armed some of the most brutal, tyrannical, anti-democratic and oppressive dictators in the region for the benefit of the world-warming, profit-pumping petroleum industry. Take a look at this nifty interactive map of Yemen, and then try to tell me with a straight face that we’re over there drone bombing Muslims to Keep Us Safe™ from terrorists, as opposed to, say, protecting a very cooperative Yemeni regime.

The War on Terror has led to profound changes in American society. The populace has meekly accepted the militarization of domestic police forces, the rise of a vast and insidious surveillance state and the erosion of constitutional rights and civil liberties, all in exchange for empty promises of safety. It’s long been clear that none of it works. Meanwhile, on the home front the War on Drugs has subjected generations of citizens to mass incarceration. More than two million people are behind bars in the U.S.: that is 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Prison populations have exploded since the 1980s, with the majority of the increase comprising low-level offenders, particularly drug offenders, and disproportionally black and Latino men who are no more likely to dabble in drugs than their white counterparts. What happened after the 1980s? The previous go-to excuse for invading, bombing and otherwise imposing our imperial will on other countries—the Cold War—had just collapsed, but the War on Drugs had already begun. Eventually, Osama bin Laden did America’s Owners a big favor, and the rest, as they say, is history. What could be a more perfect pretext than a “War on Terror”? Let’s invade Iraq for oil! We’ll just say Saddam’s in league with Al-Qaeda or something! The press?! Pfft. They’ll help us do it, bro. 

This is not a Republican-Democrat thing. No matter which party is nominally in power, the U.S. government will use every tactic at its disposal keep the American left marginalized as effectively as the Colombians do. Obama saw to it that the Occupy movement was crushed. FBI, NYPD, State Police and other law enforcement agencies have long been infiltrating and monitoring groups opposed to U.S. economic policy, immigration policy, harmful trade agreements, union-busting and racial profiling. The feds are also interested in keeping tabs on anti-death penalty groups, labor organizers, those who support Palestinians or the Israel divestment campaign, and, unsurprisingly, anti-war groups. After all, how are we all going to be duped into the next War on Whatever if we have a formidable peace movement?

All of this is precisely what one would expect from a system of unbridled, imperialist capitalism constrained by neither law nor conscience. The System is the problem.

__________

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended a rally at Union Square. It was the NYC kickoff for an “Abortion Rights Freedom Ride,” a cross country caravan organized by StopPatriarchy.org, with rallies planned along the route including places where some of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws have been passed: Fargo, North Dakota; Wichita, Kansas; and Jackson, Mississippi. Take Mississippi, for example: since 2002 only a single clinic providing abortion services has been in operation. The state’s legislators and governors, who clearly have no other problems to attend to, have been very busy attempting to shut down that last remaining clinic by passing disingenuous laws purporting to protect women’s health. (As if anyone, anywhere, believes conservatives are concerned about anyone’s health. OMGLOL.) Not to be outdone, North Dakota—another state with only one remaining clinic—passed a ban on abortions after six weeks, a point at which many women have no idea they’re pregnant.

I had recently written a piece mentioning StopPatriarchy.org and their refreshingly plain language and savvy messaging: “Abortion on Demand Without Apology.” “Women are NOT incubators.” “Forced motherhood is female enslavement.” When their campaign started to gain attention, the liberal hand-wringing came right on cue. There were concerns, you see. This Abortion Rights Freedom Ride will be “too confrontational, too vociferous and may turn off people to the cause.” The activists will be viewed locally as “invading outsiders.” Mass political protest only “distracts from important court cases.” Besides, it’s better to “rely on officials channels of politics.”

Really. How’s that been working out? In the past three years, states have passed nearly 180 restrictions on abortion, and 2013 is already on track to record the second-highest number of abortion restrictions in a single year, ever.

And these concerns sounded familiar. Where had I heard this before? Oh, that’s right: from critics concerned about the Occupy movement, who in turn echoed nearly verbatim critics of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, and critics of the women’s suffrage movement before that. Quiet down, they said. Wait. Work with The System. Please. When has anything short of confrontational, vociferous, mass political protest ever yielded more than lip service or a few table scraps from The System?

America’s Owners do not care one whit about abortion rights, except insofar as the issue drives conservatives to the polls to elect their Republican servants or outrages liberals enough to elect their Democratic servants. Indeed, they have every reason to keep the War on Women raging.

