Rest easy. Your government has things well in hand.

i posted last thursday on the broadening of surveillance technology to include visual data gathered from the national geospatial-intelligence agency (nga)... here's some more from today's wsj... (an interesting sidenote... nowhere in the article is the nga mentioned...)

The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S.

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.

and so, constant reader, let's take a look behind door number three and see what you've won...

According to defense experts, MASINT [Measurement and Signatures Intelligence] uses radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data.

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.

well, that's certainly exciting...! but, you might ask, what's the legal basis and what will be the oversight...?

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.

pay no attention to that complete lie about electronic eavesdropping being "subject to legislative and 'some' [quotes added] judicial control..." is there ANYTHING we can learn about it to find out if it IS legal...? can ANYBODY check it out...?

The full capabilities of these systems are unknown outside the intelligence community, because they are among the most closely held secrets in government.

oh, well then, evidently not... so, who will be in charge of making sure our civil liberties are protected...?

Access to the satellite surveillance will be controlled by a new Homeland Security branch -- the National Applications Office -- which will be up and running in October.

[...]

"This all has to be vetted through a legal process," [Charles Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer] says. "We have to get this right because we don't want civil-rights and civil-liberties advocates to have concerns that this is being misused in ways which were not intended."

oh, heavens no...! those pesky civil-liberties advocates and their damn constitution...! we should all be vastly relieved to know that an unimpeachable (pun intended) repository of citizen trust, the executive branch, will keep an eye out to make sure all is copacetic... and, really, a concern like the following is so trivial that it's hardly worth mentioning...

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.

there now... rest easy... your government has things well in hand...

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A brief update of the advancing state of domestic surveillance

a quick refresher of the past week...

[T]he Protect America Act is a dramatic, across-the-board expansion of government authority to collect information without judicial oversight. Even though Democrats negotiated a deal with Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell that addressed solely the foreign-to-foreign "problem" created by the FISC ruling, the White House torpedoed that deal and won a far broader law.

To those who have followed this Administration's legal strategy closely, the outcome should be no surprise. The law's most important effect is arguably not its expansion of raw surveillance power but the sloughing away of judicial or Congressional oversight. In the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, the law provides "unlimited access to currently protected personal information that is already accessible through an oversight procedure."

Like the Constitution's Framers, this Administration understands that power is accrued through the evisceration of checks and balances. Unlike that of the Framers, its mission is the transformation of limited government into a government that is not accountable to anyone.

those who have been paying attention have become reasonably well-informed about electronic interception, the how and the where (see here and here, among others)... so, now, let's add another dimension - the visual, real-time, gps and satellite-assisted form of surveillance...

[T]he NGA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] was first organized in 1996 from the imagery and mapping divisions of the CIA, the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that builds and maintains the nation's fleet of spy satellites. In 2003, the NGA was formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of the Pentagon. It is responsible for supplying overhead imagery and mapping tools to the military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies -- including the National Security Agency, whose wide-reaching, extrajudicial spying inside the United States under the Bush administration has been a heated political issue since first coming to light in the media nearly two years ago.

so, what would this nga outfit be all about...? let's visit their website...

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)

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A Crucial Member of the Intelligence Community
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) provides timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives. Geospatial intelligence is the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.
Information collected and processed by NGA is tailored for customer-specific solutions. By giving customers ready access to geospatial intelligence, NGA provides support to civilian and military leaders and contributes to the state of readiness of U.S. military forces. NGA also contributes to humanitarian efforts such as tracking floods and fires, and in peacekeeping.
NGA is a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and a Department of Defense (DoD) Combat Support Agency. Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., NGA operates major facilities in the St. Louis, Mo. and Washington, D.C. areas. The Agency also fields support teams worldwide.

[...]

National System for Geospatial Intelligence
NGA is the functional manager for the National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSGI). NSGI integrates technology, policies, capabilities and doctrine necessary to conduct geospatial intelligence in a multi-intelligence environment.
NGA provides accurate, up-to-date geospatial intelligence to support our senior national decision makers as well as to help plan and prosecute military objectives. NGA’s strategy supports operational readiness through a set of geospatial foundation data. These may include controlled imagery, digital elevation data and selected feature information-which can be rapidly augmented and fused with other spatially referenced information such as intelligence, weather and logistics data. The result is an integrated, digital view of the mission space.

got all that...? now, let's link the nsa and the nga...

In December 2004, the NSA and the NGA announced the signing of an agreement to share resources and staff and to link their "sources, data holdings, information infrastructure, and exploitation techniques." The document spelling out the agreement itself is classified. But in a press release the NGA explained that the pact allows "horizontal integration" between the two agencies, defined as "working together from start to finish, using NGA's 'eyes' and NSA 'ears.'"

pulling all this together into a nice, neat, driftnet surveillance program might look something like this...

Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous "fusion centers" around the country in a joint program run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into the agency's day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The project, according to EPIC, "inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO," the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at destroying groups on the American political left.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, could be misused in a domestic context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras throughout their downtown areas that track activity 24 hours a day. And U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd. Combine that with the awesome eavesdropping power of the NSA and the ability of the NGA to capture live imagery from satellites and UAVs, and the result could be an ability to track any individual, in real time, as he or she moves around.

don't forget to smile and wave when you step out on the street...

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