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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Drones are less practical than existing tools for most everything you just listed.

For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results. The only thing a drone can better do is look down at your roof, or over your fence if your fence is higher than nearby buildings.

For assassination, traditional tools are clearly more practical in nearly every case. A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.

I don't really know how arsonists generally do their thing, but I can't imagine that dropping something flammable is more practical than just driving by and throwing it.

I'm sure there are very specific cases where sophisticated drone usage could be useful for committing these crimes, but I don't think it's a major concern, and not even one of the biggest concerns of drones.

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You seem to be only considering the moment of crime and disregarding what happens before and after it. A tool that almost completely removes risk of getting caught and need for alibi will surely be seen as more practical by all except mad and ridiculously dumb people, regardless of how less effective it is.

A drone leaves all that bomb trace leaves and more - its construction, hair skin and dna traces of the builder, even its radio control details. So its not perfect; its more like leaving the rifle at the scene.

And the idea that shooting a gun brings down some hailstorm of official response is myth. Fire a gun in most places and ... nothing will happen. Folks will rush to the scene of any murder, but will only find the sniper's location after hours or days of investigation. It won't be like the NCIS show where the investigator glances around and says 'must have come from that rooftop; its the only secure sniper post in a half-mile!' You can shoot from nearly anywhere with line-of-sight, from the partly-open door of a parked delivery van, without much risk of discovery.

"Shotgun-Toting New Jersey Man Shoots Down Man's Drone", charged with criminal mischief and weapons charges: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/weird/Drone-Shot-Down-Lo...

I considered the likelihood of getting caught as well. I mentioned that explicitly in the rifle example. It's fairly obvious for the telescope example. For arson, again, I don't know much about how arson tends to be committed, but it seems that a drone is not inherently harder to track than a car, bicycle, or person on foot, given the range, speed, reliability, and conspicuousness of those modes of transportation.

How would you trace back a drone that shoots a bullet then wipes its data and dies?

A drone with a gun is unrealistic, I think. The stability of a light, air-borne vehicle is just not good enough. A drone with fragmentation grenades, on the other hand, could work well and pretty much erase all evidence.

I'm mostly commenting because I think the "small drone with a gun" idea is interesting; no idea how it would play out in practice.

If you had a drone with a weapon, I would think you'd want to fire on someone using some variation of Tracking Point style hardware [1], except partially self aimed. Basically see the target, paint the target, drone uses internal sensors to detect a brief instant of random stability and fires the weapon

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gun-linux-on-the-rang...

On the show Sons of guns, they already made a drone that can shoot a pistol. Not very hard to do. Drones can withstand very high winds and hold position very easily, lots of hand guns have very little recoil and can easily be shot from a drone with very good accuracy.

Fragmentation grenades are presumably fairly difficult to come by. I think it's laughable to worry about an autonomous or remotely piloted drone assassinating people with fragmentation grenades when a normal firearm operated by a human is extremely practical and seems to work well enough. The latter is designed for nearly that exact purpose, and refined over centuries. They're cheap, easy to use, easy to get (in some places), and reliable.

when a normal firearm operated by a human is extremely practical

Again, doing a crime and getting away with a crime are two enormously different things. The truth is that the majority of humanity can commit terrible crimes with utter ease. There is absolutely no question about that.

Most of us don't, however, because of morality and our nature. The rest don't because they don't want to spend the rest of their life in jail, and for major crimes the probability of getting caught is enormously high. Things that reduce that probability (and a device that means you don't have to be on or even near the site, and can extract 100% of evidence with a very high degree of success, does that) open up opportunities for people to do such crimes.

As a parallel, someone mentioned bitcoins, and bitcoins absolutely opened up the world of casual extortion, because suddenly you don't have to go to a mailbox or meet in a park.

Do you watch the news? Flying machines with guns are decades old tech. Drone versions are actively used. Welcome to the present.

Fingerprints, hair or clothing samples, asking nearby drone hobbyists if they might know anyone into drones who might want to murder the victim, sales records of retailers of drones or drone supplies, and of course the normal stuff, like who would want the victim killed in the first place.

