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Legal Group Launches Domestic Drone Information Center

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Photo Credit: APOn Tuesday, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) announced the launch of its Domestic Drone Information Center to act as a hub for its effort to aggregate public data on unmanned aircraft systems.

The impending deadline of the Federal Aviation Administration’s integration of domestic unmanned aircraft systems — more popularly known as drones — into U.S. national airspace continues to hold the public imagination and raise questions about the technology’s privacy implications.

“Domestic drones have many potential positive applications – e.g., traffic mapping, monitoring agriculture, weather forecasting — but it is vital that their use be regulated,” reads the statement from NACDL.

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Drone Battles over America a Possibility in the Future, Sen. Dianne Feinstein Says

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Photo Credit: AP

As the global drone boom unfolds in the next few years, one key lawmaker warns we could eventually see science-fiction style warfare in American skies.

“I can envision drone fights in the air, drones cracking into each other,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, during a Senate subcommittee hearing on the Federal Aviation Administration’s fiscal 2014 budget.

Although Mrs. Feinstein isn’t the only one with such concerns, FAA officials have on several occasions reassured the public that it would be illegal to operate an armed drone in U.S. airspace. It is illegal for civilians to arm the helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft they own or operate, though every military in the world already does this.

But with technology racing ahead, Mrs. Feinstein fears drone pilots could disregard the law and use the crafts to deliver weapons — and that the federal government will be ill-equipped to stop them.

“It doesn’t take much to put munitions on [a drone], once you’ve got the know-how,” she said.

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Navy Deploying New Attack Laser to Persian Gulf (+video)

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Photo Credit: NY Times

The Navy is going to sea for the first time with a laser attack weapon that has been shown in tests to disable patrol boats and blind or destroy surveillance drones.

A prototype shipboard laser will be deployed on a converted amphibious transport and docking ship in the Persian Gulf, where Iranian fast-attack boats have harassed American warships and where the government in Tehran is building remotely piloted aircraft carrying surveillance pods and, someday potentially, rockets.

The laser will not be operational until next year, but the announcement on Monday by Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, seemed meant as a warning to Iran not to step up activity in the gulf in the next few months if tensions increase because of sanctions and the impasse in negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. The Navy released video and still images of the laser weapon burning through a drone during a test firing.

The laser is designed to carry out a graduated scale of missions, from burning through a fast-attack boat or a drone to producing a nonlethal burst to “dazzle” an adversary’s sensors and render them useless without causing any other physical damage. The Pentagon has a long history of grossly inflating claims for its experimental weapons, but a nonpartisan study for Congress said the weapon offered the Navy historic opportunities.

Watch video here:

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The Axis of Torpor: Against Waging War as an NGO.

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Photo Credit: National Review

I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming Finding Nemo 2 Marlin and Dory’s marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he’s not Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster — questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America — broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town — and those are just our “allies.” With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

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Video: Hannity, Paul Discuss Holder’s Claim of Legal Authority to Drone-Kill Citizens Inside US

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Eric Holder today called drone use to assassinate American citizens on US soil potentially “appropriate” and “necessary” in some cases.

Senator Rand Paul calls the administration’s claims “disturbing.” He pointed out that what we’re discussing is not just administration of justice, as in detention or other lesser measures. What we’re talking about is administering the death penalty without respect to the judicial process.

Paul went on to say that there is an enormous amount of hypocrisy with respect to these issues in the Obama administration.

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Pilot Reports Mysterious Drone Near JFK Airport

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Photo Credit: Examiner On Monday, an Alitalia pilot reported seeing a mysterious black drone flying above New York near JFK International Airport, which is one of the busiest in the world. Minutes later, another unidentified pilot reported a similar sighting of a black unmanned aircraft. The incident was first reported by ABC News.

Government officials are currently launching a multi-agency preliminary investigation which includes the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI. The Joint Terror Task Force is also looking into the matter to see whether there are any travel or homeland security threats and risks.

The Alitalia pilot said he spotted a black drone 1,500 feet above ground near JFK International. In a statement, the FAA said that the pilot saw a “small, unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft” on final approach heading towards the runway at JFK. The Alitalia plane was on final approach about 1:15 p.m. when its pilot spotted the mysterious black drone about four to five miles southeast of the airport.

