DoD surveillance balloons over US

Americans know they're being watched by cell phones and smart home devices, but there may be a new privacy threat just above your head: Video-outfitted mass-surveillance balloons to capture every moving object across a 25-mile swatch beneath it from 65,000 feet. These experimental devices are being tested, from mid-July through Sept. 1, above six Midwest states – South Dakota, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri – as part of a Defense Department program temporarily authorized by the Federal Communications Commission for the Sierra Nevada Corp., an aerospace and defense company. The project involves as many as 25 solar-powered balloons, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. The technology is meant to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats,” according to the FCC filing. Experts are now cautioning that all kinds of data are likely being collected, Jay Stanley, an analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Guardian. (The FCC’s “Special Temporary Authorization” was granted upon the express condition that it may be terminated by the commission at any time without advance notice.) The U.S. Southern Command commissioned the test, though the end goals are unclear. SOUTHCOM’s HQ is in south Florida, and includes resources from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and other agencies. Among the command’s missions are tracking and blocking drug shipments heading to the U.S., and protecting the Panama Canal. SOUTHCOM has been using light aircraft to conduct surveillance, but these balloons would be less expensive alternative: Hovering for months without a flight crew. The balloons appear to be carrying “satellite-like vehicles housing sophisticated sensors and communication gear,” the Guardian reported from FCC documents, making them able to share data with themselves and ground receivers. One of the sensors “is a synthetic aperture radar intended to detect every car or boat in motion” within a 25-mile swath beneath it, and because it’s recording, it allows users to travel back in time to re-watch an event (and) who was involved, and where they came from, according to Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York. The recording ability has led to the system’s nickname of “combat TiVo,” he said. The aerial camera system is called the Gorgon Stare, made by Sierra Nevada, and owned by the Air Force. Its invention was literally inspired by the 1998 sci-fi film Enemy of the State. Gorgon Stare is named for the Greek figures whose gaze could turn a person into stone, and used by the AF, though exactly where or how is classified. It’s unclear where the data is being stored or going, says ACLU’s Stanley, but it’s time to be cautious: “We should not go down the road of allowing this to be used in the United States … (and) being carried out, by the military no less.” (Source: The Guardian 08/03/19)