A proposed unmanned floating airship surveillance system is being hailed by city officials in Ogden, Utah as one way to fight crime in its neighborhoods.

“We believe it will be a deterrent to crime when it is out and about and will help us solve crimes more quickly when they do occur,” Ogden City Mayor Matthew Godfrey told Reuters.

The airship entails military technology now available to local law enforcement, he said.

Godfrey floated the idea of a dirigible in the skies above Ogden for his city council members last week. The council is expected to vote on the measure in coming weeks.

He says the cost of the blimp is being negotiated but said it is more “cost effective” to operate than helicopters or fixed winged aircraft.

“We anticipate using it mainly at night. The cameras have incredible night vision to see with tremendous clarity daytime and nighttime. It will be used like a patrol car. It will be used to go and check things out and keep things safe,” said Godfrey.

One person will be able to operate the system but Godfrey says it will also function on its own with programing directives.

The blimp is 52 feet long, will be outfitted with two cameras, and is capable of flying up to 40 miles per hour at 400 feet above the city.

Officials say the cigar-shaped blimp, powered by electric batteries, can fly for four to six hours before needing to be recharged.

“Once you understand the capability of the technology as well, not only the cameras but the ability to relay that data from the camera down to ground it’s amazing,” said Godfrey.

The blimp is long but narrow and moves quickly and quietly, meaning it should be fairly undetectable, he said.

The blimp is being developed by the Utah Center for Aeronautical Innovation and Design at Weber State University. Researchers say the blimp is a helium filled balloon with a special coating of fabric developed at their center.

“The very lightweight fabric was developed in partnership with the Utah State Legislature who gave us a grant… The air envelope would leak the helium it would penetrate through so it had to be coated,” said Bradley Stringer, research team executive director.

Ogden will be the first metropolitan police force to employ this technology, Stringer said.

The blimp has almost no operational costs and minimal maintenance expenses, he said. Ogden city officials say it will cost about $100 a month to operate but would not comment specifically on the cost of the blimp.

Source: Reuters

A new piece of technology may soon be coming to South Florida, but is already raising concerns from residents.

The Miami-Dade Police Department recently finalized a deal to buy a drone, which is an unmanned plane equipped with cameras. Drones have been used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan in the war against terror.

Many residents are concerned that the new technology will violate their privacy.

MDPD purchased a drone named T-hawk from defense firm Honeywell to assist with the department’s Special Response Team’s operations. The 20-pound drone can fly for 40 minutes, reach heights of 10,500 feet and cruise in the air at 46 miles an hour. “It gives us a good opportunity to have an eye up there. Not a surveilling eye, not a spying eye. Let’s make the distinction. A surveilling eye to help us to do the things we need to do, honestly, to keep people safe,” said Miami-Dade Police Director James Loftus.

The ACLU is one of the organizations that is concerned about the drone that may soon be coming to Miami-Dade County. Howard Simon, the executive director of the ACLU of Florida approves of the drones but also advocates strict regulation of the drones. “Technology: there’s no reason not to embrace technology if it makes the streets safer, if it helps the police. The concern is, though, that every new technology also has within it the capacity to threaten people’s privacy,” he said.

Terrorism expert Douglas Haas, however, believes that the drones will help in many ways, including fighting crime. “This has unlimited capabilities,” said Haas. “Not only is it good tactically for a SWAT call out or any tactical situation, there’s numerous search and rescue applications for it after a hurricane. They could send one of these up fast and assess damage.”

Residents have also questioned whether or not Miami-Dade Police can afford to purchase the drone, especially since the department has recently made a lot of budget cuts. “Nothing happens quickly in the purchasing process, and that’s something that really was in place, the funds for that, a couple of years ago,” Loftus said.

The purchase of the drone may have been made possible through a federal grant; however, this has not been confirmed.

Honeywell has applied to the FAA for clearance to fly the drone in urban areas. This has never been allowed before, but if it does happen, the Miami-Dade Police Department will be the first police agency in the US to use the technology.

