The FBI has had an eager eye on surveillance drones since first experimenting with remote control airplanes in 1995. But budget cuts nearly ended the Bureau’s unmanned machinations in 2010, and it took a dedicated push aimed at making drones “a tool the FBI cannot do without” to cement their place in the FBI’s surveillance toolkit.

The near termination — and subsequent expansion — of the FBI’s drone program over the past four years is chronicled in hundreds of heavily-redacted pages released under a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over the past several months.

The FBI’s Video Surveillance Unit took over the agency’s drone program in summer 2010. The Technical Response Unit, another component within the Operational Technology Division, had been overseen the program since 2003. The FBI flew its first operational drone mission in October 2006, but documents suggest no operational deployments were flown in the next four years before VSU took over the program.

Two months after the handoff, the VSU chief outlined the program’s close brush with cancellation and the unit’s bold ambition’s for unmanned vehicles.

“I know this program can be a huge benefit to the FBI if given the right support,” wrote the VSU chief in a July 2010 email. “I wasn’t present at a meeting two weeks ago where it was mentioned that folks in this Division was looking at cutting the UAS program out entirely to meet the budget cuts we’re facing next year.”

The released FBI documents do not indicate what saved the agency’s drones from the budget hangman. But the VSU chief’s vision upon taking up the program was to make it “a tool the FBI cannot do without.” This would require building demand for drone backup from field agents, as well as drumming up support among senior FBI and Justice Department officials.

As it began a new fiscal year, the FBI drone team set a number of goals to advance the program, which included codifying a process for field offices to request unmanned technical assistance. The Quantico-based team spread word of their wares and protocol to request them by a variety of channels. In a May 2011 newsletter, the VSU boldly declared to agents from coast to coast, “The UAV Program is mission ready and fully operational” and is “actively pursuing additional [Federal Aviation Administration] approvals.”

These promotion efforts apparently paid off: the FBI flew at least two drone missions in 2011, and agency documents indicate that at least six unmanned surveillance operations were approved the same year. One April 2011 mission proposal was rejected in deference to the “safety of nonparticipating aircraft.” The final memo noted that even the rejected request was “well written” even if it could not be authorized.

Where fiscal year 2011 was nearly the end of FBI drones, 2012 saw a considerable upswing in budgeted UAV expenditures. Even if it’s scrubbed of actual figures, a March 2013 email from the Operational Technology Division chief clearly conveys how much more money the program spent in 2012 over the previous year.

A July 2012 slideshow looked forward to the not-too-distant “FBI UAV Future,” when the Bureau would establish “an East Coast and West Coast Operational Hub” to coordinate drone missions as well as maintain standalone drone programs in all major field offices with aviation units.

Such drone-in-every-pot dreams are hardly reality two years later, and the VSU’s enthusiasm was reined in somewhat. In September 2012, for example, an FBI contracts officer refused to allow the drone program manager to play loose with purchase orders after a manufacturer dropped prices.

“It’s hard to see the money let go, I know,” read the contract officer’s response to the UAV manager, “but I cannot violate Federal Appropriations Law.”

Even with the brakes pumped, though, the FBI managed to spend $3 million on drones from 2004 through May 2013, per figures released by the Justice Department Inspector General last fall. Seemingly paltry next to the FBI’s $8.3 billion annual budget, this figure looms much larger given that the Bureau flew a grand total of ten drone missions in that span, for a rough cost of $300,000 per operational deployment.

Even more significant than securing current funding, the FBI drone team’s efforts secured buy-in from field agents and headquarters officials alike, all the way up to the director’s office. In February 2013, FBI Director Robert Mueller, III requested a personal UAV demonstration. Four months later, Mueller confirmed before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI had a small inventory of drones, but emphasized that “our footprint is very small, we have very few and of limited use.”

In a span of three years, the FBI’s drone program went from budgetary gristle to a matter for the director’s attention. Drones may not yet be indispensable to the Bureau, but they have generated considerable momentum as a low-cost, low-profile surveillance tool. We know precious few details about how many units the Bureau has, where they’ve been deployed or what privacy protections are in place, but one thing is certain: FBI drones are here to stay.

Read the full story at Motherboard.  

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