Drones are especially useful to law enforcement and immigration authorities because they’re versatile, undetectable, and relatively inexpensive, and they can link together data from multiple sources. “Companies that are developing these surveillance technologies, they are quite creative in terms of mixing and matching the technologies,” Yun says, noting, for example, that some drones are equipped with license-plate readers (LPRs), which use cameras to track vehicles on city streets. An LPR-equipped drone could theoretically identify and track a single car for miles.
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Mixing and matching technology in this way provides law enforcement with certain loopholes. Police need a warrant before placing a GPS tracking device on your car, for example, but not for querying an LPR database for a list of all your locations. Technology develops faster than privacy laws can keep up, especially in border communities, where law enforcement already enjoys enhanced privileges. Within 25 miles of the border, CBP agents theoretically operate under qualified immunity, empowering them to patrol private lands. Within 100 miles of the border, CBP agents can set up checkpoints and question, search, and potentially detain travelers if they believe they have probable cause.
“You can view this extension of the border as a [way] for federal authorities to maintain jurisdiction over large swaths of land,” says Mana Azarmi, a policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, “[and] permit them to do more and more invasive things.”
While CBP’s drone surveillance is restricted to the 100-mile border zone, the agency records footage and collects data—largely unnoticed and unchallenged—far beyond that. The EFF report found that many local and state police departments use drones as part of a suite of advanced tech, meaning that for citizens living in border communities, aerial surveillance is ongoing at the federal, state, and local levels simultaneously. Azarmi worries that this allows local police to overstep the boundaries of justifiable surveillance, “turning border enforcement into more of a dragnet surveillance system.”
Included in the EFF’s data set is a series of CBP missions conducted using the Predator B drone, which is equipped with long-range cameras and sensors to detect illegal border crossings and coordinate with CBP agents on the ground. The report also includes a link to a data set that catalogs hundreds of drone flights over Texas hospitals, community centers, churches, and so on, from 2015 to 2017; the state’s Department of Public Safety was looking for marijuana fields and tunnels. Though U.S. agencies don’t have the authority to surveil Mexico, the Texas report notes that drone flight paths dipped into Mexico regularly.