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The Trump Administration Wants To Be Able To Track and Hack Your Drone (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants federal agencies to be able to track, hack, or even destroy drones that pose a threat to law enforcement and public safety operations, The New York Times reports. A proposed law, if passed by Congress, would let the government take down unmanned aircraft posing a danger to firefighting and search-and-rescue missions, prison operations, or "authorized protection of a person." The government will be required to respect "privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties" when exercising that power, the draft bill says. But records of anti-drone actions would be exempt from public disclosure under freedom of information laws, and people's right to sue over damaged and seized drones would be limited, according to the text of the proposal published by the Times. The administration, which would not comment on the proposal, scheduled a classified briefing on Wednesday for congressional staff members to discuss the issue.
Just try and fly a drone anywhere near someone with secret service protection. Watch what happens.
Don't actually do this, you will end the day in jail.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Nice try but you clearly failed to call Trump worse than Hitler or at least accuse Trump of colluding with Putin to grant Russia full control of all drones in the U.S.
On top of that, you blatantly failed to go into detail about how Trump's repression of drones negatively impacts the LGBTQ+ community and this clearly shows your subservience to the white cisgendered patriarchy.
Report to the Safe Space at Berkeley for reconditioning NOW!
Look, I loathe most everything that the Trump administration has done thus far, but as written, this doesn't sound too bad.
If some moron is hindering fire-fighting operations with a drone, then yes, there should be ways to deal with it without having to worry about the drone owner threatening a lawsuit.
Now, I object to to the records of such anti-drone activities being exempt from freedom of information laws.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Take down drones that endanger firefighting and prison operations, sure. The problems start when undefined weasel-words like "authorized protection of a person" are used and rights of citizens are curtailed or eliminated. Clandestine hearings and elimination of FOIA for the program do not help matters. You just don't need all that secrecy to take down a drone over a fire or prison.
Beware of the Leopard.
This doing the same thing as someone else doesn't make it right because motivations are different. Just as when Obama dropped 20k munitions in the Middle East last year, he did so for the right reasons. When Trump fired 59 cruise missiles at Syria, he should have been impeached because he did it for racist reasons. It's all about motivations. That's why we have mans laughter chargers versus murder, but Trumpsters are too stupid to grok that.
We know full well how much the PGOTUS respects these things.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
That cure is worse than the disease! Flak falls down to the ground — on our heads. Better to shoot it with a regular bullet — at least, you only need one or two. But most of these drones are slow-flying "copters" — you can disable them with an entangling net...
And you don't need your means to be too powerful — to endanger a fire-fighter, for example, the drone has to fly right next to him anyway. If it is too far to be hit with a thrown stick (or a net), they should not be hitting it with anything.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't think leaving a hack-able vulnerability is a good idea but sure why not use something like a T-shirt Canon that shoots a Net? It wouldn't be that difficult to shoot down a consumer drone and fairly safe to do so. Instead of crippling everyone with restrictions, just shoot down or catch the folks who blatantly break the rules. You don't even really need to fine because drones are pretty expensive. The loss alone should teach someone a lesson.
My first impression of this is that it's an out-of-band attack on the overall integrity of encryption technologies. So far as I know, drone control signals are encrypted; what they want, then, is a backdoor into the encryption used. If successful, that would create a precedent for creating 'backdoors' in any encryption method ("..well, drone manufacturers were willing and able to comply with this law, so you have to, too, Apple/Google/$WHOEVER"). As much as I hate drones as a general concept, this cannot be allowed. Aside from the legal precedent it might create, it would also create a vector for attack by anyone wishing to seize control of any drone for whatever purpose they might have in mind; this, too, cannot be allowed to happen. Seriously, drones are bad enough as-is, without there being a ready-made ability for someone to hijack them, too.
I like to know that the government is doing, and if they're saying that they're protecting public safety, they shouldn't mind telling us what they did and why.
There be something like a secondary receiver built into all drones, that when it receives the appropriate signal, causes the drone to descend and land safely, or perhaps return to it's point of origin. In law enforcement, firefighting, or other emergency situations, the signal could be broadcast in the affected area, thus acting as a 'drone repellant'. Once it's landed, the drone would remain in a 'disabled' state, unable to launch, until such time as the disable signal ceases to be broadcast. Disabling the 'repellent' receiver is made punishable by large fine and perhaps jail time, if you've done that and it's flown into an area that's experiencing an emergency situation. If criminals or terrorist operatives are using a drone to deliver explosives or some other destructive force, it would have the bonus effect of potentially blowing them up instead. Now, someone is going to point out that the drones' hardware could be hacked to disable this 'disable' function, but I see no reason why it couldn't be so thoroughly integrated into the drones' control hardware/firmware/software that there would be no way to prevent it from performing it's intended function.
Just ban them. They serve no purpose except for spying on people's daughters sunbathing by the pool, based on the comments I see on Slashdot.
Yeah soon he'll also make the tough choice of giving himself 100s of millions in tax breaks.
Maybe the fact that they want to hide all records from the public?
That's not suspicious in the least! /sarcasm
Just having tough laws on hazardous toys may prevent a lot of abuse.
When all the weasel words are taken into account, it quickly becomes obvious that this means, "Drones making video of police beating or killing civilians will be taken down, and you can try to get the wreckage back by talking to one of our tame judges."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It does NOT fully make sense.
On the one hand, I can understand tracking, hacking or destroying your drone for public safety. Like firefighters. Ambulances. Rescue operations, etc.
