A Criminal Gang Used a Drone Swarm to Obstruct an FBI Hostage Raid
defenseone.com
defenseone.com
Imagine if it thr subject were encryption instead of drones.
Police are able to shoo people away from crime/accident scenes, that should apply to devices too, and can't they solve it by having a device that shoots out a net? (Or does that only exist in movies?) US police can apply for federal military gear for cheap anyway (not that that's a good thing, police should deescalate, not escalate situations).
> hostage rescue team set up an elevated observation post
> the head of the agency’s operational technology law unit told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference here.
We don't know when this incident occurred nor do we know if this was a surveillance op or part of an actual raid. The article is possibly FUD, but this isn't outside of the realm of possibility.
In my neck of the woods, drones have been known to drop contraband in prime locations at our state maximum-security prison[0]. Surveillance, and counter-surveillance is not a huge leap to make from there. Being able to disrupt a top-tier police unit for a few grand is money well spent.
[0] - https://www.postandcourier.com/news/in-south-carolina-the-fi...
Moderately sophisticated people can do all sorts of things to undermine police activity, especially raids. Think about things like detecting WiFi, tactical radios or Bluetooth devices.
The police operate in a dark world, and the counterparties that they interact with are fundamentally bad actors.
What regulation? You can build your own drone with open source software. People with criminal intent are not going to build their drones according to regulations and put in a transponder that broadcasts their ID.
If you don't want drones around just plug your taser into a magnetron...
The guys at the top are much smarter, and are running in some cases multi-billion dollar operations. You have to be smart to be in charge of something at that scale, whether it's Wal-Mart or MS-13. I'm not saying the gang bosses are good, but many of them are smart. They have "technology teams" of sorts. After all, somebody thought to strap drugs to drones and experimented with payloads before sending them...
Most criminals are honestly pretty dumb. Real life isn't like the movies.
You don't have to know how to build it yourself, you just need to stick a gun in the ribcage of someone who does.
https://www.budk.com/ProductDetail.aspx?itemno=56%20BU4303
3-Pack is $19
"Using 12 gauge rounds as the delivery system, the shells separate into tethered pieces after firing them. As these parts separate and extend outward, a web is created that is 5' in diameter. When the SKYNET round reaches the drone, the tethers and round pieces wrap around the drone, interfering with the propellers and forcing the drone to the ground. If the SKYNET round misses the target, it is designed to parachute safely to the ground to reduce any unwanted damage or injury. There are three in the pack."
(edit, parenthetical for clarity)
> One would make it illegal to “weaponize” consumer drones.
> The other — and arguably more important — amendment would require drones that fly beyond their operators’ line of sight to broadcast an identity allowing law enforcement to track and connect them to a real person.
Literally neither of these would have had any effect on the case at hand. I'm reminded of gun control legislation - except you can't build a gun from scratch in your basement and quadcopters are very ineffective at killing people.
You can't? While the equipment isn't something everyone owns, there are those who do own it and can do it.
Take this for example (warning, language!) https://www.northeastshooters.com/xen/threads/diy-shovel-ak-...
That guy is building a receiver, then assembling. Most people who are into it are just assembling.
This is like saying you didn't make homemade bread if you didn't grow the wheat out back. It is a pointless statement countering an assertion no one asserted because the rest of us know that home made bread means from store bought ingredients unless specified otherwise.
Making primers and smokeless powder might be tricky, but the mechanical stuff is easy peasy.
Blatantly false for that bit, but I agree with the rest of what you're saying.
> The other — and arguably more important — amendment would require drones that fly beyond their operators’ line of sight to broadcast an identity allowing law enforcement to track and connect them to a real person.
Not terribly hard to circumvent, just put in the data of a public official.
To bring it back, it is perfectly legal to build guns or even vehicles in your basement or garage, but if you wish to operate either of them then they must conform to some standards in order to make them legal. Same with quadcopters, if you build one in your basement and wish to operate it legally, it should be required to identify you as the owner. Whether that is compiling in a hash identifier that's tied to a national database of registered operators, or a postit note with your name on it taped to the bottom is irrelevant. If you're found operating a drone without the identifier, you should be charged with violating the laws. There will always be people that build untraceable "ghost" drones or guns, but from my quick research untraceable guns make up less than one percent of all known weapons used in crimes. Until it starts reaching a couple percent, it seems like off the shelf guns or drones will continue to be the issue. There is almost zero barrier to entry outside of cost to owning a drone. They'll continue to become cheaper as time moves on, so the problem will only get worse. Until they get banned entirely, drones made in a non-production facility like a basement intended to evade law enforcement are a non-issue.
i dunno. i hear these 'backyard' gun makers in the Philippines are pretty advanced
https://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2013/04/08/backyard-gun-sh...
