Unmanned surveillance balloons are being launched from South Dakota to conduct surveillance over the Midwest, prompting concerns that it could violate South Dakotans' privacy.

The balloons were launched to provide "a persistent surveillance system" for narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats, according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The balloons were launched from Baltic, about 20 miles north of Sioux Falls, and will travel up to a maximum altitude of 65,000 feet off the ground in a radius of 250 miles, according to the filing. The FCC authorized the corporation's temporary balloons on July 12 and the authorization will expire on Sept. 1.

The Pentagon is testing the solar-powered balloons, which are carrying hi-tech radars designed to track vehicles day or night and in any kind of weather, The Guardian reported on Friday. The Guardian reported that the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) commissioned the tests, and the balloons are carrying sensors and communication gear capable of detecting every vehicle in motion in a 25-mile range beneath the balloon. It's unknown if the tests are connected to any active investigations and if vehicle data would be stored or passed onto other agencies.

It's a federal government project and the state wasn't involved in planning or logistics of the balloon launch, according to Kristin Wileman, spokeswoman for Gov. Kristi Noem.

"If the state of South Dakota can contribute in some small way to stopping the flow of drugs in our communities and country by hosting a balloon launch, we're proud to play a role," Wileman said.

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Southcom referred the Argus Leader's request for a comment to the Pentagon and the Argus Leader hasn't received the information it requested from the Pentagon as of presstime Friday. The Sierra Nevada Corporation, a electronics and engineering contractor with the U.S. Department of Defense, filed the special temporary authorization request with the FCC. It did not return the Argus Leader's requests for comment.

The Guardian reported that Sioux Falls business Raven Aerostar supplied the balloons and launched them from its South Dakota facility about a month ago. The company didn't return the Argus Leader's request for comment. Raven has also supplied the balloons used by Project Loon, an experiment by Google parent company Alphabet to test beaming internet connectivity down from balloons.

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Privacy concerns

The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota raised concerns that the balloons' surveillance could violate South Dakotans' privacy, and called on the military to be clear about it's actions in South Dakota.

The technology is capable of recording and storing all public movement over entire cities or metro areas and that level of mass surveillance destroys any level of anonymity South Dakotans have, according to Libby Skarin, policy director for the ACLU of South Dakota.

"There are so many unanswered questions here. What kind of information is being collected? What information is being stored? Who has access to this information? Is the surveillance for law enforcement purposes?" Skarin said. "At a minimum, there should be consultation and approval from local communities before the federal government subjects South Dakotans to area-wide surveillance."

The technology was developed for the battlefield for activities such as finding improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan and it's migrated to civilian use without any oversight, according to Libby Skarin, policy director of the ACLU of South Dakota.

"Technology like this runs the risk of turning South Dakota into a surveillance stat and is violating the privacy of every South Dakotan. We're not talking about closed-circuit TV cameras or camera in discrete places," Skarin said. "This is area-wide surveillance that essentially creates a pervasive checkpoint over entire cities and metro area."

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of privacy three times in the last seven years when it comes to advances in technology. In the most recent case in 2018, the Court ruled that the government violates the Fourth Amendment by accessing without a search warrant historical records containing the physical locations of cell phones. The Court said that there's a distinction between being observable where law enforcement can follow a person and being observable in the day of technological advances where a camera can follow an entire area.