Blimplike surveillance craft set to deploy over Maryland heighten privacy concerns
Blimplike surveillance craft set to deploy over Maryland
heighten privacy concerns
By Craig Timberg, Published: January 22
They will look like two giant white blimps floating high
above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the
bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with
sports and everything to do with war.
The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air
craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land
about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a
three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they
will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie,
with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be
intercepted before reaching the capital.
Aerostats deployed by the military at U.S. bases in Iraq
and Afghanistan typically carried powerful surveillance cameras as well, to
track the movements of suspected insurgents and even U.S. soldiers. When Army
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales murdered 16 civilians in Kandahar in March 2012, an
aerostat above his base captured video of him returning from the slaughter in
the early-morning darkness with a rifle in his hand and a shawl over his
shoulders.
Defense contractor Raytheon last year touted an exercise
in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban
Baltimore with one of the company’s most powerful high-altitude surveillance
systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of
many miles.
The Army said it has “no current plans” to mount such
cameras or infrared sensors on the aerostats or to share information with
federal, state or local law enforcement, but it declined to rule out either
possibility. The radar system that is planned for the aerostats will be capable
of monitoring the movement of trains, boats and cars, the Army said.
The prospect of military-grade tracking technology
floating above suburban Baltimore — along one of the East Coast’s busiest
travel corridors — has sparked privacy concerns at a time of rising worry about
the growth of government eavesdropping in the dozen years since the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks.
“That’s the kind of massive persistent surveillance we’ve
always been concerned about with drones,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert
for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s part of this trend we’ve seen since
9/11, which is the turning inward of all of these surveillance technologies.”
The Army played down such concerns in written responses
to questions posed by The Washington Post, saying its goal is to test the
ability of the aerostats to bolster the region’s missile-defense capability,
especially against low-flying cruise missiles that can be hard for ground-based
systems to detect in time to intercept them.
The Army determined it did not need to conduct a Privacy
Impact Assessment, required for some government programs, because it was not
going to collect any personally identifiable information, officials said in
their written responses to The Post.
“The primary mission . . . is to track airborne objects,”
the Army said. “Its secondary mission is to track surface moving objects such
as vehicles or boats. The capability to track surface objects does not extend
to individual people.”
Even the most powerful overhead surveillance systems,
experts say, struggle to make out individual faces or other identifying
features such as license plates because of the extreme angles when viewing an
area from above.
But privacy advocates say location information can easily
lead to the identification of individuals if collected on a mass scale and
analyzed over time.
Researchers have found that people vary their movements
little day to day, typically traveling from home to work and back while also
regularly visiting a small number of other locations, such as stores, gyms or
the homes of friends.
Aerostats’ range
The aerostats planned for Maryland will have radar
capable of detecting airborne objects from up to 340 miles away and vehicles on
the surface from up to 140 miles away — as far south as Richmond, as far west
as Cumberland, Md., and as far north as Staten Island. The Army declined to say
what size vehicles can be sensed from those distances.
“If it’s able to track vehicles, that is problematic,”
said Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties
group. “You could imagine a scenario in which the location information can
reveal where you go to church, what doctor you’re going to, whether you’re
cheating on your wife, all those types of details. . . . Once a surveillance
technology is put up, it’s very tempting for law enforcement or the military to
use it for reasons they did not originally disclose.”
Technologies developed for battlefields — weapons,
vehicles, communications systems — long have flowed homeward as overseas
conflicts have ended. The battles that followed the Sept. 11 attacks have
produced major advances in surveillance equipment whose manufacturers
increasingly are looking to expand their use within the United States.
Aerostats — basically big balloons on strings — grew
popular in Iraq and Afghanistan and also are used by Israel to monitor the Gaza
Strip and by the United States to eye movement along southern border areas.
Even a rifle shot through an aerostat will not bring it down, because the
pressure of the helium inside nearly matches the pressure of the air outside, preventing
rapid deflation.
TCOM, a Columbia, Md.-based company that Raytheon hired
to manufacture the aerostats planned for the upcoming deployment, said business
is growing for smaller, tactical systems that can be used in sensitive border
or harbor areas.
“When you need persistent surveillance in a particular
area, there is no better solution than the aerostat because it’s there all the
time,” said Ron Bendlin, TCOM’s president.
