Military officials scrambled Wednesday to retrieve an unmanned Army surveillance blimp that detached from its moorings in Maryland and drifted north over Pennsylvania.
Two American fighter jets tracked the blimp, military officials said, that had been tethered at Aberdeen Proving Ground and broke free around noon.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado posted an official statement at 4:15 p.m. Eastern, saying that the aerostat was on the ground “in the vicinity” of Moreland Township, Pa. A military recovery team was said to be on its way to the scene…
People were warned to keep a safe distance from the airship and tether as contact with them may have presented significant danger.
No doubt as it drifted with fighter escort, loitering DHS phased-vehicle-surveillance on the ground, all along the path, was tasked with keeping eyes on it until it was down and could be secured. There is a lot of civilian surveillance on that blimp they don’t want the public knowing about.
This is from an earlier article on the blimps:
In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles.
And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns.
The project is called JLENS – or “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.” And you couldn’t come up with a better metaphor for wildly inflated defense contracts, a ponderous Pentagon bureaucracy, and the U.S. surveillance leviathan all in one.
Built by the Raytheon Company, the JLENS blimps operate as a pair. One provides omnipresent high-resolution 360-degree radar coverage up to 340 miles in any direction; the other can focus on specific threats and provide targeting information…
“A lot of people may hear radar and they picture a fuzzy green screen with little blips. But today’s radar is significantly more sophisticated than that and is in some ways akin to a camera,” warns Jay Stanley, a privacy expert for the American Civil Liberties Union.
In the article the Army says the JLENS radar on the blimp isn’t taking pictures, but is silent on whether there are any cameras on the blimps themselves. Note one blimp handles radar, the other, “can focus on specific threats and provide targeting information…”
Other great money quotes:
Extensive redactions in the hundreds of pages of contracting documents related to JLENS in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by EPIC leave the true scope of the project unclear.
One EPIC researcher poring through the documents found an alarming passage. The Army’s contract with Raytheon, it said, will be evaluated based on its “potential to grow to accommodate new and/or alternative missions…”
Federal privacy regulations currently don’t apply. “JLENS does not operate under privacy rules,” Smith, the spokesperson for JLENS, explains.
It is no coincidence this thing is flying near DC, instead of at Wright Patterson or Pensacola.
I would be shocked if DHS surveillance couldn’t commandeer the feeds from it should any known terrorist associates begin the drive down toward DC from Jersey. I also suspect that since the article went to great pains to say the radar wasn’t stored organically, it is a safe bet that it is stored “non-organically” at a secure off-site location where DHS can track every car in DC and the surrounding suburbs going years back. If you are a congressman having an affair, or a Federal regulator they want power over, every move you make will be in the database for subsequent analysis.
Some of the moves they are making almost seem as if they are preparing to stave off some kind of insurrection in the future. The view of what is coming from behind the scenes may be much worse than even we could imagine.
Never do I feel more like saying…
Apocalypse cometh™
One previously broke free from its moorings in Iraq and drifted into Iran, so the Russians amd possibly the chinks now have the “classified” technology on board.
Also, I doubt that the army technicians getting the direct feed are using the data to track Americans. However, I also doubt those techs have any idea who else has direct access to that feed or indirect access via those techs computers.