Pentagon launching drug surveillance balloons over Midwest

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Unmanned surveillance balloons are being launched from South Dakota to conduct surveillance over the Midwest, prompting concerns about privacy violations.

The Pentagon is testing the high-altitude, solar-powered balloons across six states, The Guardian reported on Friday.

The balloons were launched to provide "a persistent surveillance system" for narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats, according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission.

 The FCC authorized the the Sierra Nevada Corp., a Nevada-based national security and aerospace contractor, "experimental special temporary authorization" for the balloons on July 12.

Roughly two dozen small balloons carrying radars that can track vehicles will journey over Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Missouri before ending up in Illinois, the Guardian. The special contract expires on Sept. 1, the filing shows.

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The balloons were launched from Baltic, about 20 miles north of Sioux Falls, and will travel up to a maximum altitude of 65,000 feet above ground in a radius of 250 miles, according to the filing.

The British newspaper reported that the U.S. Southern Command commissioned the tests, and the balloons are carrying sensors and communication gear capable of detecting every vehicle in motion in a 25-mile range beneath the balloon. It's unknown if the tests are connected to any active investigations and if vehicle data would be stored or passed onto other agencies.

Southcom referred the Argus Leader's request for a comment to the Pentagon, which didn't respond. The Sierra Nevada Corp. did not return the Argus Leader's requests for comment.

The Guardian reported that Sioux Falls business Raven Aerostar supplied the balloons and launched them from its South Dakota facility about a month ago. The company didn't return the Argus Leader's request for comment. Raven has also supplied the balloons used by Project Loon, an experiment by Google parent company Alphabet to test beaming internet connectivity down from balloons.

Privacy concerns

The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota raised concerns that the balloons' surveillance could violate South Dakotans' privacy, and called on the military to be clear about it's actions in South Dakota.

The technology is capable of recording and storing all public movement over entire cities or metro areas, and that level of mass surveillance destroys any level of anonymity South Dakotans have, according to Libby Skarin, policy director for the ACLU of South Dakota.

"There are so many unanswered questions here,” Skarin said. “What kind of information is being collected? What information is being stored? Who has access to this information? Is the surveillance for law enforcement purposes? At a minimum, there should be consultation and approval from local communities before the federal government subjects South Dakotans to area-wide surveillance."

The technology was developed for battlefield activities such as finding improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it has migrated to civilian use without any oversight, according to Skarin.

"Technology like this runs the risk of turning South Dakota into a surveillance stat and is violating the privacy of every South Dakotan. We're not talking about closed-circuit TV cameras or cameras in discrete places," Skarin said. "This is area-wide surveillance that essentially creates a pervasive checkpoint over entire cities and metro area."

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of privacy three times in the last seven years when it comes to advances in technology. In the most recent case in 2018, the court ruled that the government violates the Fourth Amendment by accessing without a search warrant historical records containing the physical locations of cell phones.

The Court said that there's a distinction between being observable where law enforcement can follow a person and being observable in the day of technological advances where a camera can follow an entire area.

Contributing: Shelby Fleig of The Des Moines Register