Source: WSVN TV

For years, the U.S. Navy has been pursuing a workable ray gun that could provide a leap ahead in ship self-defenses. Now, with a series of tests of a system called the Laser Weapon System, or LaWS), it may be one step closer to that goal.

Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the service’s technology development arm, announced today that LaWS had “successfully tracked, engaged, and destroyed” a drone in flight, during an over-the-water engagement at San Nicholas Island, Calif.

It’s certainly not the first time lasers have shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle — last year, the Air Force zapped several drones with beam weapons in a series of tests at China Lake, Calif. — but this test brings an additional bit of realism — and an extra technical challenge. Laser beams can lose strength as they move through the moist, salty sea atmosphere above the sea, so the Navy needs directed-energy weapons that can work effectively on ships.

The LaWS is essentially a laser upgrade to the MK 15 Close In Weapon System (CIWS), a.k.a. the Phalanx gun, a radar-guided autocannon that is already installed on Navy surface combatants. According to NAVSEA, the system tested (shown here) fired a laser through a beam director installed on a tracking mount, which in turn was controlled by a  Mk 15 CIWS. That’s the basically same system that controls the Phalanx.

It represents a possible next step for the Phalanx system, which is currently limited by the range of its 20mm autocannon (Raytheon, manufacturer of the Phalanx, is also marketing a missile system to replace the gun). The Phalanx is a last line of defense against sea-skimming anti-ship missiles and hostile aircraft, but the laser wouldn’t replace the gun completely. Theoretically, directed energy weapons would increase the range of the system, but you would still have the gun as a backup if the laser fails to do the job.

LaWS might also have other applications: land-based Phalanx guns have been used to shoot down incoming  rockets and mortars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a laser Phalanx could — theoretically — avoid the problem of the “20mm shower” (unexploded rounds falling back to earth).

And after all, what’s a holiday weekend at Danger Room without news of the latest directed-energy weapon?

Source: Wired

The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday.

Harold Koh, the State Department’s top legal adviser, outlined the administration’s legal case for the robotic attacks last month. Now, some legal experts are taking turns to punch holes in Koh’s argument.

It’s part of an ongoing legal debate about the CIA and U.S. military’s lethal drone operations, which have escalated in recent months — and which have received some technological upgrades. Critics of the program, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have argued that the campaign amounts to a program of targeted killing that may violate the laws of war.

In a hearing Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s national security and foreign affairs panel, several professors of national security law seemed open to that argument. But there are still plenty of caveats, and the risks to U.S. drone operators are at this point theoretical: Unless a judge in, say, Pakistan, wanted to issue a warrant, it doesn’t seem likely. But that’s just one of the possible legal hazards of robotic warfare.

Loyola Law School professor David Glazier, a former Navy surface warfare officer, said the pilots operating the drones from afar could — in theory — be hauled into court in the countries where the attacks occur. That’s because the CIA’s drone pilots aren’t combatants in a legal sense. “It is my opinion, as well as that of most other law-of-war scholars I know, that those who participate in hostilities without the combatant’s privilege do not violate the law of war by doing so, they simply gain no immunity from domestic laws,” he said.

“Under this view CIA drone pilots are liable to prosecution under the law of any jurisdiction where attacks occur for any injuries, deaths or property damage they cause,” Glazier continued. “But under the legal theories adopted by our government in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, these CIA officers as well as any higher-level government officials who have authorized or directed their attacks are committing war crimes.”

The drones themselves are a lawful tool of war; “In fact, the ability of the drones to engage in a higher level of precision and to discriminate more carefully between military and civilian targets than has existed in the past actually suggests that they’re preferable to many older weapons,” Glazier added. But employing CIA personnel to carry out those armed attacks, he concluded, “clearly fall outside the scope of permissible conduct and ought to be reconsidered, particularly as the United States seeks to prosecute members of its adversaries for generally similar conduct.”

Drone attacks haven’t just become the primary weapon in the American bid to wipe out Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist networks. “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership,” CIA director Leon Panetta said.

But that “embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radical new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force,” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer recently observed. Before 9/11, the American government regularly condemned Israel for taking out individual terrorists. “Seven years later, there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.”

