One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

[Joe Hillshoist]

Years ago my dad and I were driving past an RC airplane range and he said, "watch this" and repeatedly tapped the talk button on his radio 3 times and we watched as all the planes started falling in stairsteps matching the interferance from his radio.

What sort of radio?

[elfismiles]

Years ago my dad and I were driving past an RC airplane range and he said, "watch this" and repeatedly tapped the talk button on his radio 3 times and we watched as all the planes started falling in stairsteps matching the interferance from his radio.

What sort of radio?

I want to say CB but I think it was more like the kind used by cops. It had one of those small hand-held tear-drop shaped mics connected to a dash-mounted receiver/transmitter via the typical CB type of coiled black cable.

[seemslikeadream]

[elfismiles]

Freud and the Drone: Robot war means more killing, less guilt
By Ed Warner • June 14, 2012
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ ... e-drone-2/

How Drones Help Al Qaeda By IBRAHIM MOTHANA
Published: June 13, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/opini ... qaeda.html

[Simulist]

Whatever it is that he really believes in, Grecian Formula* is sure to be part of it.

_________
* NEW AND IMPROVED!!! Now includes Grecian Austerity Formula for the economy!

[Project Willow]

Sorry if a re-post,, but the image caught my eye today.

Here come the MAVs.

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/02/07/johns-hopkins-researchers-develop-mav-the-size-of-a-bug/

http://phys.org/news/2012-02-butterfly-flight-bug-size-robots.html

[Joe Hillshoist]

Years ago my dad and I were driving past an RC airplane range and he said, "watch this" and repeatedly tapped the talk button on his radio 3 times and we watched as all the planes started falling in stairsteps matching the interferance from his radio.

What sort of radio?

I want to say CB but I think it was more like the kind used by cops. It had one of those small hand-held tear-drop shaped mics connected to a dash-mounted receiver/transmitter via the typical CB type of coiled black cable.

Cheers.

[Allegro]

.
Highlights mine.

_________________
Drones not used effectively on U.S. borders
— Center for Public Integrity | Updated: 3:25 pm, June 14, 2012

The key military role played by the over 7,500 drones used by the Pentagon is well-known. But until recently, the deployment of drones by the government inside U.S. borders has attracted little attention or critical oversight.

Now a new internal audit from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has raised concerns about the utility of those drones, focusing on their high costs and how they have been managed.

DHS has spent more than $250 million on its program in the past six years, and currently has nine Predator drones on call. While each drone is purchased at a cost of around $18 million each, the GAO estimated that the hourly charge is $3,234 — or almost $65,000 per 20-hour mission.

The majority of the drones are based on the U.S./Mexico border, where a growing drug war has slowly seeped into parts of California and Texas. But drones also scout the border with Canada. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified last month that UAVs were patrolling from North Dakota to eastern Washington State.

The program has had a series of operational troubles, the IG report reveals. For example, the drones have required an hour of maintenance for every hour they fly, significantly increasing their expense. Additionally, inspectors found that the drones were often grounded by bad weather.

As a result, in 2011 the drones logged only half the air time expected. During the year-long period inspectors studied, the drones logged only 37 percent of the minimum desired mission needs and 29 percent of the maximum needed.

This failure to meet expectations hasn’t tempered the government’s enthusiasm. In 2011, DHS asked for and received an additional 2 drones for use on the border. The department is expecting another to be delivered in 2012. Some of the conclusions in a draft version of the IG’s report were first disclosed in May by the Los Angeles Times.

The report recommended that the Customs and Border Protection agency, which manages drone use for DHS inside U.S. borders, put off further purchases of drones until it has figured out a way to use its current ones more fully. It also calls on DHS to create a formal process by which outside groups — including the FBI, the Defense Department, the Texas Rangers, FEMA and the United States Forest Service, among others — can request to borrow drones from DHS and pay for their use. In their response to the report, the agency said it agreed.

