The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

Surveillance aircraft used by the U.S. military overseas could soon be coming to the skies above Los Angeles County.


The FAA has streamlined the process that would allow agencies to fly smaller, unarmed versions of the drones that hunt down terrorists in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has not yet applied for an application to fly drones over our skies, its Homeland Security chief Bob Osborne said drones could be in the department’s future — with some caveats.

I have been holding off on this issue to get an understanding its scope. Right now, I am in the "not concerned" corner. However, if this turns out to be a Skynet thing, then I am busting out my flux capacitor to change my opinion.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/05/15/faa-to-ease-rules-for-police-agencies-to-fly-unmanned-drones/

Isn't this old news?  I thought state and local law enforcement had been piling onto the drone bandwagon for at least a year or two, if not more. 

The drones are silent and invisible.  

30,000 Drones To Fly Over The US by 2030

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/06/20126247243722488.html

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/apl/aviation_forecasts/aerospace_forecasts/2011-2031/media/2011%20Forecast%20Doc.pdf
Never mind big brother, the kid next door will have a camera up with a live feed.

I’m not generally a big conspiracy person, but you pair drones with the Patriot Act and the new NSA supercomputer being built in the Utah desert to aggregate all of the information that the NSA “collects” today and what the government knows about all of us and what we are doing will be staggering. Privacy is SO 20th century.

Most of the drones involved in that may be flying cell cites that intercept phone conversations, doing Siri-like conversions of speech to text to be analyzed by computers for hot keywords and phrases.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamedStellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”
The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.
Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.
The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.
The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)
After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.
Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.
But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.
Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”

Most of the drones involved in that may be flying cell cites that intercept phone conversations, doing Siri-like conversions of speech to text to be analyzed by computers for hot keywords and phrases.

My solution to big brother monitoring my life is to have a boring enough life that no one cares.

And hopefully, by 2030 the new tech drones will be invisible and make no sound....

+1

They don't need drones to do that when they have taps into the phone switches and can get the calls directly. And already do have trillions of communications recorded. Yes, trillions.

No more "shake weighting" out of doors for most of us then.

My solution to big brother monitoring my life is to have a boring enough life that no one cares.

Like all those references I make to Teaheads and Republijerks? YIKES!
Our privacy is pretty much a thing of the past. You don't need to watch everyone, just have everyone THINK they are being watched.
And hopefully, by 2030 the new tech drones will be invisible and make no sound....

“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys told Fox News.
In other words, with the right equipment, anyone can take control of a GPS-guided drone and make it do anything they want it to.

“Spoofing” is a relatively new concern in the world of GPS navigation. Until now, the main problem has been GPS jammers, readily available over the Internet, which people use to, for example, hide illicit use of a GPS-tracked company van. It’s also believed Iran brought down that U.S. spy drone last December by jamming its GPS, forcing it into an automatic landing mode after it lost its bearings.

While jammers can cause problems by muddling GPS signals, spoofers are a giant leap forward in technology; they can actually manipulate navigation computers with false information that looks real. With his device -- what Humphreys calls the most advanced spoofer ever built (at a cost of just $1,000) -- he infiltrates the GPS system of the drone with a signal more powerful than the one coming down from the satellites orbiting high above the earth.

Initially, his signal matches that of the GPS system so the drone thinks nothing is amiss. That’s when he attacks -- sending his own commands to the onboard computer, putting the drone at his beck and call.

Humphreys says the implications are very serious. “In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he told Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”

“What if you could take down one of these drones delivering FedEx packages and use that as your missile? That’s the same mentality the 9-11 attackers had,” Humphreys told Fox News.

It’s something the government is acutely aware of. Last Tuesday, in the barren desert of the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, officials from the FAA and Department of Homeland Security watched as Humphrey’s team repeatedly took control of a drone from a remote hilltop.

“I’m worried about them crashing into other planes,” he told Fox News. “I’m worried about them crashing into buildings. We could get collisions in the air and there could be loss of life, so we want to prevent this and get out in front of the problem.”
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/25/drones-vulnerable-to-terrorist-hijacking-researchers-say

The U.S. military is preparing for the maiden flight of a football-field-size airship laden with surveillance gear designed to do the work of a dozen drones.
The experimental craft, known as the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV, is designed to loiter for weeks at a time, outfitted with high-tech sensors that can intercept phone calls, shoot full-motion video or track the movement of insurgents.

