Spy satellites to be used domestically
Today's Wall Street Journal reveals that the US government plans to expand the domestic use of spy satellites; among other things, they plan to grant law enforcement the use of spy satellite imagery with no apparent judicial oversight or warrants:
The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.
Sure, they're paying lip service to "anti-terrorist" monitoring activities, but look what else is on the list:
Access to the high-tech surveillance tools would, for the first time, allow Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to see real-time, high-resolution images and data, which would allow them, for example, to identify smuggler staging areas, a gang safehouse, or possibly even a building being used by would-be terrorists to manufacture chemical weapons.
Not actual terrorists, but merely "would-be" terrorists.
We're supposed to trust Executive Branch agencies to police themselves, with no judicial oversight or pesky warrants needed:
Unlike electronic eavesdropping, which is subject to legislative and some judicial control, this use of spy satellites is largely uncharted territory. Although the courts have permitted warrantless aerial searches of private property by law-enforcement aircraft, there are no cases involving the use of satellite technology.
In recent years, some military experts have questioned whether domestic use of such satellites would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The act bars the military from engaging in law-enforcement activity inside the U.S., and the satellites were predominantly built for and owned by the Defense Department.
According to Pentagon officials, the government has in the past been able to supply information from spy satellites to federal law-enforcement agencies, but that was done on a case-by-case basis and only with special permission from the president.
Of course, we can reasonably guess how often this president would grant "special permission," but that is beside the point. Regardless of the party in control of the White House, blanket surveillance without a judicially sanctioned warrant violates the Constitution. Period. The fact that the surveillance is being conducted by the military and not the police makes the violation even more egregious. Military reach, power, and technology have always outpaced that of law enforcement; that's the reason for the Posse Comitatus Act in the first place. The deployment of this technology to spy on Americans without warrant should offend any rational person:
The spy satellites are considered by military experts to be more penetrating than civilian ones: They not only take color, as well as black-and-white photos, but can also use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities, including, for example, traces left by chemical weapons or heat generated by people in a building.
Here's the money quote:
"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."
Anybody want to lay odds on how long we'll have to wait to see this technology abused to such an extent that the Fourth Amendment becomes utterly moot?