On the other hand, it seems that it would be be STRONGLY in the interests of public safety to NOT let law enforcement interfere with the operation of drones. If they don't like the public distrust, they brought it on themselves. All of them. They either were the "bad apples", or the ones who would protect the bad apples.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This part I never understood, to be perfectly honest. Every time there is a news-report about pilots avoiding a "near miss" with a drone, I wonder — why do they bother "avoiding" it? None of the consumer-drone I've seen is tougher than a sizeable bird and an airplane better be tough to enough fly straight through a bird or two — except, perhaps, condors... But the heavy (loaded with water) fire-fighting craft (as well as the usual passenger planes used by commercial airlines) should be able to fly through even a condor without registering the collision...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How is it different? Obama would not hump or molest your drone first.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
That's the trick. Start with a statement that everyone should agree with. "We want to be able to take down drones which endanger the life of others !!" Sure, and I think that was already the case.
Then hide small text where the real difference lies : "so we'll grant us the right to track (Why ?), hack (WTF??), and destroy drones and this without disclosure and with no risk of being sued".
As someone who thinks Donald trump is one of the more useless pieces of shit to grace this planet, this is actually fairly sound policy. More of this and less bitching on Twitter, please.
Perhaps you could wake the fuck up, and focus more on that whole exempt-from-FOIA fine print with this latest piece of law-shit, and less on the pointless 3AM Twitter ramblings.
Twitter isn't trying to undermine the entire fucking point of FOIA.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You mean, like Hillary's email? Like that?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
33 minutes before you brought up Hillary in a discussion about politics? A little slow. Are you okay?
There is great potential for abuse with these things,
Yes, laws like this have a great potential for abuse. That's generally why we try to keep public disclosure of these actions available, to watch for the government misusing them.
Sure you could probably require DJI or Gopro to include an over-ride command in their code. But how would you enforce this on an ardupilot controlled drone? Building a large scale camera platform based on a naza or ardupilot is pretty easy.
And that completely ignores all the micro racing quad flight controllers which run betaflight or KISS. Neither of those have GPS or stabilized flight systems. So you could jam the 2.4g band to take out its control signal but then you are taking out a lot more than just that quad.
Sure, works for alcohol, tobacco and firearms, right?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Being the winners, they aren't as obsessed as the losers are.
Do you count the minutes for the Drumpf shitposters?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some of Trump's broad based 'philosophies' are fine - limited government, closing loopholes on immigration, balancing the budget, personal freedoms, etc.
Virtually all of the Trump Administrations attempts at actually creating functional legislation, OTOH have been pitiful disasters. And then there is the little issue of 360 degree changes in viewpoint depending on who last rubbed his ego. So yeah, some sort of coherent legislation concerning rogue UAVs is fine. I rather suspect, however, that the actual rules will be an incomprehensible, reprehensible mess.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why is it that every other headline is TRUMP DOES BAD THING instead of tech news headlines? None of the editors ever pointed a finger at Obama ripping the country apart, and here we are now with this blatant political agenda. Who is behind it? The Russians? George Soros? The...the...illuminati? Come on and give us a break. WHAT is going on here? It also doesn't help that we have this Flavor-Aid drinkin' noob BeauHD posting gobs of false news whenever he checks his iPhone.
'360 degree changes in viewpoint'...you are a moron...just for the record.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Alcohol, tobacco and firearms are not toys. They have a powerful force to them. Drones don't.
I find it particularly ironic that a great deal of folk are throwing fits about drones needing to be regulated... and yet ultralights don't seem to be an issue.
Okay, now I know that they *say* that they want to do this when a drone is posing a threat to public safety or to rescue operations, and that much is all very well and good. So let's give them the benefit of the doubt on this for just a minute here, and assume that was really all they were ever going to do and it wouldn't be abused.... Ignore for just a moment how unlikely you might think that is and just hear me out on this.
Even *IF* the government actually entirely abides by their proclaimed intentions to only use these mechanisms when it was truly necessary for the greater public good, this is still going to be a problem because, you see, if the federal agencies can do it then others with more outwardly nefarious intentions could also do it, using the exact same means... and while laws may exist against individuals doing such things, it might end up being rather hard to identify who is doing it.
I would think that such a situation would be far more problematic than the one that they are trying to alleviate by these proposed measures.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Keep, 'turning that ship, 360 degrees'.
When you see it, you will kick yourself as the moron that you are.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Depends on your drone, you can build drones without all that fancy crap, we even flew across the ocean once without.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There is great potential for abuse with these things, and the Trump admin is not afraid to make the hard decisions on these types of things, optics be damned.
Your damned right. The ability to take actions and against citizens and their property, and to then be able to hide those actions from public scrutinty is a hugely dangerous thing. My gawd, the potential for abuse is...
Oh... wait.
You actually think that such assaults on our Constitutional rights are a good idea? You are an imbecile.
MSM wants to blame Trump for a cloudy day.
They have been wanting to register drones for a few years now.
Making a drone fair game to any official who dislikes it for any reason might be the only way to halt the increasing problems they'll pose to safety and privacy.
Did Hillary hide or not hide emails, server etc from the public?
The selective moral outrage by the Democrats and left is astounding.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well, she is relative to the discussion, because as far as "hiding" things goes, she was a master, and almost became president. And the outrage was nonexistent during the campaign, even though it was well known. This kind of dismissal is what I expect from Liberals caught in their typical hypocritical double standard.
Its only bad when the other guy does it!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Look, you won. Get over it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Keep up those 360-degree turns and you'll get precisely nowhere. Try going in one direction rather than all of them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes