Drones In Our Skies

[swake]

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.

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.

Read the article:

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.”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

[Teatownclown]

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.

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....

[Conan71]

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

+1

[jacobi]

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

Finally we will have a vehicle suitible for wonder woman.

[Teatownclown]

+1

Oh Conan, they won't be able to see into the house. And by that time, the only time they'll see you is being wheeled in and out. 

[patric]

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.

Was thinking of something more strategic, like government interception of phone calls near a specific area or crime scene.

On the other hand, I can see someone like the Tulsa World getting a high-resolution camera drone for those times where reporters are being kept away from a news event.  A failed drug raid in 2010 comes to mind, where reporters were told they were being pushed back out of camera range because there might be "a bomb" in the building where deputies accidentally shot a sleeping man reportedly reaching for his hearing aids.

There's going to have to be some ethical restraints on their use, though, probably more in the form of a code of conduct than some broad-brushed ordinance.

[Townsend]

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

[jacobi]

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

HAH!  So the government really is just collecting data on everyone to commit the most epic internet troll ever!

[dbacks fan]

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

That's the way that I roll.

[Red Arrow]

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....

You have always been vocal with your opinions.  Why start worrying about privacy now?  I think it's way too late.

[patric]

“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

[nathanm]

Do drone GPSes not use the P(Y) code? Or were we too dumb to implement it using some sort of public key cryptography that allows it to be verified without giving up the encryption key?

[Conan71]

“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

Simple company policy: “if your GPS signal disappears on your company-provided vehicle on a consistent basis, you are fired.”

Problem solved.  The only people who would jam the signal are those having two hour lunches at Night Trips or stopping off to smoke pot at their brother’s house before getting to the job site.

[Vashta Nerada]

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.

[patric]

It's a few months old, but seems to be the first known instance of a SWAT team using an armed drone in, of all things, a cattle dispute in North Dakota:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57409759/drone-use-in-the-u.s-raises-privacy-concerns/

Sgt. Bill Macki, who runs the SWAT team in nearby Grand Forks, called in the reinforcements: a Department of Homeland Security Predator drone - a massive aircraft that until now most people associate with Hellfire missiles and strikes against terrorists.