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Comment by benmowa | Hacker News Reader

>"Tamez said there is no easy way for prisons to protect against the use of small, unmanned aircraft, other than hiring more guards to watch the fences."

Can the drone and controller radio signals be detected, recognized and triangulated? seems cheaper than staffing up..

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well prisons aren't even allowed to block cell phones within prison walls, the state of Georgia confiscated over twenty two thousand cell phones in 2016. Yes, twenty two thousand. [1]. This lets them continue to commit crimes while behind bars.

The rules that prevent anyone else from blocking radio and cellular signals apply to prisons as well. so in a battle against drones one of the only steps would be to keep all inmates inside 24x7 but that still leaves you with exposure on details and worst yet, the staff.

http://www.myajc.com/news/local/georgia-prisons-inmates-use-...

> well prisons aren't even allowed to block cell phones within prison walls, the state of Georgia confiscated over twenty two thousand cell phones in 2016.

Seems to me that blocking cell phones is the wrong solution; preventing smuggling of contraband is the solution.

If you can smuggle cellphones in, cellphones are far from your only problem, and probably far from your biggest.

Seems like it'd be a lot easier to jam cellphones with a few hundred bucks worth of parts than apply Supermax security standards to every low-security inmate.

The technology isn't the issue. FCC and similar regulations are.

I'm aware of that. This seems like the sort of thing where an exemption should be a no-brainer, and I'm fairly shocked there hasn't been a law allowing jammers in prisons yet.

Even if that worked, it will only buy a little bit of time. Drones already have partial autonomy capabilities and will probably be fully autonomous, with no signals to jam, before too long.

You could jam the GPS.

you could fly high, you could use optical flow, pattern detection

Military aircraft and missiles use celestial navigation in GPS denied areas. All you need is one or two cameras pointed up and a bit of software.

The Trident system did it back in the 70s, it's not really that hard.

Not always.

You can use cameras [1] plus magnetometers and accelerometers to do dead reckoning and get pretty good results.

[1] https://pixhawk.org/modules/px4flow

A company called Skysafe released some press in 2015 (nothing since), which showed them taking control of a DJI Phantom 2. It should definitely be feasible to intercept and take over many consumer drones, with the right hardware, but there may be some FCC limitations to consider.

The reason they haven't released anything since the Phantom 2 is because that was the last DJI drone before they started using the Lightbridge protocol. Lightbridge (and now OcuSync) have strong encryption and have not been broken yet AFAIK.

How about a net?

Yeah, it's not like 3D, open-to-weather but not flying things (usually birds have been the bigger concern) enclosures are a new concept.

https://www.droneshield.com

They have a detector that can listen for drones that people can't hear.

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