[Infowarrior] - Congress to eye feds' spy satellite scheme

[Richard Forno]

Congress to eye feds' spy satellite scheme
Posted by Anne Broache
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9768357-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&t
ag=2547-1_3-0-20

When politicians return to Washington from their August recess next week,
one of their first orders of business will be lobbing questions at Bush
administration officials over recently disclosed plans to open up powerful
spy satellites to the likes of American border-security agents and police.

On September 6, the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security
Committee plans to hold a morning hearing entitled "Turning Spy Satellites
on the Homeland: the Privacy and Civil Liberties Implications of the
National Applications Office," according to a press release issued by the
panel. Scheduled to appear for questioning are the Department of Homeland
Security's Chief Intelligence Officer Charles Allen, Chief Privacy Officer
Hugo Teufel, and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer Dan Sutherland.

The event is apparently a direct response to a Wall Street Journal report
about two weeks ago, which revealed that the sprawling federal agency had
signed off on expanded use of the so-called "eyes in the sky." By October,
Homeland Security is poised to establish a new subset called the National
Applications Office, which would oversee expanding access to the
surveillance images.

Data about domestic incidents is already fused and sorted 24/7 at Homeland
Security 'nerve centers' like this one.
(Credit: U.S. Department of Homeland Security)

The military has been using the Cold War-era surveillance gadgets overseas
for years in an effort to spot terrorist hideouts, to track contraband
movement and to plot routes for U.S. soldiers, the WSJ reported. Domestic
agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey have also had access to the
high-resolution images for mapping and environmental studies.

But the use of the monitoring technique for domestic law enforcement
purposes appears to be on murkier legal grounds. That's why the plan has
attracted concern from some congressional Democrats, including Rep. Edward
Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of a congressional telecommunications and
Internet panel, and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the Homeland Security
Committee's chairman (click here for a PDF of Thompson's August 22 letter).

Homeland Security officials, for their part, say they have already briefed
the various congressional intelligence committees about their plans and have
even secured a budget for their activities, according to the WSJ. That may
make it more difficult for politicians the House Homeland Security panel to
get answers in an open forum next week, as the Bush Administration officials
may claim they're not at liberty to discuss classified details.

It's likely no coincidence that the hearing is set to occur during
Congress's first week back in session after a month-long recess.
Congressional Democrats are clearly seeking to rebuild some credibility
among privacy and civil liberties advocates after caving at the last minute
to the president's demands to enact what critics argue are unacceptably
sweeping changes--albeit temporary ones--to federal electronic snooping law.
(Since then, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid have implicitly threatened to let that law die unless the
administration cooperates with Congress's demands for more details on its
surveillance programs.)