Over at The Daily Beast, defense reporter (and Reason contributor) Eli Lake warns that some fancy War on Terror technology is on the verge of being deployed in the domestic War on Crime (which is to say, on Americans):
It's known as IBISS, the acronym for the Integrated Building Interior Surveillance System. Like its name suggests, it can see through the walls of buildings and sketch out images of what's inside.
Until this year, IBISS was a classified system, a piece of high-tech wizardry the military used to fight the war on terrorism. The contractor that made the system, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), couldn't talk about it in public, but that's changing. IBISS is one of the new products SAIC is hoping to sell to local police stations and fire departments as the defense contractor explores what is known in the industry as "adjacent markets." […]
"A number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection[,]" [said Gulu Gambhir, the chief technology officer for the ISR group of SAIC].
Brad Antle, the president and CEO of Salient Federal Solutions and a former vice president of Lockheed Martin, said, "I think it's logical to assume your adjacent markets for ISR capability, assuming the federal government won't let you sell it overseas—and it's pretty sensitive, so I can't imagine you are going to get much of that approved for foreign sales—they are going to try to push it down to the state and local governments to see if there is a mission to support." […]
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has seen this trend for a while of military technology developed for uses overseas finding their way to local law enforcement.
"In some ways this is the entire trend we've been seeing since 9/11. All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people," Stanley said. "We've seen this with everything from the NSA to spy satellites even to a lot of the technologies that are moving through what is called the green to blue pipeline, which is to say the military to the police."
Whole thing, including possible constitutional restraints, here. Reason on the militarization of police here.
