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The U-2 spy plane, the high-flying aircraft that was often at the heart of cold war suspense, is enjoying an encore.

Four years ago, the Pentagon was ready to start retiring the plane, which took its first test flight in 1955. But Congress blocked that, saying the plane was still useful.

And so it is. Because of updates in the use of its powerful sensors, it has become the most sought-after spy craft in a very different war in Afghanistan.

As it shifts from hunting for nuclear missiles to detecting roadside bombs, it is outshining even the unmanned drones in gathering a rich array of intelligence used to fight the Taliban.

All this is a remarkable change from the U-2’s early days as a player in United States-Soviet espionage. Built to find Soviet missiles, it became famous when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in one while streaking across the Soviet Union in 1960, and again when another U-2 took the photographs that set off the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Newer versions of the plane have gathered intelligence in every war since then and still monitor countries like North Korea.

Now the U-2 and its pilots, once isolated in their spacesuits at 70,000 feet, are in direct radio contact with the troops in Afghanistan. And instead of following a rote path, they are now shifted frequently in midflight to scout roads for convoys and aid soldiers in firefights.

In some ways, the U-2, which flew its first mission in 1956, is like an updated version of an Etch A Sketch in an era of high-tech computer games.

“It’s like after all the years it’s flown, the U-2 is in its prime again,” said Lt. Col. Jason M. Brown, who commands an intelligence squadron that plans the missions and analyzes much of the data. “It can do things that nothing else can do.”

One of those things, improbably enough, is that even from 13 miles up its sensors can detect small disturbances in the dirt, providing a new way to find makeshift mines that kill many soldiers.

In the weeks leading up to the recent offensive in Marja, military officials said, several of the 32 remaining U-2s found nearly 150 possible mines in roads and helicopter landing areas, enabling the Marines to blow them up before approaching the town.

Marine officers say they relied on photographs from the U-2’s old film cameras, which take panoramic images at such a high resolution they can see insurgent footpaths, while the U-2’s newer digital cameras beamed back frequent updates on 25 spots where the Marines thought they could be vulnerable.

In addition, the U-2’s altitude, once a defense against antiaircraft missiles, enables it to scoop up signals from insurgent phone conversations that mountains would otherwise block.

As a result, Colonel Brown said, the U-2 is often able to collect information that suggests where to send the Predator and Reaper drones, which take video and also fire missiles. He said the most reliable intelligence comes when the U-2s and the drones are all concentrated over the same area, as is increasingly the case.

The U-2, a black jet with long, narrow wings to help it slip through the thin air, cuts an impressive figure as it rises rapidly into the sky. It flies at twice the height of a commercial jet, affording pilots views of such things as the earth’s curvature.

But the plane, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, is difficult to fly, and missions are grueling and dangerous. The U-2s used in Afghanistan and Iraq commute each day from a base near the Persian Gulf, and the trip can last nine to 12 hours. Pilots eat meals squeezed through tubes and wear spacesuits because their blood would literally boil if they had to eject unprotected at such a high altitude.

As the number of flights increases, some of the plane’s 60 pilots have suffered from the same disorienting illness, known as the bends, that afflicts deep-sea divers who ascend too quickly.

Relaxing recently in their clubhouse at Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif., the U-2’s home base, several pilots said the most common problems are sharp joint pain or a temporary fogginess.

But in 2006, a U-2 pilot almost crashed after drifting in and out of consciousness during a flight over Afghanistan. The pilot, Kevin Henry, now a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said in an interview that he felt as if he were drunk, and he suffered some brain damage. At one point, he said, he came within five feet of smashing into the ground before miraculously finding a runway.

Read the rest of the story at: U-2 Spy Plane Evades the Day of Retirement (NY Times)

U2 40th Anniversary PR video

The Feds are on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

U.S. law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.

Think you know who’s behind that “friend” request? Think again. Your new “friend” just might be the FBI.

The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Among other purposes: Investigators can check suspects’ alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, obtained the Justice Department document when it sued the agency and five others in federal court. The 33-page document underscores the importance of social networking sites to U.S. authorities. The foundation said it would publish the document on its Web site on Tuesday.

With agents going undercover, state and local police coordinate their online activities with the Secret Service, FBI and other federal agencies in a strategy known as “deconfliction” to keep out of each other’s way.

“You could really mess up someone’s investigation because you’re investigating the same person and maybe doing things that are counterproductive to what another agency is doing,” said Detective Frank Dannahey of the Rocky Hill, Conn., Police Department, a veteran of dozens of undercover cases.

A decade ago, agents kept watch over AOL and MSN chat rooms to nab sexual predators. But those text-only chat services are old-school compared with today’s social media, which contain mountains of personal data, photographs, videos and audio clips — a potential treasure trove of evidence for cases of violent crime, financial fraud and much more.

