New Documents Reveal U.S. Marshals’ Drones Experiment, Underscoring Need for Government Transparency
The use of surveillance drones is growing rapidly in the United States, but we know little about how the federal government employs this new technology. Now, new information obtained by the ACLU shows for the first time that the U.S. Marshals Service has experimented with using drones for domestic surveillance.
We learned this through documents we released today, received in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents are available here. (We also released a short log of drone accidents from the Federal Aviation Administration as well as accident reports and other documents from the U.S. Air Force.) This revelation comes a week after a bipartisan bill to protect Americans’ privacy from domestic drones was introduced in the House.
Although the Marshals Service told us it found 30 pages about its drones program in response to our FOIA request, it turned over only two of those pages—and even they were heavily redacted.
Here’s what we know from the two short paragraphs of text we were able to see. Under a header entitled “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Man-Portable (UAV) Program,” an agency document overview begins:
"USMS Technical Operations Group's UAV Program provides a highly portable, rapidly deployable overhead collection device that will provide a multi-role surveillance platform to assist in [redacted] detection of targets."
Read the rest here...
Thanks, Steve.
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Holocaust Researchers Catalog 42,500 Nazi Ghettos, Camps; Numbers Are 'Unbelievable'
Posted: 03/02/2013 12:18 pm EST
In this 1943 file photo, a group of Polish Jews
are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers during the destruction of the
Warsaw Ghetto by German troops after an uprising in the Jewish quarter. While
Warsaw is one of the most well-known ghettos, new research proves the Nazi
network of camps and ghettos was far more extensive than most people realize.
(AP Photo, file)
Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded
that over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror
between 1933 to 1945.
The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated, according to The New York Times.
Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of the project, have compiled the thousands of sites in a multivolume encyclopedia that is being published by the Holocaust Museum. Each volume catalogs thousands of sites, providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos."
The Holocaust Museum team also created maps of the sites, which were scattered across Europe, and which imprisoned or killed between 15 and 20 million people.
Essentially, this study shows the Holocaust was far more extensive than even historians comprehended.
Read the rest here...
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Make of it what you will.
My wife and I toured the concentration camp at Dachau in 1976, approximately 30 years after it was discovered by the Allied Forces. Though not an extermination camp, many bodies were burned in the crematoria of Dachau. In 1976 you were still able to smell the death from 30 years prior.
It couldn't happen here.
Stay safe.
The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated, according to The New York Times.
Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of the project, have compiled the thousands of sites in a multivolume encyclopedia that is being published by the Holocaust Museum. Each volume catalogs thousands of sites, providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos."
The Holocaust Museum team also created maps of the sites, which were scattered across Europe, and which imprisoned or killed between 15 and 20 million people.
Essentially, this study shows the Holocaust was far more extensive than even historians comprehended.
Read the rest here...
~~~~~~
Make of it what you will.
My wife and I toured the concentration camp at Dachau in 1976, approximately 30 years after it was discovered by the Allied Forces. Though not an extermination camp, many bodies were burned in the crematoria of Dachau. In 1976 you were still able to smell the death from 30 years prior.
It couldn't happen here.
Stay safe.
