The FBI Doesn't Know How Many Drones It Has, Or Who's Allowed to Fly Them

In November 2012, Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, sent each agency he oversees, including the FBI, DEA and ATF, a battery of questions about their use of drones. He wanted to verify how many unmanned vehicles were in inventory, how much they cost, and how often they were flown.

When notified that the inspector general had just begun its inquiry, the FBI general counsel’s office directed its staff to “not insert ourselves in this audit if not invited.” When the invitation did, in fact, arrive in the form of an audit questionnaire, recordkeeping discrepancies emerged as the FBI scrambled to prepare its responses. The latest documents on the bureau's drone program, released in response to MuckRock's FOIA requests as part of the Drone Census, suggest that the FBI doesn’t have a solid grasp on basic measures, like how often it’s used drones, or which agents are certified to fly them.

Foremost is apparent confusion within the FBI as to the scope of its drone deployments. The program’s primary legal adviser asserted in December 2012 that the Bureau “owns numerous UAS [unmanned aerial systems], which we routinely use primarily in CI [counterintelligence], CT [counterterrorism] and official corruption cases throughout the US.”

In a letter to Senator Rand Paul this past July, however, the FBI indicated that it had used its drones a total of 10 times since 2006, a number that is hardly "routine."

Just four months later, another FBI attorney downplayed the scope and capabilities of the program, calling it “a new program, still in R&D, not yet ramped up for full operational fielding.” This directly contradicts the UAV office’s May 2011 claim of being “mission ready and fully operational.”

Given these wild differences in interpretation and reporting, the inspector general demanded a hard number of drone flights with supporting documentation. Emails show that the FBI had to scrape together these documents case-by-case across field offices, even though one central office oversees the agency’s UAVs. Released emails note one fugitive incident and three drug cases from 2010 where drones were involved, in addition to a hostage situation in Alabama in February 2013. Agents struggled to come up with an explanation for missing reports and approval documents for certain drone deployments.

The first round of documents released revealed that the FBI has been experimenting with drones since 1999. The FBI has previously divulged that it first used the vehicles in operations in 2006, but it’s only in the last year that the agency has felt pressure to account for its use of unmanned aerial surveillance.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighted potential privacy issues in a September 2012 report, and the FBI director was briefly grilled about the matter in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in June.

This sudden interest in the FBI's drones came before details emerged that the agency is plenty comfortable with the glaring lack of warrant requirements on unmanned aerial surveillance. Per internal briefings from FBI lawyers, agents have the unflagging support of the Supreme Court to conduct whatever drone surveillance missions they see fit, so long as they don't use thermal imaging or other technologies to actually look through walls.

The DOJ Inspector General has meted out the most rigorous scrutiny of the FBI's drone program to date. Its interim report released in September contains only broad-stroke figures on the Bureau’s purchase and deployment of drones. But internal emails reveal that the inspector’s inquiry inspection has been anything but general, and the FBI drone office’s figures haven’t always added up.

The Bureau also had issues reconciling drone purchasing data. An April 2013 email from one financial officer complains of being “hammered with questions” on discrepancies in drone purchase orders. The FBI released a flurry of heavily redacted invoices in its first cache, and contracting officers apparently struggled to make the columns add up. Despite apparent accounting issues, the audit response documents indicate that FBI’s drone funding saw an uptick in the last two years based on increased deployment demand. Administrators finally resorted to compiling a spreadsheet of all drone purchase orders.

All email attachments were conveniently omitted from documents released to MuckRock, so these spreadsheets could not be reviewed. But emails sent as late as June 2013 indicate that inconsistencies remained as to the total number of drones in the FBI's inventory. In any case, the FBI’s accounting practices apparently satisfied the inspector general’s office in the end. The September report indicates that the FBI has spent more than $3 million on UAV equipment, maintenance, and training since 2004, with no mention of the slapdash accounting.

The FBI also quibbled on just how many of its aviation crew are certified to fly drones. In compiling its list of certified drone pilots, one administrator realized that one agent in the squad hadn’t completed the necessary training. This was news to the agent in question.

“I thought I was a qualified UAV pilot,” the agent wrote after being notified.

“[We] are not counting you for the purposes of the OIG audit,” his chief replied.

Beside this interaction, the FBI thoroughly scrubbed the documents of all staffing details for its drone operations, even down to how many part-time support staff worked in the UAV program office two years ago. Its censors justify these redactions with the claim that releasing even such minor or historical details of the drone program would undercut law enforcement operations.

The FBI justifies these redactions with the claim that releasing even such minor or historical details of the drone program would undercut law enforcement operations.

We still have no idea, then, just how many agents the FBI has trained to operate its (similarly unquantified) fleet of drones.

Whether in response to an internal audit or to transparency advocates’ prying, the FBI has resisted divulging details of its drone program. But as the result of its court loss to Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) in October, the FBI must continue to release its files. Bit by heavily redacted bit, the Drone Census will continue to cobble the pieces together.

@shawnmusgrave

Read more in the Motherboard / MuckRock Drone Census.