Border Patrol Drones Flew Almost 700 Surveillance Missions For Other Agencies In 3-Year Period, Says New Data

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that new data released by Customs and Border Protection shows that between 2010 and 2012, the agency began to lend its fleet of 10 drones to other law-enforcement agencies for operations carried out within the United States’ borders with increasing frequency. At the petition of civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request for flight logs from the period, CBP released records showing that its unarmed Predator B drones had been flown by other agencies in 687 domestic missions in the three-year period.

The Post writes that the drones, which are built by San Diego-based General Atomics, were mostly utilized by the Coast Guard, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other immigration authorities within the Department of Homeland Security for missions related to disaster relief, marijuana crops, meth labs and missing persons cases. But the new records – which revise earlier data released to EFF on the topic – show that criminal investigations bureaus for Minnesota and North Dakota and the Texas Department of Public Safety, among other state agencies, also made use of the Predator drones in surveillance operations.

The CBP drones, which typically fly within a 25-mile-wide strip of the Mexican and Canadian borders as well as over the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, are equipped with Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER), a sensor originally developed for use in the Afghanistan War. It can detect the presence of people from as high as 25,000 feet, in inclement weather. EFF notes that CBP has been using it since 2011. Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with EFF, expressed frustration to the Post over the CBP’s refusal to release names of sheriff departments which had also made use of drones as well as concern over the lack of laws limiting indefinite retention of video and other data collected during drone flights, saying, “We don’t know what’s happening with that data, and that creates a bigger privacy risk.”