The Defense Department spent nearly $7 billion on 15
different lighter-than-air systems between 2007 and 2012, with several
suffering from technical problems, delays and unexpectedly high costs, the
Government Accountability Office found in an October 2012 report .
The system planned for Maryland is called JLENS, short
for Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System. The
system has had setbacks, including rising costs and an accident in 2010 that
damaged one of the aerostats at a facility in North Carolina.
A GAO report in March put the total development costs for
JLENS at $2.7 billion. Once expected to provide 16 systems, each consisting of
two aerostats and accompanying ground controls, only two of these systems have
been built, the one scheduled to fly in Maryland and a second sitting in
storage in Utah.
Raytheon, the prime contractor on the project, declined
numerous interview requests about the JLENS system and, after requesting
questions in writing, also declined to answer those.
The military has no concrete plans to build more JLENS
systems, though supporters of the program have not given up hope of reviving
support.
“They are bringing this to the East Coast, close to
Washington, to get the Pentagon guys and Congress to say, ‘Whoa, we could
really use this,’ ” said Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute, a military
think tank with ties to the defense industry. “This is re-purposing. You’ve
already spent the money.”
Tests in Utah
The JLENS aerostats can stay in the air continuously for
up to 30 days and have shown the ability in tests to track fast-moving objects
in flight. The JLENS radar systems also can detect what security experts call
“swarming boats,” the kind of small, agile watercraft that, when loaded with
explosives, can threaten ships.
The aerostat system destined for use outside Baltimore
has spent the past few years based at the Utah Test and Training Range, in the
vast, parched salt flats west of Salt Lake City.
Residents of the area complained less about privacy
issues than the militarization of the airspace. Testing of the JLENS involved
small aircraft that raced through the sky, mimicking the flight of missiles.
The radar systems were supposed to track them and help firing systems home in
on the moving targets. The aerostats themselves were not armed.
The Army said similar tests will not be conducted while
the aerostats are deployed in suburban Baltimore.
As the aerostats hover above the area, they will be
visible — at least faintly — for dozens of miles in any direction. To fans
seated in the stands behind home plate at Orioles games in Baltimore’s Inner
Harbor, more than 15 miles away, they will probably appear as two white dots
hovering in the sky beyond the historic brick warehouse at Camden Yards.
The JLENS system will require pilots to take precautions
in flights through the area; the Federal Aviation Administration is creating a
“special use airspace” for the three-year test period, the Army said.
There also will be “minor adverse impacts” on the bald
eagle population in the vicinity of Aberdeen Proving Ground, which sits among
the highest density of nests for the iconic birds in the Chesapeake Bay region,
according to an Army environmental assessment.
One of the two base stations for the aerostats will
breach a 500-meter perimeter established to protect a nest used by a pair of
bald eagles. The environmental assessment says that if those eagles are
disturbed or killed because of the proximity of the JLENS base station or
related construction, it would qualify as a legally permissible “incidental
take” of the species.
In a bid to demonstrate the long-term utility of JLENS to
potential customers, Raytheon organized and paid for an exercise at a Utah test
range in which it outfitted an aerostat with a spherical MTS-B sensor, often
used by the Air Force and Customs and Border Protection to conduct overhead
surveillance from drones. The exact capabilities of the MTS-B are classified,
military officials said, but engineers familiar with the technology said its
electro-optical and infrared sensors probably can detect individuals from more
than 20 miles away.
For the Raytheon test, the MTS-B spotted a person
pretending to be a terrorist planting an improvised roadside bomb, even though
the view was obscured by smoke from a nearby forest fire, according to a
Raytheon news release from January 2013. Operators could see live feeds of
“trucks, trains and cars from dozens of miles away.”
The Army described the MTS-B test as “a contractor
conducted demonstration” and said that only Raytheon could provide details. The
company declined to do so, referring all questions to the Army.
Activists in Utah critical of the aerostat testing there
said they were never alerted to the testing or to potential privacy issues for
the test of Raytheon’s surveillance sensors.
“I’m positive that was never raised,” said Steve Erickson
of the Citizens Education Project, based in Salt Lake City. “Privacy was just
not an issue, in part because of the remoteness of the place.”
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