WSJ: DHS to Get Access to Spy Satellite IntelSomething of great concern to civil-liberties hawks: the Department of Homeland Security is about to receive expanded access to U.S. intelligence’s powerful spy satellites.
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.
Until now, only a handful of federal civilian agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have had access to the most basic spy-satellite imagery, and only for the purpose of scientific and environmental study.
More:
According to officials, one of the department’s first objectives will be to use the network to enhance border security, determine how best to secure critical infrastructure and help emergency responders after natural disasters. Sometime next year, officials will examine how the satellites can aid federal and local law-enforcement agencies, covering both criminal and civil law. The department is still working on determining how it will engage law enforcement officials and what kind of support it will give them.
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.
DHS intelligence chief Charlie Allen — a legendary CIA official renowned for his unorthodox thinking — assures the Wall Street Journal that “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.” Allen says he’s not going to turn over satellite data to local law enforcement until he’s confident that civil-liberties protections are in place. Whether
McConnell is going to turn satellite intelligence over to DHS in advance of similar legal guidelines is unknown: the paper reports that “even the architects of the current move are unclear about the legal boundaries.”
Update: Big, big mistake on my part: this post originally wrote, mistakenly, that the National Security Agency was going to be the one turning over satellite data to DHS. In fact, that’s just not clear from the piece, and other intelligence agencies, like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, operate intelligence satellites. Nor should I have linked this, as I initially did, to the FISA revisions. I regret the errors, and thank reader P for pointing them out.