This is why voting is not enough: the game is rigged. As Chris Hedges put it so succinctly, “There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.” Democrats have concern-trolled themselves right into irrelevance. They are The System. The System is the problem. The math is not hard.

I’ll leave you with something promising. There are people who get it. I met some of them at the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride rally.

Meet (L-R) Noche Diaz, Jamel Mims, and Carl Dix, members of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, and defendants in cases brought for nonviolent civil disobedience actions protesting the NYPD’s Stop & Frisk practices. To be honest, when they were first introduced I wondered why three d00ds would be speaking together at an abortion rights rally. It didn’t take long to find out: their explicit message was that if women, who make up half of humanity, are not free, then none of us are free. They spoke powerfully and eloquently about the oppression that they and their communities have faced—and linked it directly to the same source of oppression and exploitation that women, workers and millions of marginalized people face, here and abroad: The System.

The difficult part is predicting what will spark the revolution—and where we will end up after it’s all said and done. To have a shot a desirable outcome, we need more citizens to realize that we, too, are casualties of war.

I’ll see you in the streets.

“I Hereby Resign in Protest Effective Immediately”

Meet Brandon Toy. He works for US defense contractor General Dynamics as an Engineering Project Manager building Stryker armored fighting vehicles. Previously, Brandon served in the Michigan Army National Guard as a Multiple Launch Rocket System Fire Direction Specialist, Team Leader and Vehicle Commander. He was deployed as a military policeman to Baghdad, Iraq in 2004 – 2005.

This is all I know about him.

Well, that, and the fact that he wrote this letter.

__________

I hereby resign in protest effective immediately.

I have served the post-911 Military Industrial complex for 10 years, first as a soldier in Baghdad, and now as a defense contractor.

At the time of my enlistment, I believed in the cause. I was ignorant, naïve, and misled. The narrative, professed by the state, and echoed by the mainstream press, has proven false and criminal. We have become what I thought we were fighting against.

Recent revelations by fearless journalists of war crimes including counterinsurgency “dirty” wars, drone terrorism, the suspension of due process, torture, mass surveillance, and widespread regulatory capture have shed light on the true nature of the current US Government. I encourage you to read more about these topics at the links I have provided below.

Some will say that I am being irresponsible, impractical, and irrational. Others will insist that I am crazy. I have come to believe that the true insanity is doing nothing. As long as we sit in comfort, turning a blind eye to the injustices of the world, nothing will change. It is even worse to play an active part, protesting all along that I am not the true criminal.

I was only a foot soldier, and am now a low level clerk. However, I have always believed that if every foot soldier threw down his rifle war would end. I hereby throw mine down.

Sincerely,

Brandon M. Toy
Stryker Engineering Project Management
General Dynamics Land Systems
Sterling Heights, Michigan

* * *

The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: ‘collect it all’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all

How the NSA is still harvesting your online data
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-online-metadata-collection

Inside America’s Dirty Wars
http://www.nationinstitute.org/featuredwork/fellows/3260/inside_america%27s_dirty_wars/

Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link

The Global Intelligence Files
http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html

Leaked HBGary Documents Show Plan To Spread Wikileaks Propaganda For BofA… And ‘Attack’ Glenn Greenwald
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110209/22340513034/leaked-hbgary-documents-show-plan-to-spread-wikileaks-propaganda-bofa-attack-glenn-greenwald.shtml

Guantanamo Detainee Begs to Be Charged as Legal Limbo Worsens
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324069104578527012686080732.html

Collateral Murder
http://www.collateralmurder.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

__________

Stop by the Palace any time, sir. Drinks are on us.

Exciting times in Drone Nation.

General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone.
(image: public domain).

For many years, our friends at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have been serving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on multiple public agencies concerning domestic drone use, and then filing lawsuits against them when the information has not been forthcoming. Even though many agencies still have not released all of the information to which the public is entitled, EFF has alerted us again and again to some remarkable discoveries about which most Americans, including the president, apparently either do not know or do not care. Or, perhaps, both.

I mentioned previously EFF’s interactive map of known military drone flights in the U.S. The U.S. military needs no authorization to fly drones over its own bases: such airspace is restricted and all other air traffic must avoid it. But at least for now, FAA must authorize drone flights operated anywhere else in our national air space, and FAA records are the source of the map data.