According to statistics cited by the Washington Post, the drone program led to the apprehension of 4,865 undocumented immigrants between 2006 and 2011. But this was a mere fraction of the illegal immigrants caught — 327,577 captured in 2011 alone — during this period, and a careful cost-benefit analysis comparing drones to manned surveillance aircraft and mounted patrols evidently has yet to be done.

Some critics have raised privacy concerns. “The deployment of drone technology domestically could easily lead to police fishing expeditions and invasive, all-encompassing surveillance that would seriously erode the privacy that we have always had as Americans,” warned a December report from the American Civil Liberties Union. This week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.) introduced a bill to ban the use of drones for domestic surveillance, citing similar privacy concerns.

Proponents of drone use note that the drones helped seize almost $20 million in marijuana during 2011. Also, last summer, a drone in North Dakota was used to help arrest a three armed citizens who chased a local sheriff of their property. Police used the drone to pinpoint the location of the men and ascertain that they were unarmed before moving in to arrest them. The incident is believed to be the first domestic arrest made with the aid of drones.

Domestic use of drones seems slated for a sharp increase, no matter what the statistics show, due to the image of battlefield success now associated with military drone use overseas. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that by 2020, for example, there could be 30,000 drones operated inside U.S. borders. Included in that number are both military-grade drones like those used by DHS on the border, and smaller surveillance craft that are cheap enough to be purchased by local law enforcement.

The Defense Department, in an April report to Congress, lists 110 military bases in forty states where it predicts the military's drones could be flying by 2017 for what it calls a "wide range" of missions, including testing and training. The report was first disclosed by InsideDefense.com and the Federation of American Scientists "Secrecy News" blog.

In the House, a 55-member, bi-partisan Unmanned Systems Caucus is dedicated to expanding the use of drone technology. Part of the caucus’ mission statement is “the urgent need to rapidly develop and deploy more Unmanned Systems in support of ongoing civil, military, and law enforcement operations.” The caucus is headed up by Defense committee chair Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), a noted friend of the defense industry who has received campaign contributions from multiple drone manufacturers.

Supporters may have the upper hand with public opinion. A poll released Tuesday by the Monmouth University Polling Institute found that two out of three Americans support the use of drones domestically to track down escaped convicts and control illegal immigration at the borders. That support for drone use shot up to 80 percent when respondents were asked if they should be used for rescue operations.

But just in case anyone intends to go overboard, only 27 percent of those polled were okay with drones being used to catch speeders.

Managing editor for national security R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this article.

[seemslikeadream]

Spies in Africa’s Skies: New Contractors for the Pentagon
by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog
June 18th, 2012

Photo of Pilatus P-12 plane: mhobl. Used under Creative Commons license

In 1994, a Turkish couple named Fatih and Emren Ozmen, bought up a nondescript company named Sierra Nevada Corporation in the small town of Sparks, just outside of Reno, Nevada.

Just over a decade later, on the other side of the country, in Eatontown, New Jersey, Scott Crockett and David Lewis, two African-American communications officers who were deployed with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, started up a company called R-4, Inc.

Today these two companies are now at the forefront of the covert war in Africa, where they operate small Swiss aircraft to spy on behalf of the U.S. Special Operations Command. They help support secret missions all over the continent, working most closely with AfriCom, the U.S. command for Africa, run out of Stuttgart, Germany.

The Ozmens company and R-4 work for Operation Tusker Sand, run out of Entebbe, Uganda. A similar mission using private pilots named Operation Creek Sand is run out of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

A Washington Post series by Craig Whitlock, with help from ace researcher Julie Tate, has unmasked some of the key details of the African spying operation that includes covert U.S. bases in Arba Minch, Ethiopia; Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti; Nouakchott, Mauritania; Manda Bay, Kenya; Nzara, South Sudan and Victoria, Seychelles.

The Ozmens have grown from a 20 person operation in 1994 to a 2,100 employee outfit today. Their pilots fly Pilatus PC-12s, small Swiss turboprop planes which are “(e)quipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals, the planes refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles,” according to the Washington Post.

