Where Is the Paper Trail for the FBI's Drone Use?

In a Wednesday hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the Bureau does, in fact, use drones for surveillance over domestic airspace.

Asked by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) if the FBI uses drones and for what purposes, Mueller answered, “Yes, and for surveillance.” Grassley pressed further, inquiring whether the FBI uses drones for surveillance on American soil, which Mueller confirmed with another terse "yes."

It seems this is the first official confirmation of an FBI drone program, but Mueller’s testimony isn’t exactly a revelation. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Federal Aviation Administration in January 2012 to reveal which government agencies had applied for domestic drone waivers, the FBI was (predictably) on the list. This February, FBI sources told CNN that surveillance drones “constantly monitored” a hostage situation in an Alabama bunker. At the time, it was not clear whether the drones were owned by the FBI or by another agency.

At the hearing, Mueller insisted that the FBI’s drone use is limited, saying that “our footprint is very small, we have very few and of limited use.”

That footprint must be pretty damn small indeed, since Bureau records officers insist that the FBI has no paper trail whatsoever on drone deployment.

Last July, MuckRock sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI as part of the Drone Census, a collaboration with EFF to map use of drones nationwide. The request sought documents related to the purchase and use of drones, including contracts, budget proposals, policy memos, manuals and flight logs, among other records. MuckRock sent the same request to 375 agencies, including every entity on the FAA lists.

A month later, the FBI responded: no documents here.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.