The House of Representatives this morning took a hard line against efforts by Democrats and libertarian Republicans to limit the president’s power to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects captured in the U.S.

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have barred military detention of terrorism suspects arrested in the U.S. regardless of their nationality. Smith outlined the argument for his amendment last night:

What we’ve learned in the last 10 years is one power [the president] does not need the power to indefinitely detain or place in military custody people in the United States. Our justice system works.

But House Republicans hit back hard at the bipartisan amendment, attacking it as providing additional rights to foreign terrorists. This morning, the House defeated the Smith-Amash amendment in favor of a competing amendment sponsored by Reps. Jeff Landry (R-LA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). Their amendment, which passed this morning, prohibits the government from denying U.S. citizens their constitutional rights.

Amash slammed the all-Republican sponsored amendment as doing nothing but providing political cover for House Republicans who disingenuously claim to care about civil liberties, telling his House colleagues last night:

The first part of the amendment does nothing. In other words, if you have constitutional rights, then you have constitutional rights.

While the battle in Congress over the detention provisions in the NDAA may have come to an end with the defeat of the Smith-Nash amendment and the passage of the competing Republican amendment, legal and political challenges may await the NDAA in the very near future.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary injunction, finding that the detainee provisions in the current NDAA are unconstitutional.

And the White House, in a statement [PDF] released on Tuesday evening, listed a series of objections with the pending NDAA including: restrictions on the implementation of the New START treaty; limits on reductions for the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal; and new restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees. Moreover, the White House objected to the overall size of the bill, which surpasses President Obama’s request by $3.7 billion and exceeds the Budget Control Act spending caps by $8 billion, and threatened to veto the NDAA if sent to the President in its current form.

Drones have constituted the sharp edge of U.S. global counter-terror strategy — flying high over hot spots, surveilling suspects and occasionally launching missiles down at them. Now, scaled down versions are being used right here in the United States. The L.A. Police Department is already using them. And civilians want to harness the power and efficiency of unmanned aircraft as well. The L.A. Times reported last year, “Farmers think drones could aid in spraying their crops with pesticides.” The federal government appears poised to allow it. But civil liberties groups have raised alarms about potential pitfalls in domestic drone use, including violating the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Now, a lawsuit against the federal government places in the crosshairs the complete lack of public information about just who, exactly, would be operating these drone aircraft over the U.S.

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took the issue to the U.S. District Court in Norther California, reports the Washington Post. EFF is suing the U.S. Department of Transportation for information about domestic drones. The suit follows a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request which went unheeded by the Department and its subsidiary, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that regulates airways and therefore domestic drone use. The complaint asserts: “There is currently no information available to the public on which specific public and civil entities have applied for, been granted or been denied certificates or authorizations to fly unmanned aircraft in the United States.” EFF spokeswoman Jennifer Lynch told the Post:

Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities. As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.

Lynch said a good start towards increasing public knowledge about the programs — and the risks they pose to civil liberties — would be to know who wants to use drones, and who is getting permission to do so. “In my mind, the first step is to get the information from the FAA about who has authorization,” she said. “We don’t really know very much right now.”

The Daily Beast reports that, with cuts to the over-inflated defense budget imminent, firms that develop military technologies are looking to alternative markets. Because the products they develop are sensitive, they’ll likely be prohibited from making sales overseas. So they’re turning to domestic markets, looking to sell surveillance products like unmanned aerial “drone” vehicles — and presumably other goods, including some weapons — to everyone from local and state cops to the Department of Homeland Security:

Gulu Gambhir, the chief technology officer for the [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR)] group of [Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)], said he has seen this day coming. [...]

“A number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas ISR mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection.”

“All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” said ACLU senior fellow Jay Stanley.

Indeed, local law enforcement agencies — and even national ones — have, at times, been less-than-responsible with their surveillance, particularly of American Muslims, raising the potential for further abuse with a greater technological reach.

At Wired’s Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman’s investigative reporting has revealed a deep-seeded anti-Muslim bias among training materials used by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. That bias has also sometimes manifested itself in local law enforcement. A recent groundbreaking investigation by the AP revealed that the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) surveillance was highly focused on Muslim Americans in the city, including one local cleric who was a counter-terror partner to local and national law enforcement.

Technologies are likely to aid these type of biased surveillance. Stanley, who authored a forthcoming report on the use of drones in American cities, told the Daily Beast that police need to exercise restraint “because the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to use a thermal imaging technology to peer into someone’s home without a warrant.” But this didn’t stop the NYPD in 2004 from using infrared technology from recording a “couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse” as they had an “intimate moment.” The only reason the case came to light was because it surfaced in separate court proceedings.

Likewise, technologies developed for the military have come into much closer contact with Americans on U.S. soil. In 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, authorities deployed Long Range Acoustic Devices — or sound cannons — against demonstrators, but never fired them. That changed during the 2009 demonstrations against the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, when sound cannons were fired on protesters.

And these are just a few of the ways that military technologies can, as the ACLU’s Stanley put it, be “turned inward upon the American people.” It seems like a good space for some oversight: Lawmakers should be cautious about the implications of transferring war-making technologies over to domestic forces for use against Americans. Keeping the profit margins high for these organs of the military industrial complex — at a time when everyone is suffering from belt-tightening — is no excuse to risk encroaching on the rights of ordinary Americans.