These could be pretty easily defeated through a multitude of tactics. They're just being pitched as a stop gap solution against the low hanging fruit like morons with drones or a drunk person with an airband handheld.
Signal-jacking and gps spoofing is the only cost-efficient and scalable way to bring these things down. The word gun really mangles the reality of counter-drone solutions
Armed police drones have a deadly downstream problems too, how will people and/or criminals oppose them, which they certainly will. Some of the most common or best counter options have really bad side effects, the first being people shooting rounds into the air at them which will come down who knows where, and if it becomes a real big problem I foresee small EMP bomb/mortar/grenade devices or powerful jammers being used. A small bit of explosive on the side of a magnet with some loops of copper coil it gets blasted through can deliver a fairly significant EMP blast over a small area which can damage all sorts of devices, especially anything with an antennae, IE every single wireless capable device. And jammers have obvious problems and can be made crazy powerful without much difficulty.
Armed police drones becoming anything near common or expected will kick off a bit of an arms race with criminals. If criminals don't just start copying the exact same thing. Ive seen DIY demonstrations of small drones firing pistols accuratly years ago now, thankfully they haven't taken off, but that might change if the police themselves start using them.
You're right, I was thinking from the perspective of people protesting the paranoia-state by jamming these drones, not shooters jamming drones. I don't expect these sort of drones to be effective and doubt they'll factor into the planning of shooters. But people fed up with authorities telling them to live in fear might want to strike out against these drones.
it seems like the only realistic solution to these asshats is to mount jammers on all the police and fire aircraft. You could tax drone sales to pay for it.
I think the most effective countermeasure is just good tracking ability. Drones are pretty conspicuous -- having one land in your backyard is like a giant billboard saying "DRUG DEAL IN PROGRESS, RIGHT HERE!"
The counter-countermeasure, of course, is to start making "deliveries" to random people, and tie up law enforcement by compelling them to arrest innocent parties.
Likely counter-measure will be more drones. It's easy to knock a drone out of the sky with another drone, especially if the counter-drone is disposable. Avoidance technology becomes complicated. It's relatively easy to program an autonomous drone for clear skies. Adding threat detection and avoidance is a lot harder.
Or the US could just go with something that actually works, like the Portugal system of scrapping all drug laws. After fifteen years none of the imagined horrors have come true, addiction has dropped to half the previous value, law enforcement costs have gone down, and things are generally better.
People look at Portugal, see that the facts contradict their imaginary scenarios, and deny the facts, but that doesn't change them.
Deterrents only work if they're enforceable. Will you be able to catch someone if they use a drone to take out a target?
After watching what is going with the use of consumer drones in Ukraine I've come to the conclusion that we will soon see this in America. People will start to fight back against corrupt law enforcement sooner or later.
Imagine the world where people in a community brutalized by law enforcement crowd source drone strikes to take out particularly menacing law enforcement officers after they've been let off with paid vacation for the nth time.
The police will quickly come to the determination that it's safer for their members to actually put through the legal system as offenders than walking free on the street.
Here in Britain we use them to prevent people jumping queues at the post office.
The parallel development of these globally does suggest we will be seeing a lot more drone-based policing in the future, and will be gleefully cracking open the inevitable can of worms when some of the accountability is removed from high pressure flashpoints and/or they have the ability to deploy lethal force.
A more reasonable solution to a bunch of drones terrorizing humanity (at least more reasonable than "hey let's make those drones' lives easier by setting up a giant artificially-intelligent surveillance monstrosity! What could possibly go wrong?") would be to stock up on shotguns, birdshot, butterfly nets, and crowbars.
I was ready to agree, but in glancing at the article I see a U.S. drone control station. And I'm reminded that one of the U.S. service branches (Air Force?) is in the course of switching from a Windows to a Linux platform, after the former was found to be infested with exploits.
Which makes me think: In the limited scale if pervasive and seemingly perpetual engagements and theaters we are currently experiencing, might there be some leverage? Some of these are not "all out" campaigns, and image and public perception do play significant roles in their continued viability. Their limited scale may also somewhat more readily place them within the purview of civilian and criminal courts -- at least in some cases.
Politicians still attend planned outdoor events. Drones can be deployed at the security perimeter, fly rather quickly, and carry an explosive payload. I'm not sure security is good enough to stop a swarm of such.
There are also intermediate steps before outright attacks: simply having drones which can track people in a crowd, guide ground forces, etc. has a lot of applications which wouldn’t be publicized (“officer smith recognized the resistance officer in the crowd and followed them home”). Plant some DL fakes on their phone and occupation could be very different.
The only next counter-logical (criminal) course of action I can think of is counter thieves using drones with nets to catch the police drones with nets.
I have to imagine it's keeping quite a few secret service agents awake at night thinking about how on Earth they're going to safely and effectively jam DC-6GHz in a large open outdoor area --- because it's absolutely inevitable that they will eventually have to as this technology becomes cheaper and better. Ultimately, I think we'll just see these types of political events go away as the security risks are unable to be mitigated.
When you can see racing drones going 150+ mph on YouTube, and you can also see videos of handguns attached to drones, it's really amazing that this isn't occuring all the time.
Edit: maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty here. They really only need to jam the ISM and cellular bands, everything else is hard to import due to FCC regs, and thus doesn't get made in the first place. I don't think terrorists will be able to make their own custom spread spectrum transmitters and receivers for their drones. Then again, GNURadio and cheap devices makes this pretty easy nowadays.
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