The Justice Department document, part of a presentation given in August by top cybercrime officials, describes the value of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other services to government investigators. It does not describe in detail the boundaries for using them.

“It doesn’t really discuss any mechanisms for accountability or ensuring that government agents use those tools responsibly,” said Marcia Hoffman, a senior attorney with the civil liberties foundation.

The group sued in Washington to force the government to disclose its policies for using social networking sites in investigations, data collection and surveillance.

Covert investigations on social-networking services are legal and governed by internal rules, according toJustice Department officials. But they would not say what those rules are.

The Justice Department document raises a legal question about a social-media bullying case in which U.S. prosecutors charged a Missouri woman with computer fraud for creating a fake MySpace account — effectively the same activity that undercover agents are doing, although for different purposes.

The woman, Lori Drew, helped create an account for a fictitious teen boy on MySpace and sent flirtatious messages to a 13-year-old neighborhood girl in his name. The girl hanged herself in October 2006, in a St. Louis suburb, after she received a message saying the world would be better without her.

A jury in California, where MySpace has its servers, convicted Drew of three misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization because she was accused of violating MySpace’s rules against creating fake accounts. But last year a judge overturned the verdicts, citing the vagueness of the law.

“If agents violate terms of service, is that ‘otherwise illegal activity’?” the document asks. It doesn’t provide an answer.

Facebook’s rules, for example, specify that users “will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.” Twitter’s rules prohibit its users from sending deceptive or false information. MySpace requires that information for accounts be “truthful and accurate.”

A former U.S. cybersecurity prosecutor, Marc Zwillinger, said investigators should be able to go undercover in the online world the same way they do in the real world, even if such conduct is barred by a company’s rules. But there have to be limits, he said.

In the face-to-face world, agents can’t impersonate a suspect’s spouse, child, parent or best friend. But online, behind the guise of a social-networking account, they can.

“This new situation presents a need for careful oversight so that law enforcement does not use social networking to intrude on some of our most personal relationships,” said Zwillinger, whose firm does legal work for Yahoo and MySpace.

Undercover operations aren’t necessary if the suspect is reckless. Federal authorities nabbed a man wanted on bank fraud charges after he started posting Facebook updates about the fun he was having in Mexico.

Maxi Sopo, a native of Cameroon living in the Seattle area, apparently slipped across the border into Mexico in a rented car last year after learning that federal agents were investigating the alleged scheme. The agents initially could find no trace of him on social media sites, and they were unable to pin down his exact location in Mexico. But they kept checking and eventually found Sopo on Facebook.

While Sopo’s online profile was private, his list of friends was not. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Scoville began going through the list and was able to learn where Sopo was living. Mexican authorities arrested Sopo in September. He is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

The Justice document describes how Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have interacted with federal investigators: Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests,” the government said. MySpace preserves information about its users indefinitely and even stores data from deleted accounts for one year. But Twitter’s lawyers tell prosecutors they need a warrant or subpoena before the company turns over customer information, the document says.

“Will not preserve data without legal process,” the document says under the heading, “Getting Info From Twitter … the bad news.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The chief security officer for MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, said MySpace doesn’t want to be the company that stands in the way of an investigation.

“That said, we also want to make sure that our users’ privacy is protected and any data that’s disclosed is done under proper legal process,” Nigam said.

MySpace requires a search warrant for private messages less than six months old, according to the company.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the company has put together a handbook to help law enforcement officials understand “the proper ways to request information from Facebook to aid investigations.”

The Justice document includes sections about its own lawyers. For government attorneys taking cases to trial, social networks are a “valuable source of info on defense witnesses,” they said. “Knowledge is power. … Research all witnesses on social networking sites.”

But the government warned prosecutors to advise their own witnesses not to discuss cases on social mediasites and to “think carefully about what they post.”

It also cautioned federal law enforcement officials to think prudently before adding judges or defense counsel as “friends” on these services.

“Social networking and the courtroom can be a dangerous combination,” the government said.

MI5 is worried about sex. In a 14-page document distributed last year to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” the famed British security service described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. The document, as the London Times reported in January, explicitly warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”

This latest report on Chinese corporate espionage tactics is only the most recent installment in a long and sordid history of spies and sex. For millennia, spymasters of all sorts have trained their spies to use the amorous arts to obtain secret information.

The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”

Those who aim to perfect the art of the honey trap in the future, as well as those who seek to insulate themselves, would do well to learn from honey trap history. Of course, there are far too many stories — too many dramas, too many rumpled bedsheets, rattled spouses, purloined letters, and ruined lives — to do that history justice here. Yet one could begin with five famous stories and the lessons they offer for honey-trappers, and honey-trappees, everywhere.