The U.S. government has since defended the strikes as legitimate self-defense — without going into details about the operations. Kenneth Anderson, an American University law professor, said the government’s reluctance to talk about the missions — as well as its reliance on an intelligence agency to carry out military action — raises some serious questions.

In his prepared statement (.pdf), Anderson said Koh “nowhere mentions the CIA by name in his defense of drone operations. It is, of course, what is plainly intended when speaking of self-defense separate from armed conflict. One understands the hesitation of senior lawyers to name the CIA’s use of drones as lawful when the official position of the U.S. government, despite everything, is still not to confirm or deny the CIA’s operations.”

What’s more, Anderson argued, Congress has been reluctant to talk about the bigger policy issue: Why this is a CIA mission in the first place. “Why should the CIA, or any other civilian agency, ever use force (leaving aside conventional law enforcement)?” he said. “Even granting the existence of self-defense as a legal category, why ever have force used by anyone other than the uniformed military?”

Mary Ellen O’Connell, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, was much more blunt in her statement. “Combat drones are battlefield weapons,” she told the panel. “They fire missiles or drop bombs capable of inflicting very serious damage. Drones are not lawful for use outside combat zones. Outside such zones, police are the proper law enforcement agents, and police are generally required to warn before using lethal force.”

“Restricting drones to the battlefield is the most important single rule governing their use, O’Connell continued. “Yet, the United States is failing to follow it more often than not.”

Not all of the law professors testifying today agreed. Syracuse University’s William Banks, for one, said that “the intelligence laws permit the president broad discretion to utilize the nation’s intelligence agencies to carry out national security operations, implicitly including targeted killing.” Current U.S. laws “supply adequate – albeit not well articulated or understood – legal authority for these drone strikes.”

But American laws may not be on the only ones applicable to drone strikes, critics contend. As Anderson argued, the United States may face legal challenges from what he called the “international-law community” – nongovernmental organizations, international bodies, U.N. agencies and others who view this as a program of targeted killing that falls outside the bounds of armed conflict.

Either way, this hearing will not end the controversy. As we’ve noted here before, the government has been less than forthcoming about who, exactly, authorizes drone strikes, how the targets are chosen and how many civilians may have been inadvertently killed.

Source: Wired.com

Stopping the pirates of Somalia hasn’t been easy. But when the navies of the world have repelled or killed the hijackers, it’s often involved three elements: helicopters, drones and trained snipers. The U.S. Army is working on a weapon which combines all three.

It’s called the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System. It mounts a powerful rifle onto highly stabilized turret, and fixes the package on board a Vigilante unmanned helicopter. I describe the system in this month’s Popular Mechanics.

The system is intended for the urban battlefield — an eye in the sky that can stare down concrete canyons, and blink out targets with extreme precision. Attempting to return fire against the ARSS is liable to be a near-suicidal act: ARSS is described as being able to fire seven to 10 aimed shots per minute, and it’s unlikely to miss.

Recent events off Somalia, however, may have suggested other uses for this technology. Last week’s standoff between pirates and the
U.S. Navy in the Indian Ocean ended famously with three sniper shots, as a drone watched overhead. In 2008, French special forces captured six pirates on land after ransom had been paid. “There were four helicopters involved,” The Independent
reported at the time. “A sniper shot out the motor of the pirates’ four-wheel drive vehicle. A second helicopter then landed nearby, allowing the six pirates to be arrested” — without any casualties.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON) uses helicopter-borne snipers to take out drug-running boats. They are accurate enough to knock out engines without harming the crew or damaging fuel tanks. “The driver just threw his hands up,” concludes the description of one such action in Men’s Vogue, after all three engines were disabled with three shots.

And because the Vigilante is smaller, lighter and cheaper than a manned combat helicopter, it can be supplied in greater numbers, and without the need for those elite, highly-trained snipers.