Can't build a a very sophisticated gun, but it is certainly possible to fabricate something that shoots bullets after nothing but a trip to the hardware store. For both your legal and physical well being, I do not recommend trying it.
Effectiveness: When they outlaw drones, then only outlaws will have drones. Wait a second, the outlaws already have drones, so if they make drones illegal then they're not actually doing anything but causing problems for law abiding citizens. The criminals will continue breaking the law.
Liberty: Combine the previous two and you get liberty. Outlawing drones will not be effective in protecting citizenry or the interests of the state in serving the citizenry. Owning a drone is pretty cool. If there is a cool thing that I can own AND me owning it doesn't cause effect the well-being of my fellow citizens then a state that is interested in freedom and liberty will allow me to own it.
On the other hand if the state is interested in oppressing the citizenry, then outlawing drones would be an acceptable action to take.
Personally, I would rather live in a state that tends towards enabling liberty in the citizenry instead of one that tends towards oppressing the citizenry.
The article states that the services used to relay data links were common wi-fi and ordinary cellular telephone service.
The first thing that usually happens in a war zone is HAM radio service experiences disruption. [0] Cell phone back doors via CALEA [1] are already used to disrupt would-be suicide bombers around the world, and yes even in the United States. [2]
If push comes to shove, we'll all lose wi-fi and cell phones in an area of effect, around any hostile activity, whenever shit gets real.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-radio14jan14-story.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
[2] http://codegreenprep.com/2013/04/boston-bombing-shows-you-ca...
The point being that, if "criminal gangs" are up to no good, but they're parting their equipment with off-the-shelf Best Buy and Radio Shack products, they probably aren't programming DSP interfaces, aren't encoding and decoding raw bit streams, aren't masking binary objects with base64 blobs, aren't rolling their own encryption.
Or, if they are rolling their own encryption, they're using Excel spreadsheets to do it. [0]
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_s...
I've never seen a remote control quad copter sold off the shelve with IR LED TV remote style I/O for it's tranceiver control system.
I had the impression, you can't out-light shadows for example.
The biggest limitations are water vapor in the air, precipitation and dust. Also, the distance is rather limited compared to radio.
Trained falcons and eagles are being used by police forces already:
https://www.google.dk/search?q=training+birds+to+attack+dron...
I don't know if any counter-measures are getting popular yet, but it's probably cheaper to poison or shoot them than explode them.
Even if we somehow restrict criminals from getting drone AI (which is on it's face reasonable ... most AI experts probably don't want their work falling into the hands of criminals building kill bots), then I doubt we'll be willing to restrict people from owning half-life because it turns out its AI makes a good autonomous FBI obstructing bot.
Regulation to prevent access to these capabilities feels like throwing rocks into a river; it may slow some things down, but it seems an inevitability that the capabilities of technologically augmented citizens will continue to grow - we as a society need to work out how to adapt to deal with this future in a meaningful way, avoiding knee-jerk policies like drone registration that inconvenience the masses and serve as no real barrier to the malicious.
There are a lot of crime of opportunity but just as much criminality from circumstance.
These are smart people doing very bad things, they need to be identified and put to constructive and rewarding work.
Not saying the idea isn't correct - just that theres a lot left to figure out in the details.
People cant get to gym or eat healthy even if it has massive differences to their life style.
Decriminalisation of drugs (Portugal) would not negate the need of going after importers and large scale dealers.
To solve illegal immigration, UBI has to be extended globally - and then the border can simply be taken down.
i like this idea, but i can not quite see how the US constitution's system of individual rights would allow the government to "put" anyone to work. the most it could do is offer someone a job.
and that someone would be free to reject such an offer because it wasn't profitable enough, or because criminal friends and acquaintances might prove to be very threatening to someone if someone were to accept such a job.
We also need to stop criminalizing voluntary activity of adult and only criminalize things that injure or harm people involuntarily (i.e legalize drugs, prostitution, etc)
Oh no siree bob...that must be stopped with only government authorities to have these abilities
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For the record, I don't think drones are exactly equivalent to firearms. But the parallels between the comments here and those of gun advocates is something that should make people stop and go, "hmm."