With the first flight, the Pentagon may also lift the veil on a project that has been shrouded in secrecy. So far, no photo of the LEMV has been released.
Initial flights of the LEMV are scheduled to occur at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., best known as the site of the 1937 crash of the German passenger airship Hindenburg.

"Once this thing clears the tree line, it's going to be on YouTube," said an Army official.

Defense officials said mechanics and engineers from Northrop Grumman Corp. were rushing to put the finishing touches on the giant airship, days ahead of a deadline for a first flight as early as next week.

Lighter-than-air surveillance craft are not new: Smaller, tethered blimps known as aerostats are a common sight in Afghanistan, where troops use them to keep an eye out for potential attacks.

But according to military experts, larger airships can carry more cameras and sensors than small blimps, and also allow military commanders to multi-task. For instance, a surveillance airship could carry equipment that would allow it to pick up a phone call, detect its location, and point a camera in the right direction.

Capable of flying at heights greater than 20,000 feet, the airship would be beyond the range of small arms fire or rocket-propelled grenades used by insurgents.

Unlike the toy quad-copters, the UAV's marketed to police fly at higher altitudes to avoid detection.
All that's missing in this arms-merchant video are bikini-clad women with AK-47s
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzHx7AxHmOA[/youtube]
and this one being tested in Texas is armed:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXwpnjoEre8[/youtube]

An opportunity for someone to develop a SAM of suitable size and range.

Estes Rockets?

You would need to be  r e a l l y lucky with an Estes Rocket to get a hit.  Might be fun to try though.  A quick escape from the launch site would be a must.
  :D

You would need to be  r e a l l y lucky with an Estes Rocket to get a hit.  Might be fun to try though.  A quick escape from the launch site would be a must.
 
 :D

Okay, I'll take a page from the US missile defense strategy of the 50's and 60's and have several rockets surrounding my "compound" and devise a way for them to have smoke and chaff payloads to create a screen that they might not be able to see through, and jam the communications of the drone if it is hovering.  ;)

Now you're talking a real plan.
 

They will declare their drones to be police officers, just as they do drug dogs, horses and those cute little bomb robots,
making it a felony to assault one.

Even discussing it might be felony endeavoring.

Oklahoma Developing Drones to Intercept Phone Calls, Locate Guns.


The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is testing a wide variety of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS) sensor platforms, including one that can determine whether individuals are armed or unarmed, for use by first responders and frontline homeland security professionals.

The testing is taking place at the Oklahoma Training Center for Unmanned Systems (OTC-UC), a unit of University Multispectral Laboratories (UML), a not-for-profit scientific institution operated for Oklahoma State University (OSU) by Anchor Dynamics, Inc. UML is a “Trusted Agent” for the federal government, technology developers and operators.
 
SUAS sensor platforms are being tested for use by "first responder and homeland security operational communities" that “can distinguish between unarmed and armed (exposed) personnel," as well as conducting detection, surveillance, tracking and laser designation of targets of interest at stand-off ranges, according to the RAPS Test Plan obtained by Homeland Security Today.
There’s also a requirement to test SUAS sensors for how well they can capture crime and accident “scene data with still-frame, high definition photos.”
 
The RAPS testing is being carried out at the Ft. Sill Army Post near Lawton, Okla. because DHS found the Army base “to be the optimal site to conduct RAPS test operations," the test plan said. “The ready availability of restricted airspace at Ft. Sill and its central location within the continental US make it logistically accessible and convenient to participating vendors.” In addition, the test plan said “the Ft. Sill test sites offer good flying conditions year-round and provide a variety of terrain features needed for conducting search-and-rescue and other test scenarios.”

Oklahoma has emerged as a leader in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). DHS is working closely with the state on the RAPS program through Gov. Mary Fallin’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Council, as the federal initiative is being conducted through OSU’s University Multispectral Laboratories' advanced testing facility that's uniquely positioned within Ft. Sill’s 200 square miles of restricted airspace.
“The strong support of the State of Oklahoma first responder community underscored the benefits of the Ft. Sill test site,” DHS said.

“Aerospace represents a significant portion of our state economy and UAS is expected to be the most dynamic growth sector within the aerospace industry in the next decade,” said Unmanned Systems Alliance of Oklahoma (USA-OK) President, James L. Grimsley. “This is an important time for the unmanned aerial systems industry and for Oklahoma.”