The newspaper says that contractors have been hired to fly as much as 150 hours a month. Also outsourced to the private sector were sensor operators, intelligence analysts, mechanics and linguists. (One of the companies that supplied linguists to the Pentagon in Africa was Mission Essential Personnel)

The road to growth for the Ozmens might have something to do with the fact that they are close friends with Jim Gibbons, the former governor of Nevada, and his wife Dawn Gibbons, whom they took on a holiday in Turkey in 2000. Gibbons was a member of the U.S. Congress at the time and the Las Vegas Review Journal notes that in mid-2004 “he helped Sierra Nevada get a $2 million no-bid federal contract for helicopter landing technology. Throughout that year, the company was paying Dawn Gibbons $2,500 a month as a public relations consultant.” That year the Ozmens company won $42 million in Pentagon contracts.

In 2007, when Gibbons became governor, the federal government investigated how the Ozmens won their classified Pentagon contracts. Dawn Gibbons was unapologetic. “Sierra Nevada got a bargain for the work I did. ... Believe me, they got their money's worth,” she told the Associated Press.

What was their company selling at the time? A system called Force 4 which “offers real-time video, individual emergency response tracking, two-way voice and message traffic with command center interaction for terrorism preparedness and response.”

Today Sierra Nevada is one of the key contractors in the drone war around the world. They sell Tactilink, a voice and data relay system for drones, they support Gorgon Stare, a multi-camera video suite touted for its ability to spy on whole cities at once and they make landing gear for the Predator drones that the Central Intelligence Agency uses in Pakistan and Yemen to kill “terrorists” from the sky.

The Pentagon and the CIA have long used private contractors for covert wars. Air America and Air Asia were the front companies used to bomb Cambodia and Laos for president Lyndon Johnson. Bigger, more established companies, like Northrop Grumman were used to spy in Colombia under president Bill Clinton

So it seems only appropriate that the next major Democratic president, Barack Obama, would adopt the same strategy of clandestine private contractors like Sierra Nevada and R4 for covert wars, this time in Africa.

[beeline]

Link


Talk of drones patrolling US skies spawns anxiety

JOAN LOWY

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The prospect that thousands of drones could be patrolling U.S. skies by the end of this decade is raising the specter of a Big Brother government that peers into backyards and bedrooms.

The worries began mostly on the political margins, but there are signs that ordinary people are starting to fret that unmanned aircraft could soon be circling overhead.

Jeff Landry, a freshman Republican congressman from Louisiana's coastal bayou country, said constituents have stopped him while shopping at Walmart to talk about it.

"There is a distrust amongst the people who have come and discussed this issue with me about our government," Landry said. "It's raising an alarm with the American public."

Another GOP freshman, Rep. Austin Scott, said he first learned of the issue when someone shouted out a question about drones at a Republican Party meeting in his Georgia congressional district two months ago.

An American Civil Liberties Union lobbyist, Chris Calabrese, said that when he speaks to audiences about privacy issues generally, drones are what "everybody just perks up over."

"People are interested in the technology, they are interested in the implications and they worry about being under surveillance from the skies," he said.

The level of apprehension is especially high in the conservative blogosphere, where headlines blare "30,000 Armed Drones to be Used Against Americans" and "Government Drones Set to Spy on Farms in the United States."

When Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, suggested during an interview on Washington radio station WTOP last month that drones be used by police domestically since they've done such a good job on foreign battlefields, the political backlash was swift. NetRightDaily complained: "This seems like something a fascist would do. ... McDonnell isn't pro-Big Government, he is pro-HUGE Government."

John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Va., which provides legal assistance in support of civil liberties and conservative causes, warned the governor, "America is not a battlefield, and the citizens of this nation are not insurgents in need of vanquishing."

There's concern as well among liberal civil liberties advocates that government and private-sector drones will be used to gather information on Americans without their knowledge. A lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco, whose motto is "defending your rights in the digital world," forced the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this year to disclose the names of dozens of public universities, police departments and other government agencies that have been awarded permission to fly drones in civilian airspace on an experimental basis.

Giving drones greater access to U.S. skies moves the nation closer to "a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities," the ACLU warned last December in a report.

