Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007

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The nation's network of spy satellites will soon be put to novel domestic use – ramping-up border security, getting a bird's eye viewpoint of vital infrastructure, and aiding emergency responders after natural disasters, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Once limited for domestic use by such agencies as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law-enforcement officers will soon be eyeing spy satellite data and images – perhaps to identify drug and human traffic smuggler staging areas, or to monitor a building being used to manufacture WMDs.

According to the Journal, the new use for the satellites was authorized in a May memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, asking his department to ease access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

The domestic use of the spy birds will be added to the present inventory of traditional uses for the key intelligence tools -- checking-out suspected terrorist hideouts overseas, identifying smuggling routes for weapons in Iraq, monitoring nuclear tests and the movement of nuclear materials, and churning out maps for the use of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"It is an idea whose time has arrived," Charles Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer, who will be in charge of the new program, told the Journal.

DHS officials say the program has been given a budget by Congress and has the approval of the oversight committees in both chambers, according to the report.

A new Homeland Security branch, the National Applications Office, will be overseeing the satellites' usage, which, says the Journal, will kick-off in October.

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Meanwhile, some military experts have been mulling whether domestic use of such satellites would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from engaging in law-enforcement activity inside the U.S.

Very relevant to their argument is the fact that the satellites were for the most part built for and owned by the Defense Department.

There is little precedent by which to judge the legality of the high-tech domestic surveillance.

A 2005 study sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community noted: "There is little if any policy, guidance or procedures regarding the collection, exploitation and dissemination of domestic MASINT."

(MASINT is the acronym for Measurement and Signatures Intelligence that uses radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies, or even concrete.)

Allen described to the Journal that the spy satellites have the capacity to take a "multidimensional" look at ports and critical infrastructure from space to identify vulnerabilities.

"There are certain technical abilities that will assist on land borders...to try to identify areas where ‘narco-traficantes' or alien smugglers may be moving dangerous people or materials," he said.

Predictably, critics of the project have emerged.

Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology for the Center for Democracy and Technology, opined, "You are talking about enormous power. Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."

But Allen argues that all is being carefully vetted through a legal process. "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."

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