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What Those Mysterious FBI Planes Might Be Carrying

The Bureau claims the planes "are not equipped, designed or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance."
Janus Rose
New York, US

The FBI has confirmed it is flying a fleet of surveillance planes over dozens of US cities, hiding behind an assortment of fake companies to cover its tracks.

Following a Washington Post report last month into the mysterious aircraft circling over the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore, researchers have been finding more and more of these mysterious flights above cities across the US. The planes are mostly single-engine Cessna aircraft, all registered under obviously bogus companies with names like "NG Research," "KQM Aviation," and "OBD Leasing." More than a dozen are registered to P.O. boxes in Bristow, Virginia, a small town with only 29,346 residents. One of the boxes is openly listed as belonging to the Department of Justice, the FBI's parent agency.

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A few months ago, this all sounded like some crackpot conspiracy theory. Now the FBI is acknowledging for the first time that not only is it behind the fake companies flying these planes, but that it usually does so without any judge's approval, according to an AP report.

The Bureau says the planes are used to support specific ongoing investigations. It also bizarrely claims that its "aviation program is not secret" and that the planes "are not equipped, designed or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance."

Both of those claims are fairly dubious. The FBI may be referring to the fact that it openly receives general funding for helicopters and the like. But its definition of "secret" doesn't seem to include a Justice Department decision to use front companies to fly camera-equipped planes in circles around major cities for hours at a time. According to the AP review, the agency was flying spy planes in more than 30 cities across 11 US states over a recent 30-day period. Another independent investigation found more than 100 recent flights in New York City, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago and Phoenix—many registered to the same made-up companies.

The current crop of aerial surveillance gear also makes it pretty hard to believe that FBI spy planes are "not equipped" for mass surveillance. The planes fly at an altitude that makes observation of unrelated activities trivial using modern airborne camera systems. There's still speculation about exactly what surveillance payloads these planes might be carrying. But a recent DOJ contract solicitation provides a likely candidate in L-3 Wescam, whose MX series includes advanced camera systems for small fixed-wing aircraft like the FBI's Cessnas. The solicitation, filed May 12th, expresses the DOJ's intent to buy "forty-eight (48) MX-10 camera systems, twenty-two (22) MX-15 camera systems, four (4) MX-20 camera systems, and seventy-four (74) Hand Controllers."

We also know the DOJ sometimes equips planes with cell phone interceptors, or StingRays, the hugely controversial devices the Bureau has been giving out to police departments while desperately trying to keep them secret. Stingrays can identify and track every cellphone in range, and in some cases can even intercept phone calls and text messages. The devices are almost always deployed without any judicial approval, but lately the FBI claims it has been getting court orders before using them.

There's also "wide-area persistent surveillance" systems like ARGUS, a 1.8 gigapixel sensor array that was designed for unmanned drones. The system can watch an entire city in real-time down to objects as small as six inches.

Whatever these spy planes are packing, it's a safe bet they'll spark another privacy firestorm in the months to come.