The anxiety has spilled over into Congress, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers have been meeting to discuss legislation that would broadly address the civil-liberty issues raised by drones. A Landry provision in a defense spending bill would prohibit information gathered by military drones without a warrant from being used as evidence in court. A provision that Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., added to another bill would prohibit the Homeland Security Department from arming its drones, including ones used to patrol the border.

Scott and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have introduced identical bills to prohibit any government agency from using a drone to "gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a regulation" without a warrant.

"I just don't like the concept of drones flying over barbecues in New York to see whether you have a Big Gulp in your backyard or whether you are separating out your recyclables according to the city mandates," Paul said in an interview, referring to a New York City ban on supersized soft drinks.

He acknowledged that is an "extreme example," but added: "They might just say we'd be safer from muggings if we had constant surveillance crisscrossing the street all the time. But then the question becomes, what about jaywalking? What about eating too many donuts? What about putting mayonnaise on your hamburger? Where does it stop?"

Calabrese, the ACLU lobbyist, called Paul's office as soon as he heard about the bill.

"I told them we think they are starting from the right place," Calabrese said. "You should need some kind of basis before you use a drone to spy on someone."

In a Congress noted for its political polarization, legislation to check drone use has the potential to forge "a left-right consensus," he said. "It bothers us for a lot of the same reasons it bothers conservatives."

The backlash has drone makers concerned. The drone market is expected to nearly double over the next 10 years, from current worldwide expenditures of nearly $6 billion annually to more than $11 billion, with police departments accounting for a significant part of that growth.

"We go into this with every expectation that the laws governing public safety and personal privacy will not be administered any differently for (drones) than they are for any other law enforcement tool," said Dan Elwell, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association.

Discussion of the issue has been colored by exaggerated drone tales spread largely by conservative media and bloggers.

Scott said he was prompted to introduce his bill in part by news reports that the Environmental Protection Agency has been using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska. The agency has indeed been searching for illegal dumping of waste into streams but is doing it the old-fashioned way, with piloted planes.

In another case, a forecast of 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by 2020 has been widely attributed to the FAA. But FAA spokeswoman Brie Sachse said the agency has no idea where the figure came from. It may be a mangled version of an aerospace industry forecast that there could be nearly 30,000 drones worldwide by 2018, with the United States accounting for half of them.

Fear that some drones may be armed has been fueled in part by a county sheriff's office in Texas that used a homeland security grant to buy a $300,000, 50-pound ShadowHawk helicopter drone for its SWAT team. The drone can be equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 12-gauge shotgun. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy with the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, told The Associated Press earlier this year his office had no plans to arm the drone, but he left open the possibility the agency may decide to adapt the drone to fire tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.

Earlier this year Congress, under pressure from the Defense Department and the drone manufacturers, ordered the FAA to give drones greater access to civilian airspace by 2015. Besides the military, the mandate applies to drones operated by the private sector and civilian government agencies, including federal, state and local law enforcement.

Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass, and Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairs of a congressional privacy caucus, asked the FAA in April how it plans to protect privacy as it develops regulations for integrating drones into airspace now exclusively used by aircraft with human pilots. There's been no response so far, but Acting FAA Administrator Michael Huerta will probably be asked about it when he testifies at a Senate hearing Thursday.

Even if the FAA were to establish privacy rules, it's primarily a safety agency and wouldn't have the expertise or regulatory structure to enforce them, civil liberties advocates said. But no other government agency is addressing the issue, either, they said.

[psynapz]

So, I wasn't kidding around earlier about the pulse generator, but since then I had an interesting conversation with a local RC enthusiast.

I was telling him about an unmanned helicopter (small, like a large-ish RC) that flies across the treeline behind the house frequently, and flies over to our development and circumnavigates it occasionally, but always at night. Now I know from the distance and topography that the operator loses visual contact when this happens, and it flies just above the treetops and rooftops in the dark, so put it all together -- this thing has an infrared camera on it.

