Is It Retroactive?

“Federal use of drones has gone way up, but it’s hard to document how much,” said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that has sued the Federal Aviation Administration for records on government drone operations. “It’s been in¬cred¬ibly difficult.”

Even Congress has struggled to uncover the extent to which the federal government uses drones as a surveillance tool in U.S. airspace.

[...]

The White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.

[...]

Most affected by the executive order would be the Pentagon, which conducts drone training missions in most states, and Homeland Security, which flies surveillance drones along the nation’s borders round-the-clock. It would also cover other agencies with little-known drone programs, including NASA, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department.

Military and law enforcement agencies would not have to reveal sensitive operations. But they would have to post basic information about their privacy safeguards for the vast amount of full-motion video and other imagery collected by drones.

Until now, the armed forces and federal law enforcement agencies have been reflexively secretive about drone flights and even less forthcoming about how often they use the aircraft to conduct domestic surveillance.

  WaPo

There are always tactics to follow the letter of the law without following the spirit of it.

In March 2013, lawmakers directed the Defense Department to produce a report, within 90 days, describing its policies for sharing drone surveillance imagery with law enforcement agencies.

Eighteen months later, the Pentagon still has not completed the report. Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Crosson, a Defense Department spokesman, said officials hoped to provide an interim response next week and a full version “in the coming months.”

Right.