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GCN Home > 09/17/07 issue

Spy satellite deal gets Hill riled up

DHS wants to share data with local agencies

By John Rendleman

Key members of Congress urged the Homeland Security Department to indefinitely postpone the launch of a controversial project to provide military spy satellite pictures and data to domestic homeland security and law enforcement agencies, citing the civil-liberties risks the project entails.

DHS’ newly created National Applications Office (NAO) planned to start the program in October. The department framed a procedure for shunting geospatial data from Defense Deparatment satellites to homeland security agencies to monitor counterterrorism and civil-safety matters, officials said.

Privacy oversight
The department planned to broaden the program to provide military satellite data to law enforcement agencies after completing a study of the police forces’ requirements. The study is designed to assess the privacy and civil-liberties implications of using military technology to monitor domestic activities.

Testifying in support of the program, Charles Allen, who leads NAO and is chief intelligence officer at DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, said that it gives homeland security and law enforcement agencies an official channel for acquiring military satellite data and offers better safeguards than the informal processes it replaces.

“The NAO, when operational, will facilitate the use of remote sensing capabilities to support a wide variety of customers, many of whom previously have relied on ad hoc processes to access these intelligence capabilities,” Allen said.

The privacy and civil-liberties offices of both DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will have oversight of NAO, which will also have its own legal adviser on privacy and civil-liberties issues, Allen said.

In addition, the program will be subject to safeguards administered by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the agency that will supply classified satellites images. Requests from NAO for classified satellite imaging data will have to comply with established NGA rules and procedures, and NGA’s own staff of policy and legal experts will review NAO requests before they are processed, Allen said.

Congressional leaders released a Sept. 6 letter to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and NAO calling for the department to delay the program until it provides evidence that the project complies with civil-liberties safeguards established in the Constitution and statutory law.

In the letter, House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and other panel members criticized the department for surreptitiously starting the project in May 2005 and keeping its program plans secret until now. DHS officials also ignored crucial civil-liberties issues the plan raised and failed to include necessary constitutional safeguards, the legislators said.

“There is effectively no legal framework governing the domestic use of satellite imagery for the various purposes envisioned by the department,” largely because of the department’s secretiveness and its failure to seek input from its own internal civil-liberties experts, the lawmakers wrote.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Geospatial, Homeland Security



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