BlimpsSurveillance blimps raise privacy concerns

Some 10,000 feet in the air above the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the Pentagon has been testing its Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), meant to identify low-flying cruise missiles within a few hundred miles. The system, composed of two aerostats, or tethered airships, filled with helium and each almost the length of a football field, are equipped with powerful radars that allow monitors to see threats within a radius of roughly 300 miles. “It provides a downward-looking view and integrates into a much larger air defense system,” said Col. Frank Rice, commander of air defense operations for the U.S. capital region. Japan Times reports that the aerostats work in pairs, so as one looks for potential threats, the other is tasked with directing air defense missiles to intercept a cruise missile in mid-flight. The second aerostat is expected to be tested soon this year.

Supporters of the program say that as cruise missiles become more widely available to U.S. enemies, the aerostats will become a preferred defense option, providing long-range radar much more consistently and cheaply than systems mounted on planes. Each aerostat can remain in the air up to thirty-days at a time, coming down only for maintenance.

“There is nothing else we have that will do that,” said Chet Nagle, a former Navy aviator and member of the Committee on the Present Danger. “Most of our in-place defensive systems are designed for ICBMs,” he said, referring to the much higher-flying intercontinental ballistic missiles. Defense contractor for the program, Raytheon, has referred to the JLENS program as a bargain considering “A fixed-wing surveillance aircraft is 500-700 percent more expensive to operate than a JLENS during that same time period because of manpower, maintenance and fuel costs.”

With almost three years of testing just fifty miles northeast of Washington, D.C., civil liberties groups have questioned whether privacy rights are being violated. “There is a particular visceral reaction to looking up in the sky and seeing someone or something staring back at you,” said Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. Reviewing thousands of pages obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, EPIC found no wording guaranteeing that JLENS would not be used for ground surveillance once fully operational. EPIC did find contracts that mentioned “the technology was specifically designed to integrate very high definition video” that could track and identify people and vehicles in a three-mile radius.

At a briefing on JLENS last December, Capt. Matt Villa, a planning officer with the Army, stressed that the aerostats do not carry cameras or video equipment. Initial plans to put cameras on the aerostats have been abandoned. “Its radars cannot detect people, it does not store information … it has no weapons on board,” he said.

Still, attorney Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Washington, D.C. wants the government to adopt “ironclad checks and balances so that we can be assured that this powerful technology is not being used for domestic surveillance.” David Rocah, an attorney with the ACLU of Maryland described the JLENS program as the latest example of battlefield technology being implemented at home. “They enable a kind of persistent surveillance which is not technologically feasible by other means,” he said. “It is that persistence that creates the invasion.”

The JLENS program may face another threat from lawmakers who must continue to approve funding to ensure further developments. In 2014 the Government Accountability Office estimated the JLENS program has cost $2.8 billion to date. For fiscal 2015, Congress tried cutting the program’s $54 million proposed budget by nearly 50 percent, but the White House restored most of the funding, just $12 million short of the Pentagon’s request.