1. Don’t Follow That Girl

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician who had worked in Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, went to the British newspapers with his claim that Israel had developed atomic bombs. His statement was starkly at odds with Israel’s official policy of nuclear ambiguity — and he had photos to prove it.

The period of negotiation among the newspapers was tense, and at one point the London Sunday Times was keeping Vanunu hidden in a secret location in suburban London while it attempted to verify his story. But Vanunu got restless. He announced to his minders at the paper that he had met a young woman while visiting tourist attractions in London and that they were planning a romantic weekend in Rome.

The newspaper felt it had no right to prevent Vanunu from leaving. It was a huge mistake: Soon after arriving in Rome with his lady friend, Vanunu was seized by Mossad officers, forcibly drugged, and smuggled out of Italy by ship to Israel, where he was eventually put on trial for treason. Vanunu served 18 years in jail, 11 years of it in solitary confinement. Released in 2004, he is still confined to Israel under tight restrictions, which include not being allowed to meet with foreigners or talk about his experiences. Britain has never held an inquiry into the affair.

The woman who set the honey trap was a Mossad officer, Cheryl Ben Tov, code-named “Cindy.” Born in Orlando, Fla., she was married to an officer of the Israeli security service. After the operation, she was given a new identity to prevent reprisals, and eventually she left Israel to return to the United States. But her role in the Vanunu affair was vital. The Mossad could not have risked a diplomatic incident by kidnapping Vanunu from British soil, so he had to be lured abroad — an audacious undertaking, but in this case a successful one.

2. Take Favors from No One

One of the best-known honey traps in spy history involves Mata Hari, a Dutch woman who had spent some years as an erotic dancer in Java. (Greta Garbo played her in a famous 1931 film.) During World War I, the French arrested her on charges of spying for the Germans, based on their discovery through intercepted telegrams that the German military attaché in Spain was sending her money. The French claimed that the German was her control officer and she was passing French secrets to him, secrets she had obtained by seducing prominent French politicians and officers.

During the trial, Mata Hari defended herself vigorously, claiming that she was the attaché’s mistress and he was sending her gifts. But her arguments did not convince her judges. She died by firing squad on Oct. 15, 1917, refusing a blindfold.

After the war, the French admitted that they had no real evidence against her. The conclusion by most modern historians has been that she was shot not because she was running a honey trap operation, but to send a powerful message to any women who might be tempted to follow her example. The lesson here, perhaps, is that resembling a honey trap can be as dangerous as actually being one.

3. Beware the Media

Sometimes a country’s entire journalism corps can fall into an apparent honey trap. Yevgeny Ivanov was a Soviet attaché in London in the early 1960s. He was a handsome, personable officer and a popular figure on the British diplomatic and social scene, a frequent guest at parties given by society osteopath Stephen Ward.

Ward was famous for inviting the pick of London’s beautiful young women to his gatherings. One of them was Christine Keeler, a scatterbrained ’60s “good-time girl” who supposedly became Ivanov’s mistress. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Keeler was the lover of the married British MP and Secretary of State for War John Profumo, who was then working on plans with the United States to station cruise missiles in Germany.

In 1963, Profumo’s affair with Keeler was exposed in the press. Britain’s famed scandal sheets also blew up the Soviet spy/honey trap angle, for which there was no evidence. Profumo was forced to resign for lying about the affair to the House of Commons. His wife forgave him, but his career was ruined.

Ivanov was recalled to Moscow, where he lived out his days pouring ridicule on the whole story: “It is ludicrous to think that Christine Keeler could have said to John Profumo in bed one night, ‘Oh, by the way, darling, when are the cruise missiles going to arrive in Germany?’” He was probably right: When the media gets hold of a potential honey trap, the truth is easily lost.

4. The Deadliest of Honey Traps

Not all honey traps are heterosexual ones. In fact, during less tolerant eras, a homosexual honey trap with a goal of blackmail could be just as effective as using women as bait.

Take the tragic story of Jeremy Wolfenden, the London Daily Telegraph‘s correspondent in Moscow in the early 1960s. Wolfenden was doubly vulnerable to KGB infiltration: He spoke Russian, and he was gay. Seizing its opportunity, the KGB ordered the Ministry of Foreign Trade’s barber to seduce him and put a man with a camera in Wolfenden’s closet to take compromising photos. The KGB then blackmailed Wolfenden, threatening to pass on the photographs to his employer if he did not spy on the Western community in Moscow.

Wolfenden reported the incident to his embassy, but the official British reaction was not what he expected. On his next visit to London, he was called to see an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) who asked him to work as a double agent, leading the KGB along but continuing to report back to SIS.

The stress led Wolfenden into alcoholism. He tried to end his career as a spy, marrying a British woman he had met in Moscow, arranging a transfer from Moscow to the Daily Telegraph‘s Washington bureau, and telling friends he had put his espionage days behind him.