Sniping from a chopper currently takes tons of skill and training.
But ARSS is literally point-and-shoot for the operator on the ground, using a videogame-type controller. The software makes all the necessary corrections, and the system should ensure first-round kills at several hundred yards. The secret is in the control system and stabilized turret (on the right in the picture above), which is currently fitted with a powerful RND Manufacturing Edge 2000 rifle specifically designed for sniping work, using the heavyweight .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge.

The stabilized turret could be fitted to a variety of other vehicles — including a small blimp, or a fixed-wing unmanned plane, like the Predator. Compared to the Predator’s array of Hellfire missiles, the ARSS’ lone gun would be much less likely to hit civilians. It would also give a far deeper magazine: dozens of shots instead of a handful of missiles, and at a cost of around $4 per trigger pull rather than about $100,000 for a Hellfire. But the turret doesn’t need such a big craft to carry it, as the complete turret assembly weighs less than a single Hellfire.

The name needs changing. But the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System looks like it may have a big future — maybe on land, or maybe at sea.

[Photo: U.S. Army]

Source: Wired.com

The US Navy’s unmanned “Fire Scout” helicopter was out minding its own business on a trial run, when its home base warship detected a suspicious speedboat on radar. That’s when Robocopter kicked into high pursuit—filming the whole way.

The subsequent three-hour chase finally ended when the speedboat rendezvoused with a fishing boat, at which time a U.S. Coastguard Law Enforcement Detachment unit from theUSS McInerney swarmed. What they found: 60 kilos of cocaine, with another 200 kilos of narcotics presumed jettisoned. Oh, and all sorts of bad guy drug traffickers.

Watch the video of the bust from the drone

Source: Raw Story

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit after federal agencies neglected to answer a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents pertaining to the legal basis for the military’s Predator drone program.

The request specifically seeks information as to how the program is governed, who can be targeted, along with when and where, and the data on civilian casualties caused by the remote-controlled weapons.

It was originally filed on Jan. 13 with the departments of defense and justice, along with the Central Intelligence Agency, none of which replied, according to the non-profit.

“The public has a right to know whether the targeted killings being carried out in its name are consistent with international law and with the country’s interests and values,” said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project, in a media advisory. “The Obama administration should disclose basic information about the program, including its legal basis and limits, and the civilian casualty toll thus far.”

Meanwhile, the globalist thinktank Council on Foreign Relations is circulating an article by Harvard National Security Journal contributor Brett H. McGurk, offering a counter-point on the use of unmanned weapons of war, opening with a rather cold-cocked headline: “Lawyers: A Predator Drone’s Achilles Heel?”

Interestingly, in the article’s opening paragraphs, McGurk flatly states that law and ethics “take a back seat” to the “new tactics” arising from the use of drones.

“As a former official overseeing national strategy in two warzones, I appreciate how law and ethics can take a back seat to new tactics that turn the tide against committed enemies,” he wrote. “So long as the tactics are legally available, whatever the theory, then the tactics will be used. In Iraq, there have probably been more Predator drone strikes than anywhere else on earth – and with tremendous effect, degrading extremist networks and decapitating leadership cells. Drone attacks alone are not strategically sound, but when combined with a campaign to secure the population against common enemies, the strategic advantages are proven and empirical. The same strategy is now being employed in Afghanistan.”

The ACLU added: “The CIA and the military have used unmanned drones to target and kill individuals not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in Pakistan and, in at least one case in 2002, Yemen. The technology allows U.S. personnel to observe targeted individuals in real time and launch missiles intended to kill them from control centers located thousands of miles away. Recent reports, including public statements from the director of national intelligence, indicate that U.S. citizens have been placed on the list of targets who can be hunted and killed with drones.”

“While the Obama administration may legitimately withhold intelligence information as well as sensitive information about military strategy, it should disclose basic information about the scope of the drone program, the legal basis for the program and the civilian casualties that have resulted from the program,” argued ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer, who heads the non-profit’s National Security Project.

Credible online reports on the number of civilians killed by Predator drones are rare to come by, leaving much of the reporting to outlets like Iranian media, Long War Journal, Pakistan Observer and others, which occasionally rely on information outside the chain of U.S. command, which typically gives lower casualty counts.

