US Gov Launches Mass Surveillance Balloons in Fear of Rebellion

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon Aug 5 13:25:52 PDT 2019


https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1157397713312501761

"They always tell us the tools of mass surveillance are intended for
use only against the faraway Other; the foreign enemy, the terrorist,
the criminal. And then, just a few years later, we realize precisely
the same system secretly surrounds us at home."


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest
https://www.sncorp.com/press-releases/snc-gorgon-stare/
https://www.darpa.mil/program/adaptable-lighter-than-air
https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=233815&x=.

"
Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US

Exclusive: the high-altitude balloons promise a cheap monitoring
platform that could follow multiple cars and boats for extended
periods

The new balloons could follow multiple cars and boats for extended periods.

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six
midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents
filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.

Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural
South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions
of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in
central Illinois.

Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the
balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to
locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”,
according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,
an aerospace and defence company.

The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously
track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of
weather. The tests, which have not previously been reported, received
an FCC license to operate from mid-July until September, following
similar flights licensed last year.
Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
Read more

Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of
the Drone at Bard College in New York, said, “What this new technology
proposes is to watch everything at once. Sometimes it’s referred to as
‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the
surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly
what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and
where they came from.”

The tests have been commissioned by the US Southern Command
(Southcom), which is responsible for disaster response, intelligence
operations and security cooperation in the Caribbean and Central and
South America. Southcom is a joint effort by the US army, navy, air
force and other forces, and one of its key roles is identifying and
intercepting drug shipments headed for the United States.

An aerial photograph of a residential development in Des Moines, Iowa.
The US military is launching unmanned surveillance balloons over
portions of the midwest.

“We do not think that American cities should be subject to wide-area
surveillance in which every vehicle could be tracked wherever they
go,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil
Liberties Union.

“Even in tests, they’re still collecting a lot of data on Americans:
who’s driving to the union house, the church, the mosque, the
Alzheimer’s clinic,” he said. “We should not go down the road of
allowing this to be used in the United States and it’s disturbing to
hear that these tests are being carried out, by the military no less.”

For many years, Sierra Nevada has supplied Southcom with light
aircraft packed with millions of dollars’ worth of sensors, which then
flew over Mexico, Colombia, Panama and the Caribbean sea. But planes
require expensive crews and can only fly for a few hours at a time. In
a report to the Senate armed services committee this February,
Southcom’s commander, Admiral Craig Faller, wrote: “While improving
efficiency, we still only successfully interdicted about six percent
of known drug movements [in 2018].”

The new balloons promise a cheap surveillance platform that could
follow multiple cars and boats for extended periods. And because winds
often travel in different directions at different altitudes, the
balloons can usually hover over a given area simply by ascending or
descending.

Neither Sierra Nevada nor US Southcom responded to requests for
comment on this story. However, the rival balloon operator World View
recently announced that it had carried out multi-week test missions in
which its own stratospheric balloons were able to hover over a
five-mile-diameter area for six and a half hours, and larger areas for
days at a time.

“The very nature of [these balloons] is that they can operate for
weeks and months,” said Ryan Hartman, the CEO of World View. “The
challenge is how to harness the stratospheric winds to be able to
create a persistent station-keeping capability for customers.”

Raven Aerostar, the company that is supplying the balloons for
Southcom’s tests and launching them from its facility in South Dakota,
told the Guardian that it has had balloons remain aloft for nearly a
month. Raven also makes balloons for the Alphabet subsidiary Loon,
which uses them to help deliver internet and cellphone service from
the stratosphere.

The FCC documents show that Southcom’s balloons are carrying small,
satellite-like vehicles housing sophisticated sensors and
communication gear. One of those sensors is a synthetic aperture radar
intended to detect every car or boat in motion on a 25-mile swath
beneath the balloon.

The balloons also have advanced mesh networking technologies that
allow them to communicate with one another, share data and pass it to
receivers on the ground below.

The Ravenstar facility launchpad in South Dakota.

The FCC filing notes that this networking includes video information.
That suggests that the balloons might also carry a Sierra Nevada video
capture system called Gorgon Stare. This wide-area surveillance system
comprises nine cameras capable of recording panoramic images across an
entire city simultaneously.

While Gorgon Stare is usually deployed on drones, Michel said that the
US army has used tethered spy blimps in Afghanistan, and that US
Customs and Border Protection has experimented with low-altitude
balloons along the Mexico border.

But surveillance from stratospheric balloons is relatively new, said
Michel, author of Eyes in the Sky, a recent book on wide area
surveillance: “The higher the altitude of the system, the wider the
area that you can cover. The trade-off is that depending on the area
and the system, you may get lower-resolution images.” Balloons are
also subject to fewer restrictions and regulations than drones.

It is unclear from the FCC documents whether Southcom’s tests within
the US are linked to any active narcotic or counter-terrorism
investigations. Also, none of the parties involved would say whether
the midwest vehicle data would be deleted, stored or passed on to
other federal or local agencies.

“[We would like to know] what they are they doing with that data, how
they are storing it, and whether they are contemplating deploying this
in the US,” said the ACLU’s Stanley. “Because if they decide that it’s
usable domestically, there’s going to be enormous pressure to deploy
it.”

The Southcom surveillance tests are probably just the tip of the
iceberg. Scott Wickersham, the vice-president of Raven Aerostar, told
the Guardian that it has also been working with Sierra Nevada and the
Pentagon’s research arm Darpa on a “highly sophisticated and
challenging development around the stratosphere”. This refers to the
agency’s Adaptable Lighter-Than-Air (Alta) program, an ongoing effort
to perfect stratospheric balloon navigation which has included
multiple launches across the country, Wickersham said.

Ryan Hartman said that World View had also completed a dozen
surveillance test missions for a customer it would not name, capturing
data he would not specify.

“Obviously, there are laws to protect people’s privacy and we are
respectful of all those laws,” Hartman said. “We also understand the
importance of operating in an ethical way as it relates to further
protecting people’s privacy.”

Meanwhile, World View is currently preparing for its next surveillance
flight, and Sierra Nevada’s tests in the midwest continue.
"


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