The use of spy satellites to gather intelligence has been criticized by many who feel a greater emphasis should be placed on human intelligence. Dwayne Day argues that spysats have been unfairly maligned.
Given enough commercial and spy satellites, supplemented by aircraft and a ground system to marry it all together, the intelligence community might one day achieve the ultimate in coverage: constant, real-time surveillance of the planet. But even without such coverage, imaging and other satellite technologies are already colliding with privacy concerns.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has a fleet of aircraft, some equipped with night surveillance and eavesdropping equipment, flying America's skies to track and collect intelligence from suspected terrorists.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced plans to develop a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system that it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures and decode them prior to an assault.
The Washington Post reports on the new interagency, computerized intelligence network that has being hastily constructed to respond to the war against terrorism.
TIME reports on the efforts of the U.S. intelligence community to coordinate their anti-terrorism efforts.
The author proposes that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence be shifted from the current standard of "reasonable expectation of privacy based on societal standards" to a "natural rights" standard which treats privacy rights as inherent and not subject to change with changes in social conditions.
To combat terrorism, federal officials are planning a massive intelligence-gathering system that will ultimately combine more than $100 million in new funding, powerful new terrorism laws, an expanded role for local police and state-of-the-art computer networks that will link federal agents with thousands of police departments.
After months of criticism that they do not work well together, the CIA and FBI have begun jointly developing a new supercomputer system designed to improve their ability to both cull and share information.
Congress has given the C.I.A. new legal powers to snoop on people in the United States — not limited to investigating groups like Al Qaeda. It has been granted these new powers, along with billions of dollars, without any public post-mortem into how all these guardians of national security failed to protect against the September attacks.