But the spy life was not so easily left behind. After encountering his old SIS handler at a British Embassy party in Washington in 1965, Wolfenden was again pulled back into the association. His life fell into a blur of drunkenness. On Dec. 28, 1965, when he was 31, he died, apparently from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a fall in the bathroom. His friends believed, no matter what the actual cause of death, that between them, the KGB and the SIS had sapped his will to live.

Ironically, his time as a spy probably produced little useful material for either side. His colleagues weren’t giving him any information because they were warned that he was talking to the KGB, and the Soviets weren’t likely to give him anything either. In this case, the honey pot proved deadly — with little purpose for anyone.

Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed formerC.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.

Even in a region of the world known for intrigue, Mr. Furlong’s story stands out. At times, his operation featured a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.

The allegations that he ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

This account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region. They insisted on anonymity in discussing a delicate case that is under investigation.

Col. Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for United States Strategic Command, which oversees Mr. Furlong’s work, declined to make him available for an interview. Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Network of Informants

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

Read the rest of the story at: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants (NY Times)

The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) is the intelligence agency of the People’s Republic of China. China’s MSS (like the CIA in the US or MI6 in the UK), is probably the country’s largest and most active foreign intelligence agency.

Former MSS agents say that the agency is engaged in counterintelligence and repressing internal dissent within China.  The internal repression includes efforts against religious groups and Tibetan and Taiwanese independence movements as well as censoring the Internet to prevent China’s population from knowing what is going on outside the country.

The actual mission of the MSS is to ensure “the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system.”  One of the primary missions of the MSS is undoubtedly to gather foreign intelligence from targets in various countries overseas.  Many MSS agents are said to have operated in the Greater China region (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and to have integrated themselves into the world’s numerous overseas Chinese communities.  At one point, nearly 120 agents who had been operating under non-official cover in the U.S., Canada, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan as businessmen, bankers, scholars, and journalists were recalled to China, a fact that demonstrates the broad geographical scope of MSS agent coverage.

60 Minutes has obtained an FBI videotape showing a Defense Department employee selling secrets to a Chinese spy that offers a rare glimpse into the secretive world of espionage.

See also: Chinese spy who defected tells all (Washington Times)

See Also: Four Chinese Espionage Investigations (PBS)

School-issued laptops are becoming more and more common these days, but thanks to the action of one high school, students and parents might have second thoughts about bringing them home. The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student, Blake J. Robbins, have filed a lawsuit against his school district after discovering that school officials had allegedly been remotely accessing the laptop in order to take webcam photos of the students at home (via BoingBoing). There are a number of unanswered questions about this story, but if true, it could mean serious penalties for the Lower Merion School District.

According to the complaint, the school in question (Harriton High School) had issued laptops equipped with built-in webcams to every student so that they could have “24/7 access to school based resources” and the ability to work seamlessly between school and home when it comes to research and projects. In November of 2009, however, Robbins was disciplined by the Assistant Principal of his school, Lindy Matsko, for engaging in “improper behavior” in his home. At that time, Matsko cited a photograph from the built-in webcam on the laptop.

Robbins’ father Michael supposedly confirmed with Matsko that the school has the ability to remotely activate the webcam “at any time it chose to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam.” Needless to say, Robbins’ parents were outraged at this development, as neither the school nor the district had told parents about this capability. As a result, the Robbins have filed a class-action lawsuit against the district, charging it with interception of electronic communications under the ECPA, theft of intellectual property under the CFAA, violations of the Stored Communications Act, violations of the Civil Rights Act, invasions of privacy, and violations of the Pennsylvania wiretapping and electronic surveillance act.

Reporters tried to get clarification from Harriton High School about its laptop policy, but were told that no one at the school would be willing to discuss it. Merion School District has not responded to our requests for comment either.   As such, we’re left speculating as to what else could have happened to led up to this seemingly surreal series of events.

Read more at: Parents: school used webcam to spy on our kid at home (Ars Technica)

*Update: School District Halts Webcam Surveillance (Wired)

A federal judge has dismissed, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails.

“We’re deeply disappointed in the judge’s ruling,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law.”

In the ruling, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker held that the privacy harm to millions of Americans from the illegal spying dragnet was not a “particularized injury” but instead a “generalized grievance” because almost everyone in the United States has a phone and Internet service.

“The alarming upshot of the court’s decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “With new revelations of illegal spying being reported practically every other week — just this week, we learned that the FBI has been unlawfully obtaining Americans’ phone records using Post-It notes rather than proper legal process — the need for judicial oversight when it comes to government surveillance has never been clearer.”

EFF Plans Appeal of Jewel v. NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Case (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.

BAE System’s new Herti unmanned aerial vehicle has been on reconnaissance and surveillance boat in Afghanistan.

CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones (Guardian UK)