“Successful SUAS test operations at Ft. Sill may lead, later, to more complex SUAS operational testing at two other Oklahoma sites,” the RAPS Test Plan said. These sites are the Oklahoma National Guard’s Camp Gruber and the University Multispectral Laboratory’s test site at Chilocco, Okla., “both of which have varied and realistic urban complex facilities.”
 
Public and congressional concerns over the expanding use of UAVs of all kinds by federal, state and local law enforcement were exacerbated recently following a report by CNET.com that DHS has “customized its Predator drones” to be able to “identify civilians carrying guns and tracking their cell phones.”

CNET.com reported that DHS’s “specifications for its drones … ‘shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,’” and that “They also specify ‘signals interception’ technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones and ‘direction finding’ technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.”

The disclosure was based on an apparent “unredacted copy” of the May 26, 2005, CBP Office of Air and Marine (OAM) Performance Specification for the DHS/Customs and Border Protection Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System document that DHS released in redacted form to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

An updated March 10, 2010 CBP OAM performance specifications document for CBP’s Predator B UAV also was obtained by EPIC under the FOIA, and portions of it also were redacted.

Most of the redactions, though, were made pursuant to legitimate FOIA exemptions authorizing the withholding of records compiled for law enforcement purposes or that would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations.

Much of the redacted information deals with sensitive operational and performance capabilities of CBP’s fleet of Predators, as well sensitive technical data on the UAVs’ sensor packages and specifications.

A CBP spokesman told CNET.com the agency “is not deploying signals interception capabilities on its UAS fleet. Any potential deployment of such technology in the future would be implemented in full consideration of civil rights, civil liberties and privacy interests and in a manner consistent with the law and long-standing law enforcement practices.”
 
But privacy rights advocates don’t see it that way. EPIC’s Ginger McCall, director of the group’s Open Government Project, has said CBP’s UAS requirements documents “clearly evidence that the Department of Homeland Security is developing drones with signals interception technology and the capability to identify people on the ground," and that "This allows for invasive surveillance, including potential communications surveillance, that could run afoul of federal privacy laws."

As for the deployment of communications interception technology on CBP’s Predators, officials adamantly said there are numerous legal issues involved “that would have to be worked out” before this capability can routinely be used.

I'll be building my own drone soon enough. I'll give you guys some camera time. ;)

Drone stuck in the arms of Lady Justice
http://www.marionstar.com/article/20130430/NEWS01/304300023/Drone-stuck-arms-Lady-Justice?nclick_check=1

Lest you think the headline was hyperbole:

Drone stuck in the arms of Lady Justice
http://www.marionstar.com/article/20130430/NEWS01/304300023/Drone-stuck-arms-Lady-Justice?nclick_check=1

Lest you think the headline was hyperbole:

(http://cmsimg.marionstar.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=BE&Date=20130430&Category=NEWS01&ArtNo=304300023&Ref=AR&MaxW=300&Border=0&Drone-stuck-arms-Lady-Justice)

So where is Alex Jones and the rest of the tin-foil hat, mouth breathers on this?

Go two posts above yours...

The immediate question I have is how to discriminate a drone propeller from any other aircraft propeller. Otherwise you'd have numerous false positives.

Possibly by frequency for the little drones.  Full size drones would probably be the same as regular aircraft propellers as you noted.

Manned surveillance craft may be on the way out sooner than we thought;
at least I would think that would be this pilot's assessment:

(http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1220549/thumbs/o-HELICOPTER-LASER-570.jpg?6)

Deer Trail, Colorado, home of the World’s First Rodeo, plans to vote next month on issuing licenses to shoot down drones over the town. The license will cost $25 and a reward will be paid up to $100 for any drones that are shot down around the city.

patric has apparently relocated to Colorado.  Who knows if legit....

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/07/255943/

An opportunity for someone to develop a SAM of suitable size and range.

A small surveillance drone flies over an Austin stadium, diligently following a series of GPS waypoints that have been programmed into its flight computer. By all appearances, the mission is routine.

Suddenly, the drone veers dramatically off course, careering eastward from its intended flight path. A few moments later, it is clear something is seriously wrong as the drone makes a hard right turn, streaking toward the south. Then, as if some phantom has given the drone a self-destruct order, it hurtles toward the ground.