"Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city," explained Maj. Gen. James Poss. "So there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything.”
At the time he made that comment about surveillance drones over Afghanistan, Poss was the Air Force's top intelligence officer. He was preparing to leave the Pentagon and move over to the Federal Aviation Administration. His job was to begin executing the plan to allow those same surveillance drones to fly over U.S. cities.
This plan was ordered by Congress in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. It directed the departments of Defense and Transportation to “develop a plan for providing expanded access to the national airspace for unmanned aircraft systems of the Department of Defense.” Gen. Poss was one of nearly two dozen ex-military officers who, starting in 2010, were put into positions at the FAA to oversee drone integration research. With little public scrutiny, the plan has been moving forward ever since.
If you're thinking that this is a partisan issue, think again. This plan has been enacted and expanded under presidents and Congresses of both parties. Along with civil liberties, a major concern must be safety. The military and the drone manufacturers, principally General Atomics, are arguing that the technology has advanced far enough that flying 79-foot wingspan, six-ton drones over populated areas and alongside commercial air traffic is safe.
But one need only look to the spotty record of self-driving cars, a technological problem an order of magnitude simpler than aircraft flying hundreds of miles per hour in three dimensions. These cars somehow keep plowing into stationary objects at relatively high speeds in two dimensions. And are we really comfortable with pilotless aircraft operating in the same airspace as the 747 at 30,000 feet that is bringing your children home for Christmas? These drones have a troubled history of crashing, and unfortunately, the process for determining whether they are truly safe has been compromised by having the military, which wants this approval, largely in charge of the testing.
Last October, General Atomics announced that it would be flying its biggest, most advanced surveillance drone yet, the SkyGuardian, over the city of San Diego sometime this summer. The stated purpose was to demonstrate potential commercial applications of large drones over American cities. In this case, the drone was to be used to survey the city's infrastructure.
But when General Atomics first began preparing for the flight, the goal was a very different one: Back in 2017, military technology analysts were predicting that by 2025, drones similar to those used in Afghanistan and Iraq would be hovering above U.S. cities, relaying high-resolution video of the movement of every citizen to police departments (and who knows who else). When there was public pushback to such a dystopian idea, General Atomics changed the purpose of the flight from providing data to the police to “mapping critical infrastructure” in the San Diego region.
The FAA, which is responsible for granting permission to General Atomics, has kept the process secret. When the Voice of San Diego asked for more information, the FAA refused on the grounds that this supposed commercial demonstration was actually “military.” The Voice of San Diego is now suing to get answers, and the American Civil Liberties Union has also expressed concern about the flight. Amid the scrutiny, General Atomics quietly announced that the flight was canceled, but this may only be a small hiccup in its long-term plan.
In fact, General Atomics’s drones are already being used domestically. Customs and Border Protection flies Predators over parts of the U.S. borders with both Mexico and Canada. Recently, CBP expanded its reach, using these drones to assist police in Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Detroit in the wake of protests against police brutality. Deeply concerned, members of Congress wrote to federal agencies denouncing the chilling effect of government surveillance on law-abiding people and demanding an immediate end to surveilling peaceful protests.
The concerns of these members of Congress should be echoed by the general public. What are the possible effects on our civil liberties from having high-tech surveillance platforms circling over millions of people, gathering information about our every move? We know from past experience that every government surveillance technology that can be abused has been abused. Allowing this powerful technology to be taken from overseas wars and turned inward on the public isn’t something that should happen without a robust public debate. The implications for civil liberties are too profound.
Medea Benjamin is author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control and co-director of the peace group CODEPINK. Barry Summers is an activist living in North Carolina who has been researching military drone integration since 2014.
