Why Wont The FBI Tell the Public About its Drone Program?Jennifer Lynch Just yesterday, Wired broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil. Mueller tried to reassure the senators that FBIs drone program is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized leads. However, theres no way to check the Director on these statements, given the Bureaus extreme lack of transparency about its program. EFF received these records as a result of our Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the licenses the FAA issues to all public entities wishing to fly drones in the national airspace. As detailed in prior posts and on our drone map, we have already received tens of thousands of pages of valuable information about local, state and federal agencies drone flights. However, unlike other federal agencies, including the US Air Force, the Bureau has withheld almost all information within its documentseven including the dates the FAAs Certificates of Authorization (COAs) were issued. As you can see from the two examples linked belowthe first from the Air Force and the second from the FBIthe FBI is withholding information, including something as basic as the city and state of the Bureaus point of contact, that could in no way be expected to risk circumvention of the law (the applicable test under FOIA, 5 U.S.C. 552 (b)(7)(E)). The FBI has even withheld information from standard documents that all agencies file with the FAA to support their COA applications, many of which come directly from the drone manufacturer. (Compare, for example, the Air Forces LOST_LINK_MISSION or AIRCRAFT_SYSTEM documents with the FBIs versions of the same documents.) One interesting fact is that the Bureau has withheld most of the records under several statutes and regulations related to the arms exports and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (see statutes and regulations here, here, and here.) This is surprising because, although ITAR does apply explicitly to drones, not even the US Military has claimed these statutes in withholding information from its drone records. Given the FBIs past abuses and the information recently revealed about how the Bureau exploits specious interpretations of federal law to help out the NSAs spying program, we have good reason to be concerned about the FBIs lack of transparency here. We hope Senator Feinstein will follow up on her concerns about the FBIs apparent lack of strictures in place to protect Americans privacy in connection to FBI drone use and demand a full accounting of how, when, where and why the Bureau has been using drones to monitor the public. Download the zip files of the documents here, here, and here. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 