I've often wondered whether it's the DEA or state police or some such looking for the heat signatures of indoor grow operations, but since it always hangs around the immediate area, and most frequently is seen over one specific spot where there's just a few houses on the other side of the woods, I figured it was a training field for some cops that got themselves a shiny new UAV and are training lucky specialist cops on night flying out in a rural who-gives-a-fuck area.

I've seen just such a cop-ter in the nearest city (20 mins away) a few years ago flying around only at night, obviously making good use of it by flying around and around the drinking hole district after 10pm on busy nights, except one night when it ascended a big hill, stopped, hovered in place, and shined a fixed forward-mounted spotlight on my buddy and I hitting a really really nice joint while sitting on a grassy overlook. We waved.

But this thing where I live... I watch it like it's about to kill my family every time I see it. The wife is pretty damned annoyed with it just in terms of the proximity and noise, and probably a little bit of the apparent privacy violation it presents.

So I end up in the local RC hobby shop and mention this thing to the owner, and he asks me where it is, and when I tell him he immediately knew I was talking about some jerk-off who is apparently on the shitlist of the FAA and is "making a bad name for the rest of us" with the local and regional air traffic control centers. I joked about shooting him out of the sky, and this guy was like "yeah, do it!"

So I ask RI -- how would you go about this? I was doing some meditative visualizations last night on shooting it out of the sky with a 9mm, but it seems kind of iffy, not to mention louder and scarier for the neighbors than the copter itself.

I'd love to bring it down more or less intact, pull the batteries before it gives me away, and recover the thing for my own enjoyment or perhaps for taunting the bastard with it myself... but as a baseline I just want to drop the fucker out of the sky without damage to life or property on the ground.

Ideas?

[2012 Countdown]

Pellet gun?

[elfismiles]

Psynapz, you could lay in wait out of sight in the brush with a fishing pole-net if the thing were low enough and the pole long enough and the net big enough.

Or something similar.

However, if you want to go a more legal route, document its encroachments, make sure it is over your property and document document document.

I think there are several legal routes one could take with regard to such a nuisance.

[StarmanSkye]

I'm with ya there; I think drones are more than a nuisance, but approach being an actual threat to our well-being and a serious infringement on our right to reasonable quality of life and security.

The following are hypotheticalized thoughts about how a drone might be stopped by physical means. It in no wise presumes authority, implications and/or consequences including legal considerations. Check local and governing laws, consult with an attorney, etc.

One could research the control frequency range and possibly fabricate a tuneable broad-spectrum jam transmitter broadcasting thru a point-and-aim parabolic dish antenae to interfere with the drone's C-and-C signals. Or else, one could try to overwhelm & commander the control system so one could take-over piloting the drone. This would however involve extensive practice flights familiarity which is cost-and-time prohibitively expensive, therefore impractical and anyway basicly gets one doing the same thing the drone-perp is. Although one might be able to substitute video-simulation gamesmanship practice to gain the needed expertise, so maybe that isn't too unrealistic after-all..

Something more feasable and cheaper, low-tech would be fabricating a long-range high-pressure airgun shotgun, like a silent version of multi-burst flak cannons -- to shoot it out of the sky. I assume regular 3" mag shotgun blasts besides having a probable too-limited-effective-range would be FAR too noisy and attention-attracting, besides probably and over-obviously illegal in an urban neighborhood.

Another alternative might be to kamikazee-dogfight it with an RC-controlled airplane, perhaps trailing fine copper-wire or fishing-line to hopefully foul its prop instead of having to ram it.

I suspect jam-transmitters to defeat drone control will be a lucrative underground product in the years ahead as people take-on the challenge of doing something, anything, to prevent drones threatening one's reasonable right of privacy and quality of life free from such insidious nuisance infringments -- absent lawmakers willingness to protect the rights of their nominal constituents.

An interesting challenge, to be sure.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Whatever you do don't fire a 9mm pistol into the air anywhere near where people live. A shottie with birdshot on the other hand...

I probably don't have to mention that do I.

You could also track its usual route and build a net there. Along the lines of what smiley was saying but not attached to a pole.