Secret Service Testing Drones, and How to Disrupt Them

schwit1 writes with this news from the Associated Press: Mysterious, middle-of-the-night drone flights by the U.S. Secret Service during the next several weeks over parts of Washington — usually off-limits as a strict no-fly zone — are part of secret government testing intended to find ways to interfere with rogue drones or knock them out of the sky, The Associated Press has learned.

A U.S. official briefed on the plans said the Secret Service was testing drones for law enforcement or protection efforts and to look for ways, such as signal jamming, to thwart threats from civilian drones. The drones were being flown between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. The Secret Service has said details were classified. ... The challenge for the Secret Service is quickly detecting a rogue drone flying near the White House or the president's location, then within moments either hacking it to seize control over its flight or jamming its signal to send it off course or make it crash.

Comments

Good luck with that

[mveloso]

There are two ways they could do this, as far as I can tell:

1. disrupt the onboard electronics to kill the power
2. spoof GPS so the thing goes somewhere totally different

You could do #1 as well by having nets spring up/out - basically have a physical barrier. The question is how would you deploy anything fast enough to catch an incoming drone? Even an energy weapon needs time to find, track, and fire.

#2 is easier, because most drones today use GPS. Just have the white house have a GPS signal that overloads anything the drone has. In fact, they could fuzz DC out of GPS, which would be the safest option.

#2 will cause drones to use an inertial system, which would then be hit with #1.

Really, they need a perimeter of cameras to track any fast moving objects from 1 mile out right down to the white house. That would probably give them enough time to figure out the vectors so they could actually do #1.

The real trick

[Anonymous Coward]

The real trick is figuring out a way to find the operator. Knocking a drone out of the sky seems fairly straightforward (trained attack crows, natch) but, except in the case of imminent attack, locating the person flying the drone seems like it would be much more useful for law enforcement.

We Knew This Was Coming

[some old guy]

After that drunk crashed his hobby-class UAV on the White House lawn, the hue and cry from the SS and the TLA's went up as predicted.

"We must have $xM and uncontrolled executive powers to combat the clear and present existential threat posed by $40 toys!"