A staple of Washington’s war missions, targeted assassinations and spying operations overseas, unmanned aerial vehicles, known as drones, are now being used by US police in the domestic arena, stirring up privacy concerns among Americans.

According to John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney from the Rutherford Institute, US police departments have been authorized to use drones extensively in pursuit of their duties on home soil. “There have been, I think, almost 266 applications that have been approved for police departments to use drones as aerial surveillance devices,” he said.

Drones can be armed with a wide range of surveillance technology, including high-powered zoom lenses and infrared and ultraviolet imaging.

“All of this is conscious and intentional,” said author and columnist Paul Craig Roberts. “They are putting in place a method of controlling a population that may be unemployed, hungry or very angry and I think the state and local police are not just militarized, but they are being federalized.”

According to trends forecaster Gerald Celente, the United States is gradually turning into one big Homeland Security enterprise. “The United States is not only now a military industrial complex. It is a Homeland Security complex. They have merged into one,” he added.

A fresh lawsuit has been launched against the US Department of Transportation for allegedly withholding records pertaining to the domestic use of drones. Currently, the American public cannot find out why drones are being used or who is controlling them.