Preparing Countermeasures For Terror Attacks Using Drones (remotecontrolproject.org)

An anonymous reader writes: You can add terrorist-controlled drones to the list of dangers we need to be prepared for, says the Oxford Research Group. Its new report contains information about over 200 current and upcoming unmanned aerial, ground and marine systems, and evaluates their capabilities for delivering payloads (e.g. explosive devices), imaging capabilities (e.g. for reconnaissance purposes), and their general capabilities. Even though the report notes that commercial drones have a limited flight time, range of movement, and payload capacity, and that their operators still have to be relatively close to a potential target, the researchers are particularly worried about the possibility of drones being used as remotely controlled explosive devices. They say, "The technology of remote-control warfare is impossible to control; the ultimate defence is to address the root drivers of the threat in the first place."

Comments

Better Idea..

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop destabilising foreign nations and victimising populations and there won't be any terrorism (except the false flag variety, which is almost all of it anyway....so stop doing that too....)

Re:Better Idea..

[camperdave]

Do you know how many Muslims were in the Irish Republican Army? or how many the IRA targetted?

Not a single one.

You don't have to be Muslim to be a terrorist, and you don't have to be a terrorist if you're Muslim. All you have to do is be a bully to someone else's coward.

Re:Better Idea..

[camperdave]

Um... No. The parent post said there would be no terrorism if there were no Muslims. The IRA is just one of many counter-examples.

Root Causes Important, but You have Crime & Cr

[Koreantoast]

For those who are trying to hand wave the issue with a broader "well, we shouldn't do things that make people angry *tsk* *tsk*", while addressing the root drivers will help mitigate the numbers of potential incidents, in a world where people have differing opinions, you'll always have a few folks who disagree strongly enough that they may just try to do something like deliver a dangerous payload via unmanned platform. Very least, you're going to have criminal elements that are going to try and exploit this technology for recon or more direct support in committing crimes, maybe even violent support. Therefore, you're going to need this technology to some degree whether through jamming or even outright shooting it out of the sky.

Re:Easy solution

[ScentCone]

I routinely fly my multi-rotor camera platforms up over 300'. Good luck with bird shot at that distance!

who really cares?

[nimbius]

Im sure for anyone who bought a "drone" 2 weeks ago at christmas, this article is neat. However fearmongering aside Terorrism in 2015 killed only 34 people in the United States, the country with the most drones. heck, in 2014 auto accidents alone killed 34,000 people here...and by comparison terorrism is almost a non-issue when pitted against heart disease, which kills 610,000 per year. Unlike terrorism, which is costly to defend against, most of the cases of heart disease in the united states that claim a life could have been prevented by simple diet and exercise. Hell, in 2013 there were 33,000 firearm related deaths in the US, almost 1000 times the number of terrorism related deaths.

but, you know...terorrism...gotta stop those terrorists.

Re:who really cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The cars, dumbass. Enough with your rhetoric about terrorists "destroying our nation". If the best they can do is kill 34 people a year then they're obviously not very good at their job. Let's concentrate on important things and save our money instead of wasting it in a fruitless attempt to stop terrorism entirely, which is a literall impossibility.

Re:who really cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously quite afraid of a possible ISIS-dominated future. Otherwise arguing that 34 terrorist deaths (last year in the U.S.) is more important that 34,000 vehicle deaths doesn't make sense.

Our war on terror has been a fiasco. We would have been better off doing nothing. More U.S. soldiers dies in our gulf wars than in 9/11. Some hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanistanis are dead. And we have way more problems than than when we started! Not too mention the injured soldiers, horrible laws like the patriot act, wasted money, millions of refugees, etc.

Do you question anything? What about the loss of our freedoms? Don't you remember communism, and what happens when you give a government too much power? Aren't you afraid that we will become a police state? Isn't that more real than some guys in a desert half a world away with ak47s and pickup trucks?

Better yet would be the american public put a stop to our governments imperialistic dealings with that part of the world. I wonder how it is that a powerful government can restrains itself from imposing its best interests on others.

I'll tell you what I am afraid of. I'm afraid of the countries of the west turning into police states. Enough of us would have jobs. There'd be plenty of corporate sponsored things to do, but not so much else. Lots of people would medicate, starting with kids in grammer school. You wouldn't want to say or do anything wrong, because everything is kept track of. Meanwhile it's all hacked and sold every which way. The collective public are distracted by politically divisive squables, celebrities, and a never ending stream of fear and manipulation. This is the world that we will grow old in. This is the world we'll be leaving to the next generations. We don't live in a police state yet. But then again, only 34 people dies from terrorists in the U.S. last year. II think the powers that we are giving corporations and the government are going to long outlast some guys in the desert with pickup trucks and AK-47s. That's what I'm afraid of.

I feel like I'm living in communist USSR. We're doing what I was told as a kid that the bad guys do.

Re:who really cares?

[gweihir]

And that is exactly what reality looks like: Terrorism is not a relevant threat in the west, unless a power-hungry political class, a press serving them and a population that does not get it makes it one. The mechanism at work here is that a population in fear is easy to rule, as a population in fear is dumb.

Re:Easy peasy.. the NRA solution

[tnk1]

The point you missed is that shotguns are not rifles. Shotguns are generally smoothbores.

Shotguns are aimed up because that is what is used for hunting birds. You don't generally hunt a flying bird with a rifle. You want shot dispersal to bracket them for much the same reason you wanted to shoot at airplanes with proximity fused ammo or a veritable hail of bullets: it's hard to hit a flying, moving object with a single slug.

You should always point any weapon downrange and/or toward the ground when it is not in use, but there's no reason whatsoever to point an actual rifle up at the sky unless you're trying to take a lucky shot at an airplane.

Re:Summary of report

[Dr_Barnowl]

Muffed up the video link :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - Pulse jet UAV from 2006

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - 200MPH Radio controlled pulse jet plane