Drone Loans: Customs and Border Protection Records 500 Predator Flights for Other AgenciesJennifer Lynch EFF obtained the list of federal, state and local agencies as a result of our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the agency. Not only does the list show the total number of flights by year between 2010 and 2012, but it shows CBP flew its drones over 100 times just for Department of Justice components including FBI, DEA and US Marshals. This is in direct contradiction to a recently released DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) Report (pdf) that stated DHS had flown its drones on only two occasions for DOJ law enforcement components. We discussed some of the other agencies that benefited from CBPs Predators in a previous post, but some agencies on the list are new. These include the Grand Forks SWAT, the North Dakota Narcotics Task Force, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Minnesota Drug Task Force, and several branches of the military. Even after all the attention drone surveillance has garnered in the US, CBP has yet to establish rules for its drone flights that would protect Americans privacy rights. In the report on the DOJs drone use, the Inspector General severely chastised DOJ for similarly failing to implement privacy-protecting rulesand for willfully failing to recognize that drone surveillance raises privacy issues different from surveillance with manned aircraft. The OIG recognized what EFF has been saying all alongthat the advanced technological capabilities of drones, their low operational costs as compared to manned aircraft, and their ability to conduct pervasive tracking of an individuals movements whether on public or private property raise unique concerns about privacy and the collection of evidence. We welcome the Inspector Generals investigation of DOJ drone use and hope the same will happen within the Department of Homeland Securityand within CBP in particular. We also encourage the agencies to follow the OIGs recommendation to convene a working group to address the privacy risks and establish explicit agency-wide rules to protect individual privacy interests. 