Critics often deride those wary of government surveillance as paranoid tinfoil hat wearers. We're learning now that paranoia may be entirely appropriate. It turns out the FBI really is watching Americans from the sky. We know this because the FBI itself said so. The AP story reads like a twisted Alice-in-Wonderland tale. FBI officials told Congress the program is unclassified and not secret, but then refused to answer certain questions in public. They were simple questions, too. How many planes does the FBI have? What is the aerial surveillance program's cost? From what little they did say, it looks like the program started 30 years ago. That would be 1985, long before anyone feared ISIS or Osama bin Laden. What was the FBI watching from above back then? We know very little more about the FBI's targets today. According to AP, most of the bureau aircraft lack high-definition video cameras. Officials claim to have only tracked cell phones five times in the last five years. They also say the planes don't conduct mass surveillance or bulk intelligence collection. What in the world are they doing up there, then? For a program that is supposedly not secret, the FBI went to great lengths to disguise its ownership of the planes. The tail numbers led to shell companies with Virginia P.O. box addresses. The ruse didn't work, mainly because the Justice Department owned the PO boxes and used them publicly for other purposes, too...... This "program" doesn't even seem to have a name? If it's 30 years old, that's extremely damaging -- shows the feds have (surprise SURPRISE) been clinically paranoid for a long long time. NN