U.S. Border Agency Allows Others to Use Its Drones

The documents, which include flight logs over the last three years, were unearthed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

Agencies that have used the 10 Predator drones owned by the Customs and Border Protection Agency have deployed them to investigate fishing violations, search for missing persons and inspect levees along the Mississippi River, among other things.

Three years ago, the drones were used by other agencies 30 times; in 2012, that jumped to 250 times. How the agency stores and shares that data with other government agencies remains unclear.

Additionally, the agency, in a 2010 report to Congress included in the documents, raised the possibility of eventually equipping its drones with “nonlethal weapons” to “immobilize” people and vehicles trying to cross the border illegally. In a statement on Wednesday, the agency said it had “no plans to arm its unmanned aircraft systems with nonlethal weapons or weapons of any kind.”

It said the drones supported the agency’s border security mission and provided “an important surveillance and reconnaissance capability for interdiction agents on the ground and on the waterways.”

The drones, the agency said, “were designed with the ability to add new surveillance capabilities, accommodate technological developments, and ensure that our systems are equipped with the most advanced resources available.”

The specter of drones in American skies has been contentious, far more so than other common surveillance tools. Proponents of drones, including the military contractors who build many of them, say they can be useful for a variety of purposes, like monitoring crops and finding missing children, and a handful of police agencies have already bought small, lightweight unmanned vehicles that can fly for short bursts of time.

Skeptics say the use of drones raises the prospect of ubiquitous monitoring, especially by law enforcement, and several states have already proposed measures to restrict their use by police.

“What concerns me is the lack of clear, transparent rules for domestic drone use,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from Northern California, who recently introduced legislation to limit their use in domestic airspace. She said she was concerned about “the government’s increased interest in using drones for domestic surveillance and security, including the potential use of force. But the law today has weak requirements for individual privacy protection, transparency of drone use, and limitations on arming drones with weapons.”

Ms. Lofgren was co-sponsor of a bill in the House earlier this year that would among other things prohibit the use of firearms on drones in domestic airspace, though, not necessarily other weapons like tear gas or pellets.

The agency has used Predator drones, the same vehicles used overseas by the United States military, since 2005. Built by General Atomics, the drones weigh about 10,500 pounds and can fly for 20 hours nonstop. They are based in Arizona, Florida, North Dakota and Texas.

“C.B.P. needs to assure the public that it will not equip its Predators with any weapons — lethal or otherwise,” Jennifer Lynch wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, in a blog post on Wednesday about the documents. “Without first addressing these issues, the agency — and Congress — should halt the expansion of C.B.P.’s Predator drone program.”

The flight logs provided by the agency show that it has become increasingly generous with its unmanned aerial vehicles. They have been used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the North Dakota Army National Guard, Texas Department of Public Safety and the United States Forest Service, among others.

The use of drones by the F.B.I. came to light only two weeks ago, when its director, Robert S. Mueller III, in response to a question, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that unmanned aerial vehicles were “very seldom used” by his agents. He went on to say the agency was developing guidelines on their appropriate use. An earlier information request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested that the F.B.I. had at least three drones in its possession as of 2011, when that request was filed.

The border agency said that when conducting joint operations with state, local and other federal agencies, its own privacy policies governed the use of data collected by the drones and “the live feed from any aircraft is encrypted and only accessible to those with specific clearance.”

An audit by the Department of Homeland Security last year criticized the border agency for failing to put in place enough resources to maintain its drones and coordinate their deployment. At the time, the agency recommended holding off on any further acquisitions.

Nonetheless, the border agency now stands to increase its fleet. The Senate immigration bill, passed last week, authorizes the agency to buy four additional drones, along with new radar equipment.

Other documents obtained earlier this year by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington, had found that cameras attached to the Predators could distinguish between a human figure and a beast, but did not use facial recognition technology.

Privacy advocates worry about the prospect of law enforcement officials using drones to patrol particular areas for long stretches of time or to follow particular individuals without a warrant.

“The danger comes from dragnet surveillance,” is how Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, described it. He called himself mostly a champion of drone technology, but with safeguards to protect privacy.

“By dragnet I mean indiscriminate,” he said, “not in a particular situation, but just to buzz around looking for suspicious activity, which is exactly what they do on border.”

Domestic Drones on Patrol

To the pilot’s right, a sensor operator was aiming a camera on the plane to pan, tilt and zoom in a search among the houses on the ground for people who had been reported missing.

On his screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire between the houses.

“There they are,” Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student, said in a flat tone that seemed out of place with a successful rescue mission.

In fact, no one was missing; the entire exercise used imaginary props and locales. Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviation, the university is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.

“The sky’s going to be dark with these things,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter — about 7,500 — as the United States military flies in total.

The burst of activity in remotely operated planes stems from the confluence of two factors: electronics and communications gear has become dirt cheap, enabling the conversion of hobbyist radio-controlled planes into sophisticated platforms for surveillance, and the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.

