Have you heard of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency? (photo: U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers Baltimore District/Getty Images/Foreign Policy)
James Bamford | The Multibillion-Dollar US Spy Agency You Haven't Heard Of
By James Bamford, Foreign Policy
22 March 17
How President Trump might turn an all-seeing spy apparatus on innocent
American citizens.
In a heavily protected military base some 15 miles south of Washington,
D.C., sits the massive headquarters of a spy agency few know exists. Even
Barack Obama, five months into his presidency, seemed not to have recognized
its name. While shaking hands at a Five Guys hamburger restaurant in
Washington in May 2009, he asked a customer seated at a table about his job.
"What do you [do]?" the president inquired. "I work at NGA, National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency," the man answered. Obama appeared
dumbfounded. "So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial." he
said, unable to finish the name. Eight years after that videotape aired, the
NGA remains by far the most shadowy member of the Big Five spy agencies,
which include the CIA and the National Security Agency.
Despite its lack of name recognition, the NGA's headquarters is the
third-largest building in the Washington metropolitan area, bigger than the
CIA headquarters and the U.S. Capitol.
Completed in 2011 at a cost of $1.4 billion, the main building measures four
football fields long and covers as much ground as two aircraft carriers. In
2016, the agency purchased 99 acres in St. Louis to construct additional
buildings at a cost of $1.75 billion to accommodate the growing workforce,
with 3,000 employees already in the city.
The NGA is to pictures what the NSA is to voices. Its principal function is
to analyze the billions of images and miles of video captured by drones in
the Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe. But because it has
largely kept its ultra-high-resolution cameras pointed away from the United
States, according to a variety of studies, the agency has never been
involved in domestic spy scandals like its two far more famous siblings, the
CIA and the NSA. However, there's reason to believe that this will change
under President Donald Trump.
Throughout the long election campaign and into his first months as
president, Trump has pushed hard for weakening restraints on the
intelligence agencies, spending more money for defense, and getting tough on
law and order. Given the new president's overwhelming focus on domestic
security, it's reasonable to expect that Trump will use every tool available
to maintain it, including overhead vigilance.
In March 2016, the Pentagon released the results of an investigation
initiated by the Department of Defense's Office of Inspector General to
examine military spy drones in the United States. The report, marked "For
Official Use Only" and partially redacted, revealed that the Pentagon used
unarmed surveillance drones over American soil on fewer than 20 occasions
between 2006 and 2015. (Although the report doesn't identify the nature of
the missions, another Pentagon document lists 11 domestic drone operations
that principally involved natural disasters, search and rescue, and National
Guard training.)
The investigation also quoted from an Air Force law review article pointing
out the growing concern that technology designed to spy on enemies abroad
may soon be turned around to spy on citizens at home. "As the nation winds
down these wars . assets become available to support other combatant command
(COCOM) or U.S. agencies, the appetite to use them in the domestic
environment to collect airborne imagery continues to grow."
Although the report stated that all missions were conducted within full
compliance of the law, it pointedly noted that as of 2015 there were no
standardized federal statutes that "specifically address the employment of
the capability provided by a DoD UAS (unmanned aircraft system) if requested
by domestic civil authorities." Instead, there is a Pentagon policy
governing reconnaissance drones that requires the secretary of defense to
approve all such domestic operations. Under these regulations, drones "may
not conduct surveillance on U.S. persons" unless permitted by law and
approved by the secretary. The policy also bans armed drones over the United
States for anything other than military training and weapons testing.
In 2016, unbeknownst to many city officials, police in Baltimore began
conducting persistent aerial surveillance using a system developed for
military use in Iraq.
Few civilians have any idea how advanced these military eye-in-the-sky
drones have become. Among them is ARGUS-IS, the world's highest-resolution
camera with 1.8 billion pixels. Invisible from the ground at nearly four
miles in the air, it uses a technology known as "persistent stare" - the
equivalent of 100 Predator drones peering down at a medium-size city at once
- to track everything that moves.
With the capability to watch an area of 10 or even 15 square miles at a
time, it would take just two drones hovering over Manhattan to continuously
observe and follow all outdoor human activity, night and day. It can zoom in
on an object as small as a stick of butter on a plate and store up to 1
million terabytes of data a day. That capacity would allow analysts to look
back in time over days, weeks, or months. Technology is in the works to
enable drones to remain aloft for years at a time.
The Department of Homeland Security has been at these crossroads before. In
2007, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the department established an
agency to direct domestic spy satellite stakeouts and gave it a bland name:
the National Applications Office. But Congress, concerned about a "Big
Brother in the Sky," cut off funding. In 2009, it was killed by the Obama
administration.
Still, unlike domestic electronic surveillance by the NSA, which has been
closely scrutinized and subjected to legislation designed to protect civil
liberties, domestic overhead spying has escaped the attention of both
Congress and the public. The Trump administration may take advantage of that
void.
Initiating a new age of "persistent surveillance," Trump could use the spy
world's overhead assets to target Muslims or members of Black Lives Matter.
The president has spoken in favor of increasing the scrutiny of mosques;
aerial assessment would allow him to track worshippers. Drones could aid in
the mass roundup of illegal immigrants intended for deportation, and Trump
has said he may send federal forces to Chicago to quell the violence. Drones
could offer the city the unblinking eye for 24/7 vigilance.
Of course, all that would require a significant expansion of the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to analyze the domestic imagery. Before that
can happen, Trump, like Obama, has to discover there is such an agency.
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