[NYTr] American Spy Satellites to Snoop on US

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Carol (activ-l) 

CBS - Aug 15, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/15/the_skinny/main3168959.shtml

American Spy Satellites To Snoop On U.S.

The Skinny: Department of Homeland Security OKs Expanded Domestic
Use of Spies in the Sky

The Department of Homeland Security has approved a measure to allow
federal civilian agencies and law enforcement to turn American spy
satellites on their citizens for the first time.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Department of Homeland
Security has approved a measure to allow federal civilian agencies
and law enforcement to turn American spy satellites on their own
citizens for the first time.

[Wall Street Journal article: 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118714764716998275.html ]

Until now, the highly sensitive satellites were aimed mostly at other
countries, usually ones we didn't really trust. Occasionally,
geologists and NASA scientists got to use them to make things like
topographical maps. Letting domestic security folks use them to spy is,
the Journal says, "uncharted territory."

Officials have been mulling the plan for a couple years, but often
bumped up against questions about whether this kind of snooping would
violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars military for engaging in
law-enforcement activity within the U.S., since the satellites are
built for and owned by the Defense Department.

The decision was made three months ago by Director of National
Intelligence Michael McConnel, and OKed in May by DHS chief Michael
Chertoff.

Access to the satellite will be controlled by a new Homeland Security
branch, the National Applications Office. As Charles Allen, the DHS's
chief intelligence officer who will head up the new program, summed up
cryptically, "It is an idea whose time has come."

Naturally, privacy groups are freaking out. Sentences like this one
probably don't help. "The full capabilities of these systems are
unknown outside the intelligence community, because they are among the
most closely held secrets in government."

One privacy advocate complained that it was this secrecy that was the
real problem.

"You are talking about enormous power," said Gregory Nojeim, senior
counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology
for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group
advocating privacy rights in the digital age. "Not only is the
surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's
also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."