> Why do I smell propaganda (for more gun laws) when I read this?
(And arguably worse than propaganda for drone laws, on account of the 2nd Amendment and the reasons we have it.)
What's your point?
(Just to be clear: I'm strongly in favor of gun regulation; there's a huge difference between something whose primary use it to harm people from tools and toys).
A drone monitoring people who come in and out of a police station would be a monumental task. Take the flight time of a drone, one that is both small enough to not be noticed and yet powerful enough to spot people's faces. These things have flight time measured in minutes. It would take a team of people and a fleet of a dozen drones. This is batman-v-joker stuff.
Same too with the drones used at the boarder. A drone has a limited useful range, perhaps a kilometer at most. So people will still need to hike into the area. And the drones need recharge/refuel. A man standing on a mountain with a telescope can continuously observe a greater area than a hundred drones. I don't see the efficiency.
Perhaps the bad guys have experimented and these experiments have been spotted, but I cannot believe that these are common practices.
This presents the Perfect opportunity to zero in on dodgy containers of contraband.. walk around coming from various directions till the drones come and they will show the area to search
The article mentions a few options for how the authorities will limit the criminal applications but I wonder if it'll get more extreme than that (especially after we end up with a terrorist attack perpetrated by someone using a drone). It won't solve all negative use cases but I wonder if there's some way for drone manufacturers to create no fly zones automatically that will cause a drone to redirect if it enters one and allows law enforcement to create new temporary zones for situations like the one described in the article.
edit for clarity
It's not easy to spot if it's in a no fly zone.
It's probably also possible (not sure how easy) to identify the the specific RC controller that's paired with the offending drone, even if there are other people flying their drones safely in the same general area.
I don't know what the answer is, other than to hope that most people continue to be mostly good.
In case you haven't seen it, the short film "Slaughterbots" is worth a watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
So LE should get counter-drones. But then the “bad guys” will get anti-counter-drones.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/12/16767000/police-netherla...
This reminds me of the not well aged The Big Hit:
It works well on Syria. I doubt it'd work well on Russia/China.
The B-2 was specifically designed to penetrate Russian (Soviet) airspace. Hopefully we'll never find out whether it works.
Any B-2 run on Russia/China would've been a "hope some get through" sort of scenario. There's no reason to take that sort of risk on a $2B aircraft when dealing with a country like Libya or Syria.
How do you propose that we stealth a drone that has to fly literally right to the target's face?
There is a robust regulatory regime at the Federal and State level for keeping, training and hunting birds of prey. There are significant penalties, including Federal felony-level offenses for straying from the path. You're probably going to get in more trouble for abusing birds than whatever you're doing.
Criminals don't need laws to keep turning them more into criminals. They need a chance to be reeducated and truly be capable of changing their lifestyle. Not sure what the better answers are but more policies wont do much. Just simple tech that shuts those drones down works easier.
That doesn't mean that laws are our only defense. I'm 100% fine with slaughterbots, because the same exact kind of bot can be used to hunt down and destroy stolen or "bootleg" slaughterbots.
Examples of successful regulation abound. It's pretty trivial to build (and has been for many years) a device that interferes with broadcast signals or mobile phones, yet we don't have a pervasive problem with this type of interference. We rely on voluntary compliance for income taxes, for example, and have a very effective system despite how trivial it is to avoid taxation. We rely on voluntary compliance with traffic laws and use licensing and sanctions to control violations.
The problem with drones is that unlike traditional aviation, right now there is no privilege associated with that can be taken away. Until that happens, you're left with prohibitions enforced by criminal sanction.
Another issue is that much progress in the past has been the product of unlawful activity. How long would slavery have lasted if abolitionists were able to have been effectively snuffed out? How would it be if the "founding fathers" instead were rotely hung, drawn, and quartered -- a practice that persisted in the English empire all the way up until 1870? Would America have been a better or worse place if every person who ever once indulged in a controlled substance or drunk before age was prosecuted? Imagine if prohibition or other morality based laws, including for instance laws against homosexuality, could have been effectively enacted. What sort of path of puritanism would that have set us on?
Of course I don't think anybody knows the answers to these questions, but I do think there is a strong argument that law enforcement does not have an inherent right to any means that would make their work more efficient. So do police have a right to obstruct all of society's freedom to operate drones for the sake of increased efficiency? I am not sure, but I do think any issue that proposes sacrificing freedom for security should be questioned.
> The most fundamental issue is that history has shown time and again that the corruption of the powers that be is not a question of if but a question of when.