Drone aircraft are known to be currently deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The United States and Colombia also recently secured a deal to house U.S. troops at Colombian military bases so they could pilot drones over the region to search for terrorists and drug traffickers. The move has angered neighboring countries in South America, causing some governments to bristle and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in particular to warn that the “winds of war” are blowing.

In the wake of increased violence along the Texas-Mexico border, Texas Governor Rick Perry has asked President Obama to dispatch Predator drones to the troubled regions to be the eyes of the currently enhanced patrols. Drones were previously dispatched to Arizona.

The unmanned technology has been called a “lynchpin” of President Obama’s strategy for the continuing terror war, with present U.S. authorities ramping up their use significantly compared to the Bush administration.

The ACLU’s full complaint is available online.

How the Predator Drone works

The US military has used drones to attack suspected terrorists in Pakistan since at least 2004. Proponents of the small, unmanned planes say they are capable of “surgical strikes”that reduce civilian casualties and effectively combat terrorism.

Is that true? Well, not really, according to a new report from the New America Foundation, a non-profit research institute.

The percentage of civilians killed by drones in Pakistan is at about 32 percent, or one out of three, the report states, and the strikes themselves have little effect in deterring terrorist activities in either Pakistan or Afghanistan. Researchers do not believe any of the reported strikes targeted Osama bin Laden.

Our study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 18 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 834 and 1,216 individuals, of whom around 549 to 849 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent.

The group’s report is titled “The Year of the Drone,” referring to 2009. According to the figures obtained by the foundation, the Obama administration has increased the use of drone strikes considerably when compared to the previous years of the Bush administration.

There were 114 reported drone strikes from 2004 through 2009, but only 45 during the Bush years. The other 51 were during last year.

…[A]lthough the drone strikes have disrupted militant operations, their unpopularity with the Pakistani public and their value as a recruiting tool for extremist groups may have ultimately increased the appeal of the Taliban and al Qaeda, undermining the Pakistani state. This is more disturbing than almost anything that could happen in Afghanistan, given that Pakistan has dozens of nuclear weapons and about six times the population.

Although the US military executes the strikes with the approval of the Pakistani government, the people feel differently. Only 9 percent approve of drone strikes.

The group ReThink Afghanistan has already created a short documentary using some of the report’s findings.

“Clearly when you have a drone strike that kills a wedding party of ninety people when you’re really after one person and maybe you didn’t even get that person, this contributes to the problem,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) says in the film.

Watch it here:

The contract has been awarded to Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot–”first walk-out” of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012.

LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It’s a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles.

Here is a video of  BigDog kicking it on a beach in Thailand.

LS3 is a direct descendant of BigDog, and it’ll be battle-hardened and clever enough to use GPS and machine vision to either yomp along behind a pack of troops, or navigate its own way to a pre-programmed assembly point. Yup, that’s right, LS3 is smart enough to trot off over the horizon all on its lonesome. That opens up all sorts of amazing military possibilities, like resupply of materiel to troops who are deployed in difficult remote locations, as well as the standard “If LS3 can offload 50 pounds from the back of each soldier in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops” as described by BD’s president Marc Raibert.

And its clear that these, and other, potential benefits have been proven to DARPA enough that it’s prepared to fund what seems to be an extremely future-focused piece of military hardware. But LS3, of course, stands for much more than its simple “squad support” label would suggest. It’s placing artificially-intelligent robots right next to soldiers on the battle field, which is a natural extension of the way robots are currently used in combat–essentially as smart remote control units for situations too dangerous for a human to risk. And in that sense, LS3 is a significant piece of kit. Because it won’t be too long before someone considers the benefits of replacing its 400-pound load with a heavy gun, and LS32 becomes an AI-equipped armed battlefield robot. More terminator-dog than K9, you see.

Here is video of  BigDog auto-tracking a human.

Stay tuned for: Drone Wars

They are calling the new project Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), and intend to assemble “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”. The uncrewed vessel would be capable of amazing range and endurance.  It could go for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, criss crossing oceans largely without any human input .

US plans crewless automated ghost-frigates (The Register)