EFF’s map indicating FAA-authorized military drone operations over U.S. soil.
(excludes military bases.)

The FOIA request also revealed a risk assessment document in connection with failures and crashes of Predator and Reaper drones operated in a corridor of public airspace between two military bases:

Risk Assessment table listing fifteen hazards, the probability of each occurring (from seldom to likely), severity of potential damage (“catastrophic,” “critical” or “moderate”), and the corresponding risk level for each (low, medium or high).

The assessment of risk appears to concern only risk to the drone itself, and not, say, risk to “other traffic” such as an airliner, or to oblivious civilians on the ground. We can readily deduce that this is so from the document’s assessment of hazard 4, “Failure of command link.” Although it has the highest probability of happening of any hazard on the list (“Likely”), the severity is assessed only at “Moderate,” and the risk level only at “Medium.” Assuming this assessment is correct, it is because nothing catastrophic is likely to happen to a drone when humans temporarily lose control of it: the drone is merely being assessed and re-programmed by the U.S. strategic defense computer Skynet*, which as everyone knows became self-aware on August 29, 1997. Until the upcoming war between humans and the machines officially begins — i.e., when the machines launch their first strike nuclear attack on Russia — any domestic drone reprogrammed by Skynet is probably only at moderate risk of harm from humans.

At least Skynet, we can be sure, knows exactly what it is doing. This is clearly not the case with human drone operators. Around the same the FAA documents were made public, the Washington Post published a report on a rash of U.S. military drone crashes at civilian airports overseas. Based on thousands of pages of unclassified Air Force investigation reports, the article reveals stories like this one:

An inexperienced military contractor in shorts and a T-shirt, flying by remote control from a trailer at Seychelles International Airport, committed blunder after blunder in six minutes on April 4.

He sent the unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drone off without permission from the control tower. A minute later, he yanked the wrong lever at his console, killing the engine without realizing why.

As he tried to make an emergency landing, he forgot to put down the wheels. The $8.9 million aircraft belly-flopped on the runway, bounced and plunged into the tropical waters at the airport’s edge…The drone crashed at a civilian airport that serves a half-million passengers a year, most of them sun-seeking tourists.

It was the second Reaper crash in five months “under eerily similar circumstances.” Among the problems repeatedly cited in the Air Force’s drone crash investigation reports are “pilot error, mechanical failure, software bugs in the ‘brains’ of the aircraft and poor coordination with civilian air-traffic controllers.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that domestic drones will be plagued with similar problems, including man-child yahoos with badges just itching to play with their $8 million toys without daddy’s permission. Hell, they will probably include the exact same d00d that crashed that Reaper. He now has valuable “experience.”

Fortunately, FAA has denied some domestic drone permit requests that are so obviously dangerous it is difficult to believe that anyone but a man-child yahoo with a badge would ever even submit them. It denied Minnesota county police a drone permit because no one in the county met even the minimum FAA requirements for drone pilots or observers, presenting an “unacceptable risk.” Then there was Georgia Tech’s Police Department — university police departments now have their own drones (of course they do!)— which wanted to fly its Hornet Micro drone in the middle of a major helicopter route. The FAA denied that permit, too, but only because the drone was not equipped with an “approved sense-and avoid system.” Any one want to bet against top drone manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and General Dynamics successfully lobbying the Congressional Drone Caucus (yes, that’s a Thing) to take domestic drone jurisdiction out of the FAA’s control entirely, and give it to Lockheed? And while they’re at it, maybe Congress can scale back all of these terrible, burdensome profit- job-killing regulations, like requiring pilots to meet pesky FAA “requirements,” or keeping drones out of major helicopter routes?

What, no takers? I am shocked, people.

Last year, the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security issued a scathing report (pdf) detailing serious problems with the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) drone program, including a lack of qualified staff and appropriate equipment necessary to fly drones safely, failure to account for costs and expenditures, and a complete lack of procedures to prioritize other agencies’ requests for drone flights, among other deficiencies. (It sounds like they’re running it exactly like the Iraq war clusterfuck. Probably the same d00ds, too.) When the OIG report was released, EFF noted at the time that the lack of procedures was especially alarming since CBP has been flying its drones for almost a decade. As a result of another FOIA lawsuit, EFF has just obtained documents from CBP in which there are even more exciting drone developments to report!