History has also shown it goes the other way as well.
Most people are naturally not particularly well informed on most things. Expecting them to collectively vote on the people most likely to lead them in all things is bound to result in bad results more than occasionally. Even moreso when we're so easily manipulated by tribalism, charisma, and so on. A successful politician and a successful conman share mostly the same skill set! And restricting voting to some group deemed sufficiently informed is an even worse solution as you'd end up with something like gerrymandering ramped up exponentially.
Elaborate on "history has shown it goes the other way as well"?
Would you still say everything's fine and we shouldn't make them less efficient because we're worried about hypotheticals?
Until then, this distinction ("until criminals and terrorists") doesn't really mean anything, when state actors regularly act indistinguishably from criminals and terrorists.
In that case, a dumb human remote-controlled flying machine gun achievable by hobbyists is about just scary (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU
But mostly because of the machine gun.
Similarly in the kamikaze drones case, just make sure no one can amass a large amount of explosives they can strap onto quadcopters.
Assuming we're talking about 10-20 years from now, what kind of power source could work for a longer period of time without increasing the size?
The USAF is playing with latching onto powerlines. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13093-spy-planes-to-r...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/massive-fire-after-kite-with-molotov-cocktail-attached-sent-from-gaza-1.6052362Took me a while to realise this wasn't really real.
Reminds me of a cheap action thriller I read where ant-swarm behaviour is used to program swarms of drones for exactly this kind of stuff.
I'm 100% fine with these automated killing-machines, and with the implications. (Heck, I'd be more than happy to help develop them, if I had the appropriate skillset.) Because our military's allegiance is to the Constitution not to any single executive administration; because the military have far more resources to purchase bots or counterbots than the police do; and because only an idiot would actually have that tech and yet fail to also have, at minimum, an equally-maneuverable ablative countermeasure drone.
(I should clarify here, that this also depends on that I think that it will indeed be our military who gets them first, not some other nation. ... Unless all of this overly-pacifistic discussion somehow convinces enough of the right people that the U.S. should abandon such research, which is why it's important that this video not be heeded. If and only if some other nation perfects the tech first, then the video's intended sentiment gains merit; that is why we must push forward, Damn The Torpedoes(TM).)
This is because, as usual, the devil is in the details. These are drones, not nukes. Nukes have effects for miles away and are so powerful that a nuclear shaped-charge is impossible; but suicide-drones have to fly directly to their target and reach it intact.
So the same amount of shaped-explosive that can crack a skull, can neutralize one of these drones. As such, the braindead-simple countermeasure is to retarget your own supply of these same drones, at the stolen drones. At worst, your IFF radios might add a negligible amount of mass ... but that won't matter for long, because once the enemy knows you're deploying counterdrones, they'll need their own IFF radios (or at least IFF radio receivers) in order to try to avoid your counterdrones.
(Or the enemy could add armor to their drones, but that will make them massive/unmaneuverable enough that you can increase your counterdrones' explosive payload to penetrate their armor, while still being able to intercept them.)
That is why having slaughterbots and not any countermeasures, is the realm of abject idiocy.
If you're looking for historical analogy, try military aviation in general. During the two World Wars, bomber planes would have been game-changing ... if not that there were fighters, too. A slaughterbot is a bomber; a slaughterbot that seeks the enemy's slaughterbots is a fighter.
(I should also point out that, like the Flying Fortress, this tech won't have a limitless lifespan: once lasers are weaponized or railguns are miniaturized, air defense against macroscopic subsonic objects will become almost trivial. Just like supersonic aircraft with rotary autocannons and laser-guided missiles make a mockery of the Flying Fortress.)
Law enforcement should be as many steps ahead of criminals as possible, provided their capabilities do not infringe on our rights as citizens.
For example blowing people up with a robot bomb without giving them a trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
Police we're being directly fired upon. Should officers not fire back when they are fired upon?
Therefore, drones need identification. There must be a number on it and there must be a law forbidding to operate a drone without number.
In Germany drones from 250g up must have a fireproof plaque with name and address of the owner. If it falls down, you'll be able to read it. No need for ID broadcasting. Or even IDs.
So does this apply to everything a person can be "irresponsible" with? I can be "irresponsible" with my hammer do I need hammer regulation?
How far do you want to go into Authoritarianism?
I value personal liberty and privacy over any perceived and hyped "safety" justifications used to violate that liberty and privacy, for which the advertised safety benefits/need hardly ever materialize