NJ drone incidents fuel government push for more anti-drone powers as current authorities expire

The Mysterious Focused Drone Phenomenon in New Jersey has prompted government officials to make fresh calls to expand the power as its anti-drone authorization expires this week.

The current drone accounting authorities, authorized as part of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, give both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) the authority to use advanced detection technologies to identify, track and intercept law-abiding drones.

The 2018 measure exempts agencies from other laws that prevent warrantless interference with aircraft and wiretapping. It expires on Dec. 20, and lawmakers must attach a last-minute extension aa invoice for provisional expenses to fund the government this week to avoid a lapse.

But government officials say the piecemeal, 11th-hour approach hurts their capacity countering drone threats.

“We can’t budget properly, we can’t plan strategically for the future,” Steven Willoughby, deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-drone office, said during a security forum last week.

“The administration has been seeking, for several years, additional authorities to expand counter-UAS authorities, both of the federal government, which are very limited, and also to give state and local authorities the authority to use certain C-UAS technologies with federal oversight,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters on a call over the weekend. “This legislation has been pending.”

DRONE MYSTERY: NEW JERSEY HOMEOWNERS THREAT TO FIND IT ON THEIR OWN HANDS IF GOVERNMENT DOESN’T ACT

A DHS official said that while “there is no known malicious activity in New Jersey,” the sightings there “highlight a gap in our current authorities, and so we would. urge Congress to pass our important anti-UAS legislation.”

The White House-backed UAS Authority, Safety, and Reauthorization Act of 2024 would expand the government’s drone authorities and renew them through 2028, and add new state and local drone authorities.

But a separate, bipartisan House plan would scale back proposed state and local authorities in favor of authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to phase out drones, instead of just regulating their use in space aerial

But lawmakers don’t have time to resolve their disputes over which agency should get which authority before the agencies lose their powers entirely, so the limited extension of authority tied to the stopgap measure is expected to only last a few months.

DRONE EXPERTS DISMISS US GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT, CERTAIN TO OTHER NEW JERSEY DRONE PHENOMENON THEORIES

For nearly a month, New Jersey residents have been alerting authorities to sightings of mysterious drones, some as wide as six feet, hovering in the night sky. Sightings have ranged from 4 to 180, with some appearing to be operating in a coordinated fashion, and some unmanned aerial systems have been spotted near the Picatinny Arsenal and the Naval Weapons Station at earl.

Law enforcement has been able to offer little explanation for the phenomenon, but they steered the public away from the assumption that the drones come from a foreign adversary.

“So far, we have no intelligence or observations that indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent,” a Defense Department official told reporters over the weekend. “But I simply have to tell you that we don’t know.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“We have not been able to locate or identify the operators or the points of origin. We have very limited authorities when it comes to moving from the base,” added the official.

“We are also significantly restricted, and rightly so, indeed prohibited, from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance here in the homeland.”

Additional sightings of unauthorized drones were reported near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where officials closed the airspace for four hours due to the sighting, and the base of the United States Air Force from Ramstein in Germany in recent days.