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.”

Bits Blog: Apple Urges Trade Agency to Stop Product Ban

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Advertising: In San Francisco, a Thriving Advertising Agency Start-Up Scene

The San Francisco ad market is well-known, even notorious, for its continual ups and downs, rising and falling with both the economy and the state of the technology industry. The highs and lows have been particularly pronounced since the mid-1990s, as agencies benefited mightily from the dot-com boom, then tried to survive the debacle of the subsequent bust. If they made it through, they were left to figure out their place in a landscape increasingly dominated by digital powerhouses like Facebook and Google.

“It’s been the most interesting ad market in the country in the last 15 years, going through a lot of metamorphoses,” said Amy Hoover, president at Talent Zoo in Atlanta, which specializes in recruiting employees for agencies in advertising, public relations and social media.

After the dot-com bust, “we were overwhelmed with calls from people saying, ‘I came in on Monday and the office was closed,’ ” Ms. Hoover said. “As the tech sector rebuilt itself, you started to see shops popping up and, as digital exploded again, it’s been this Wild West recently.”

Almost all the start-ups have involved executives who were already working in the market. One, to be announced on Tuesday, also includes an agency holding company, Project WorldWide, based in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills, Mich., which is making a bet on the market’s viability by bankrolling the start-up of a San Francisco agency named Argonaut.

(The Argonaut name seems to be part of a pattern of offbeat nomenclature in the San Francisco market that also includes agencies like Cutwater, Dojo, Eleven, Mekanism, Odopod, Sequence, Signal to Noise and AKQA, for “all known questions answered.”)

“The Bay Area is quite vibrant these days,” said Robert G. Vallee Jr., chairman and chief executive at Project WorldWide. “There’s a lot of opportunity out there.”

Agencies in San Francisco are benefiting from a trend in which marketers that once used only agencies with which they had defined relationships on accounts — agencies of record, in industry parlance — are handing out creative assignments to other shops, Mr. Vallee said.

Ms. Hoover identified another trend: The San Francisco ad market is being influenced by the entrepreneurial spirit of nearby Silicon Valley as agency employees are inspired to go into business for themselves with “a lot of breakoffs, guys starting their own thing.”

That describes some of the six founders of Argonaut, among them the co-chief creative officers, Rick Condos and Hunter Hindman, who worked as a creative team at perhaps the most prominent agency in San Francisco, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group; Max Heilbron, the head of strategy, who had been group brand strategy director at Goodby, Silverstein; and Robbie Whiting, the head of creative technology and production, who had been head of creative technology at another well-regarded local agency, Duncan/Channon.

“We’re taking a lot of inspiration from the San Francisco kind of start-up mentality,” Mr. Hindman said. “We want to be agile, act quick and be artful.”

Jordan Warren, the president of Argonaut, said he believed the San Francisco ad market has been “coming back, and coming back in the right way.”

“It’s not about chasing fads and buying the hype” this time around, said Mr. Warren, who has spent 20 years in leadership posts at local agencies like Eleven and Signal to Noise. “It’s about people getting their hands dirty and building sustainable things, delivering value.”

The sixth principal of Argonaut, Conal O’ Doherty, whose title is head of growth, has worked at agencies in San Francisco as well as markets like Barcelona, Spain.

The ad business in San Francisco “has a long history of iconoclastic personalities,” said Courtney Buechert, chief executive at Eleven, which opened in 1999. That has helped “make the market independent and inherently entrepreneurial,” he said.

He cited figures like Howard Gossage, who was an early proponent of Marshall McLuhan and green marketing, and Hal Riney, whose agency, Hal Riney & Partners, is now Publicis & Hal Riney, part of the Publicis Groupe.

“The dot-com boom was crazy; I don’t think anyone had seen anything like it since the Gold Rush,” Mr. Buechert said. “But since then, there have been different kinds of agencies growing, thriving here, agencies that have enjoyed the true benefit of the new technology, accountability, which has made them more metrics-centric, concerned about results, and media-agnostic, interested in new things like social media and not just advertising.”

There is even a new agency in the market that is wearing its heart on its sleeve by including the letters “SF” in its name.

“I’m not sure many people start agencies with the initials of the city,” said Jamie Barrett, a partner at BarrettSF. In May, he left Goodby, Silverstein, where he had been partner and executive creative director, to start the agency with Patrick Kelly, another former executive at Goodby, Silverstein.

“We are proud of the market and excited about the market,” said Mr. Barrett, whose fledgling shop has two clients, the California Redwood Association and the Pacific-12 Networks. He and Mr. Kelly are bringing in a third partner, Pete Harvey, who also joins from Goodby, Silverstein.

“There’s almost no better place to be” than the San Francisco market, because of the proximity to Silicon Valley, said Mr. Harvey, who has also worked in cities like Boston and Los Angeles.

“You get people knocking on the door with wild ideas,” he added, “which inspires you to make your own business a little more innovative and interesting.”

Bits Blog: Government Agency Will Give RIM Another Chance

Robert Galbraith/Reuters Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of Research In Motion, discussing the BlackBerry 10 in September.

Perhaps there’s hope for the BlackBerrys after all. A United States government agency that had announced plans to dump the BlackBerry for the iPhone says it’s willing to give Research in Motion’s coming BlackBerry 10 smartphones a shot.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, says it will start a pilot program early next year to test the new BlackBerry phones.

In October, the agency said it was planning to buy iPhones for its 17,600 employees and stop issuing BlackBerry devices because they could “no longer meet the needs of the agency.” But it told Reuters that it was developing mobile apps for law enforcement and looking into whether the BlackBerry 10 could come in handy in the future.

RIM introduced the new BlackBerry 10 software in May. The company has delayed the release of new BlackBerry phones with the software several times, but it appears that they will finally arrive early next year.

Scott Totzke, RIM’s senior vice president of BlackBerry security, said in a statement that the company designed the BlackBerry 10 to provide businesses with secure services and to bolster productivity.

“ICE has been a valued BlackBerry customer for years, and our commitment to government agencies has influenced the development of the BlackBerry 10 platform,” he said. He said the company would share more details about the BlackBerry 10 in an event announcing the phones on Jan. 30.

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Japanese Agency Investigating Overheating PS Vitas

It appears that some gamers are having overheating issues with their PlayStation Vita handhelds, and now an independent agency sanctioned by the Japanese government is looking into the matter. Andriasang reports that Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has an article discussing the inquiry, which is being conducted by Japan’s National Institute of Technology and Evaluation.

The overheating problem, which has only been reported a total of 31 times to Sony, appears to happen when gamers recharge their Vitas. Twenty-three of the 31 reported issues occurred in Japan; the remaining instances happened in Sony’s other three major markets: Australia, North America and the UK.

Sony is fully cooperating with the National Insistute of Technology and Evaluation; Andriasang notes that “Sony sent a detailed listing of the various incidents” to them. “In all cases,” the article goes on, “the problem involved the connection slot between the charging unit and the Vita burning during charging. There have been no reports of injuries.”

Yomiuri Shimbun has spoken to Sony’s Japanese PR department and received word that there will be no recall of the PlayStation Vita , as apparently the handheld itself isn’t to blame. Rather, Sony “believes that the problem is with people having liquids or other objects inserted into the connection.”

We’ve reached out to Sony for further comment and clarification, and will update when we hear back.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.