In a radio communication with the tower controller, the pilot said:

“We saw a drone, an aircraft.”

See news report:

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Robert Gibbs: I Was Ordered Not To Acknowledge Existence Of Drone Program

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Photo Credit: Alex WongOn Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs said that he was not allowed to acknowledge the existence of the drone program while discussing transparency in the Obama administration.

“On this issue, particularly on national security issues, I feel like there really has been a transparency problem. I want to just show a little bit of montage of the White House responding to questions about, say, the drone program over the years,” Hayes said before playing a clip of an exchange between Gibbs and Major Garrett.

In that clip, Gibbs told Garrett that he would not “get into internal discussions” about the program.

“Do you think that you’ve been sufficiently forthcoming and the White House has been sufficiently forthcoming on this stuff?” Hayes asked.

“I certainly think there are aspects of that program that are and will remain highly sensitive and very secret, but let me give you an example here, Chris,” Gibbs said. “When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was you’re not even to acknowledge the drone program. You’re not even to discuss that it exists,” he admitted.

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Cut Commitments, Not Muscle

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Photo Credit: Senior Airman Julianne In that year of happy memory, 1972, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, declared he would chop defense by fully one-third. A friendly congressman was persuaded to ask Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to expatiate on what this might mean.

The Pentagon replied the Sixth Fleet might have to be pulled out of the Med, leaving Israel without U.S. protection against the fleet of Adm. Sergei Gorshkov, and provided the congressman a list of U.S. bases that would have to be shut down.

Radio ads were run in the towns closest to the bases on the Pentagon list, declaring they would be closed and all jobs terminated, should McGovern win.

Something akin to this is going on with the impending sequester. A cut of 7 percent, $46 billion, in Pentagon spending, says Army chief Ray Odierno, will mean a “hollowing” out of his force.

The Navy? The carrier Harry Truman will not be sailing to the Persian Gulf. The Abraham Lincoln will not be overhauled in Newport News. Thousands of jobs will be lost. Reporter Rowan Scarborough writes that the Air Force has produced “a map of the U.S. that shows state-by-state the millions of dollars lost to local economies,” should the guillotine fall.

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Revealed: Al-Qaeda’s 22 Tips for Dodging Drones

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The document includes advice such as “hide under thick trees” (believed to be bin Laden’s contribution), and instructions for setting up a “fake gathering” using dolls to “mislead the enemy”.

Found by the Associated Press in a building in Timbuktu, the ancient city occupied by Islamists last year, the document is believed to have been abandoned as extremists fled a French military intervention last month. It is a Xeroxed copy of a tipsheet authored by a Yemeni extremist that has been published on some jihadi forums, but that has made little appearance in English.

The list reflects how al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghbreb anticipated a military intervention that would make use of drones, as the war on terror shifts from the ground to the air.

The document also shows the coordination between al-Qaeda chapters, which security experts have called a source of increasing concern.

“This new document… shows we are no longer dealing with an isolated local problem, but with an enemy which is reaching across continents to share advice,” said Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, now the director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institute.

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‘Orwellian’: Proposed Gun Law in Washington State Calls on Police to Inspect the Homes of ‘Assault Weapon’ Owners

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With each proposed anti-gun bill put forth by Democrats across the U.S., the demands appear to be getting more and more restrictive on gun owners. While the Obama administration pushes for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and universal background checks, Democrats in both California and Missouri have proposed legislation that would result in possible confiscation of semi-automatic rifles.

Now, Democratic lawmakers in Olympia, Wash. last week introduced legislation that would allow county sheriffs to inspect the homes of semi-automatic rifle owners once a year. Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat describes the move as “Orwellian.”

The proposed bill, Senate Bill 5737, would ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons that use detachable magazines and magazines that contain more than 10 rounds. It would also subject law-abiding gun owners to random searches by a county sheriff.

“In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection,” the bill states.

“They always say, we’ll never go house to house to take your guns away. But then you see this, and you have to wonder,” Seattle trial lawyer Lance Palmer told the Seattle Times.

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