• CBP is presently flying its ten Predator drones for a slew of other law enforcement agencies, for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with border patrol. Although the CBP documents were heavily redacted (particularly with respect to outside agency names), EFF was able to determine that they include the FBI, ICE, US Marshals, Coast Guard, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Army National Guard, and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Missions for these agencies “ranged from specific drug-related investigations, searches for missing persons, border crossings and fishing violations to general ‘surveillance imagery’ and ‘aerial reconnaissance’ of a given location.”

Fishing violations?

• The CBP flight logs indicate an enormous increase in drone missions for other agencies over the past three years. In 2010, there were about 30; in 2011, more than 160; in 2012, 250.

I’m sure 2013 is shaping up to be a banner year for fishing violations.

• The documents also reveal that in addition to CBP’s plans to make its drones more widely available to other agencies, it also plans to increase access to the data gathered on its surveillance flights — for example, by streaming data in near real-time to the Department of Defense’s Global Information Grid (GIG). CBP also envisions that its joint operations with DHS and other government agencies will “become the norm at successively lower organizational hierarchical levels.” EFF notes that this will almost certainly “reduce the already limited oversight for CBP’s drone-loan program.”

• By 2016, CBP plans to obtain an additional 14 Predator drones. This will increase its fleet to 24 and its drone surveillance capability to 24/7/365.

With all the Iraq-style accounting going on, it is difficult to estimate the precise costs of expanding CPB’s fleet and operating it continuously. But for a back-of-the-napkin estimate, the aforementioned OIG report notes that CBP’s ten Predator drones cost about $18 million to buy — each. And about $3,000 per hour to fly — each.

General Atomics MQ-1 Predator.
(image: public domain)

Drones already have remarkable surveillance capabilities — and they are constantly improving. The Air Force has flown Insitu’s ScanEagle near Virginia Beach; the ScanEagle carries an “inertial-stabilized camera turret, [that] allows for the tracking of a target of interest for extended periods of time, even when the target is moving.” The Air Force has also flown Boeing’s A160 Hummingbird near Victorville, California; the Hummingbird sports a gigapixel camera, “Forester foliage-penetration radar” designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and can stay airborne for 16-24 hours at a time. But the Reaper drone the Air Force is flying around Lincoln, Nevada and areas of California and Utah is in a class of its own. The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper deploys so-called “Gorgon Stare” technology, defined by Wikipedia as “a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone…capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city.” This imagery “can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind’s Eye project” currently being developed by Cyberdyne Systems DARPA. The Predator drones CBP is now flying have “high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), color video, and electron optical (EO) and infrared (IR) cameras.” Weaponized Reapers and Predators have been deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the president’s multiple illegal wars in places like Pakistan and Yemen: they are capable of performing Reconnaissance, Surveillance, Targeting and Acquisition (“RSTA”) to track multiple moving targets of interest in any weather, and then blasting them to pieces with Hellfire missiles.

Which brings us to perhaps the least surprising revelation in the latest document trove: CBP is considering equipping its Predator drones with “non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize” targets of interest. EFF notes that this is the first time it has heard of any federal agency proposing the use of weaponized drones over U.S. soil. Another prediction: it will not be the last. (You fishing violators out there better watch out! Your ass is gonna be tazed by sky robots!)

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman reports in The Guardian on a study referenced in an official U.S. military journal, conducted by a U.S. military adviser at the Center for Naval Analyses. U.S. officials have long contended that drone strikes significantly limit civilian casualties, noting that drone targeting capabilities are much more precise than targeting from manned aircraft. The new study analyzed classified military data on strikes and civilian casualties in Afghanistan from mid-2010 to mid-2011, and revealed that drone strikes actually caused more civilian casualties than strikes initiated by manned fighter jets. Ten times more. Yep. According to the unclassified executive summary of the study, drone strikes are “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement.”

Somebody had better inform the Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Constitutional Scholar in Chief about this right away! Why, as recently as May 23, our poor, clueless president was under the misimpression that “conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.” He also insisted that by deploying drones to assassinate people with no due process, he is “choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.” Since we all know our highest officials would never, ever lie to us, we can only surmise that there is at least one nefarious mole high up in the administration, feeding the president false information.

They’re probably working for Lockheed.

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*This post contains several references to the 1984 film The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. I do sincerely apologize for this, but really, it just couldn’t be helped.