Feds planned to arm drones
2010 report: U.S. weighed weaponizing border planes
by Bob Ortega, The Republic
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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security developed plans at least three years ago to mount weapons on drones operated by Customs and Border Protection — though the agency denied Wednesday that it has any current plans to use armed drones.
The plans, outlining the idea of mounting “expendables or non-lethal weapons” on CBP drones, are disclosed in a 2010 document signed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
The document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and first posted Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco non-profit focused on cyberspace free speech, privacy and consumer-rights issues.
According to the document, titled “Concept of Operations for CBP’s Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System,” the weapons would be used against “targets of interest,” described as people or vehicles carrying smugglers or undocumented migrants.
The DHS and CBP declined to answer specific questions about the document, but issued a statement Wednesday that “CBP has no plans to arm its unmanned-aircraft systems with non-lethal weapons or weapons of any kind.”
However, civil-rights advocates are concerned that Napolitano signed off on a document positing plans to place even “non-lethal” weapons on drones.
“We’ve never seen this before in any proposals to fly drones domestically,” said Jennifer Lynch, an attorney for the foundation, which first requested the documents last summer and then filed suit in October.
She said the foundation obtained the document last month.
In June, departing FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged in a Senate hearing that his agency has deployed surveillance drones, even though it hasn’t yet drafted regulations for their use.
“Weaponizing drones, even with non-lethal weapons, creates too much of a danger to the public,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. “And it is an open question what a ‘non-lethal’ weapon is. … Something that could incapacitate a person in the middle of a desert could be hugely problematic. We think that, in the United States, drones should be used for surveillance alone, and only under strong legal protections.”
The DHS document was heavily redacted, with pages of text blacked out. None of the material released details what “expendables” or “non-lethal” weapons would be.
Currently, the CBP operates 10 drones. It plans to have 17 by 2017. The “Gang of Eight” immigration bill passed by the Senate last week calls for the CBP and its subagency, the Border Patrol, to operate drones 24 hours a day, seven days a week along the southern border. If some version of that bill passes the House, as many as 24 additional drones could be deployed.
By law, to ensure that drone operations don’t pose a safety risk to civil aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration must issue “certificates of authorization” for all unmanned- aerial-vehicle operations.
In response to a query from The Arizona Republic, the FAA issued a statement Wednesday saying that it “has not approved any certificates of authorization for law-enforcement agencies that authorize armed operations.”
The FAA hadn’t responded by deadline when asked whether it has received requests to authorize armed operations.
In February, at a drone convention in northern Virginia, the FAA official charged with regulating unmanned aircraft said that FAA rules bar using weapons on drones.
“We currently have rules in the books that deal with releasing anything from an aircraft, period. Those rules are in place, and that would prohibit weapons from being installed on a civil aircraft,” including on unmanned aircraft, the FAA’s Jim Williams said, according to the Washington Times.
Williams couldn’t be reached Tuesday or Wednesday. When asked for the regulation Williams cited, an agency spokesman gave a regulation that says: “No pilot in command of a civil aircraft may allow any object to be dropped from that aircraft in flight that creates a hazard to persons or property. However, this section does not prohibit the dropping of any object if reasonable precautions are taken to avoid injury or damage to persons or property.”
Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of a book on drone use, “Legitimate Target,” said that the Obama administration hasn’t articulated a clear policy on either domestic or overseas drone use and that neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress have been eager to limit the executive branch in this area.
“This is the new Wild West,” he said. “They have no clear criteria, no articulation of the threat, no articulation of what constitutes a legitimate target.”
Meanwhile, flight logs of CBP drones obtained and posted Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that the CBP has lent its drones more than 200 times in recent years to other federal and state agencies, including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Forest Service and state law-enforcement agencies in Minnesota, North Dakota and Texas, among others.