I'm not a detective, but I suspect having the large, complex piece of electronic equipment that was used as the weapon would be a godsend compared to the evidence available in a normal murder or assassination investigation.

Obviously the plan wouldn't be "drop the drone at the scene of the crime". Why would anyone ever do that? I mean, of course they would minimize the reveal were that to happen (though note that drones are becoming absolutely pedestrian, so this notion that you talk to the niche club and find the drone enthusiast is absurd), but the rational plan would be that the drone would escape as well. Because its odds of escape, currently, barring mechanical defect, would be close to 100%. No one is going to catch a drone.

The MAC addresses for the wireless interfaces are likely trackable to an individual purchase.

Perhaps. But a wlan card taken from a discarded/stolen/recyled/used corporate machine, then transported half-around the globe and sold for cash, isn't necessarily easy to trace back to a perpetrator.

Often they can be wiped as well.

In some cases yes, but that requires additional expertise.

Not much. The OS has a utility to do it.

What? ifconfig or My Network Places in Windows. Adapter cards had to have their mac address programmed once; it can be done again. Its firmware.

"For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results."

I'm not sure I agree with this at all. Drones allow you to access viewpoints that are otherwise impossible using telescopes at a fraction of the overall cost.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLB66lge6oA&list=UUZfBMqj1pN...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98

> A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.

Perhaps, but you've still got to pay the guy holding the rifle. A drone could self-terminate. Most parts can be 3D-printed & assembled in a clean tent, untraceable. The most expensive part is possibly the infrared camera ($1~2k).

There's Seek Thermal Camera that has a decent resolution (200x156) and a low price ($200): http://obtain.thermal.com/category-s/1818.htm

> For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical.

Well, say I set up a drone for remote control over the internet, then rent it out to people that are located half around the globe. I act as a cut out, and whomever is spying will (may[1]) be hard to track.

[1] If I'm getting paid, there's the issue of anonymous transactions, and as for control, latency might be too high to use Tor -- but the main point is that drones already facilitate something new, if not revolutionary new.

I think the biggest 'benefit' to having a drone perform these tasks is the fact a robot is carrying out the task.

For example, instructing a drone to assassinate is potentially closer to hiring a hitman, than murdering someone firsthand with a shotgun. Closer in the sense that the puportrator feels a sense of detachment.

As hamstergene mentioned, drones are the before and after risk abatement.

A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.

Aside from the difficulty of a few hundred meter shot in urban settings, shooting a weapon from a location announces where you are, exactly when you are there. Aside from the immediate and overwhelming response likely, the human traces would be enormous and unavailable. A drone, in contrast, comes from some unknown place off in some unknown direction, can with ease get anywhere near the target (on a nearby roof for instance), and then when the task is complete it can go low and fast and get back to a drop-off. For arson and peeping, the same premise holds -- a drone can go to exactly where is needed, do what is necessary, and get away with, currently, essentially zero risk of capture.

Will we eventually have drone registrations and tracking systems, comprehensive urban radio tracking and announcement, police overrides, etc? Yeah, probably, which was what I was getting at -- events will inevitably happen, and regulations will adjust.

These types of assassinations don't seem to happen very often, so there probably isn't much actual data. But I would expect that a single shot of a rifle is quite difficult to pinpoint, especially in an urban setting. There are audio gunfire locators that some cities have, but even then, the assassin can be long gone by the time anyone could respond. Just drive a car into a nearby parking garage, do the thing, and leave. For a drone operation, the setup and "mission" time is almost certainly much longer. I don't think we're anywhere near fully autonomous missions that could assassinate with any appreciable reliability, so you're going to need to fly line of sight (very impractical because of the range) or FPV (still impractical because of the required skill, equipment and mission time).

Could a professional band of assassins pull off an assassination with a drone? Certainly. Would it be far easier to just use a rifle? I'd say absolutely.

The us military finds drones more practical for bombing.

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