U.S. Marshals Service Experiments With Domestic Drone Surveillance

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.

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