The rapidly expanding market has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers and privacy watchdogs. On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the privacy implications of drones like the ones being developed at Grand Forks.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said this year: “This fast-emerging technology is cheap and could pose a significant threat to the privacy and civil liberties of millions of Americans. It is another example of a fast-changing policy area on which we need to focus to make sure that modern technology is not used to erode Americans’ right to privacy.”

Some fans of the technology wince at the word “drone,” which implies that there is no pilot. And they have grown resentful about the alarms raised over privacy issues, noting that a few city and state governments have begun banning drones even where they do not yet operate.

Tom K. Kenville, chairman of the North Dakota chapter of the trade association, Unmanned Applications Institute, International, said such bans would discourage technological progress. “I don’t think we had rules for the road before we had roads,” he said.

Back in the university lab, Rico Becker, a software developer with Corsair Engineering, which had written a program for the students, emphasized that the “missing persons” exercise was just one of many hypothetical missions that students would fly, and was purely theoretical. “We’re not training pilots to spot people camping in their backyards,” he said.

Aside from the missing persons mission, experts here outline a number of uses for the planes: “precision agriculture,” with tiny planes inspecting crops several times a week for the first sign of blight or insect invasion; safety missions by semiautonomous flying machines that could cruise the two-mile length of a freight train and examine the air brakes on each car, far faster than a person could, and be available for accident assessment in case of derailment; inspection operations of pipelines or power lines, a job that is notoriously dangerous for helicopters, and scouting out fires or car crashes.

Volunteer fire departments in places like Grand Forks, Mr. Kenville said, would provide a clear market. An unmanned vehicle, he said, was “going to beat all the cars there,” to determine the scope of a problem.

“If it’s a chemical fire, it will tell us to stay away, or it’s just some hay bales, drive slower,” he said.

Remote control equipment might even displace some human pilots, in the cockpits of cargo planes.

Drones and iPad Apps May Help in Power Failures

Facing more frequent storms that cripple electric distribution systems over big areas, utility companies are drafting iPads and military-style aerial surveillance robots to get the lights back on faster.

Much of their problem in restoring service quickly usually has to do with information and logistics. In the latest wave of power failures, on Thursday night and Friday morning, a line of extreme storms knocked out electricity to thousands in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. In some places, damage was so extensive, and so many roads were blocked, that utilities had not even finished assessing the problem by midday Friday.

After the powerful storm known as a derecho struck on June 29, East Coast utilities were forced to bring in help from as far away as Ontario and Oklahoma, and had to determine quickly where to put the borrowed crews to work, even before the roads were passable. Then they had to deliver poles, transformers, wires, crossbars and other parts to the precise locations where they were needed.

A prototype app for the iPad, developed by the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility research consortium, is aimed at solving part of that problem. Here is how it works: The electric company preloads the iPad with data about the equipment in the field. With GPS, the device knows its location. A field worker can then point the device at a utility pole and quickly see an “augmented reality” view, showing precisely what kind of pole, crossbar, transformer and wire are present, and how the system is wired.

The technician selects the image of the parts that need replacing, and “click, click, it goes back to the loading dock,” where workers begin loading trucks with what is needed for that spot, said Clark Gellings, a senior researcher at the institute.

It even has a “Star Wars” name: Field Force Data Visualization. The Field Force, though, refers to the workers, not to the subliminal energy field sensed by the Jedi.

The industry is also testing remote-controlled drones to help it quickly count downed poles, wires and transformers on streets that are still impassable because of fallen trees.

The technology has helped the military find the enemy around a corner or over the next hill. Applying it to a broken distribution system is “a no-brainer,” said Matthew Olearczyk, a senior program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

His organization has been testing a drone at a test range operated by New Mexico State University, near Las Cruces. But it has been flying at 8,000 feet, probably much higher than needed; the solution is probably a much smaller drone that would fly at very low altitudes, Mr. Olearczyk said.

It is looking at the Hornet Maxi, a 25-pound helicopter that looks like a miniature of the real thing, sans pilot, or the Aeryon Scout, which has four rotor blades, one in each corner, and appears to have flown straight out of a science fiction movie. Other models look like toy airplanes and can be launched by a worker with a throw like a quarterback’s. Some drones have a wingspan of a mere 18 inches.

Simple optical cameras would probably do the trick, Mr. Olearczyk said, although other sensors might be added.

Southern Company will try the drones first, in Alabama, he said.

But one problem is getting approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been slow to approve the use of drones over populated areas; for one thing, they cannot see other aircraft and thus are more collision-prone.

Mr. Olearczyk suggests that a governor could declare a state of emergency, giving the utility the ability to conduct a flight of two or three hours to gather information that would also be useful to road crews.

John Schwartz contributed reporting.