The Flight of the Killer Robots
Military drone tech crosses over into civilian airspace
It’s now easier than ever to smite one’s enemies with death from above, in the form of a high-explosive missile delivered by an aerial drone. So far most of the world’s war drone killings have been confined to parts of Iraq and Pakistan, Libya and Yemen where impious tribesmen, and often their families and neighbours, are judiciously smitten by laser-guided Hellfire payloads. A recent security leak described a novel method of quasi-military death-by-drone, whereby the CIA can target a drone attack on the radio signal from a cellphone SIM card. So it’s no leap to imagine that the CIA can now just dial-a-drone-death anywhere in the world. And they’ve got your number.
There are big civilian spinoffs in drone technology. Weapons capabilities aside, the ability to fly a point-of-view through the air without fear of harm is useful for much more than just war, and new generations of aerial drones are being pressed into police surveillance, environmental and agricultural monitoring, scientific research, and aerial photography. In the United States alone, more than 100 companies are now developing hundreds of different drone systems, ranging from lightweight hobbyist multicopters for views of the local neighbourhood, to heavy-duty fixed-wing drones for government and industrial applications. Government bodies such as the Forest Service and border protection agencies, regional police and fire services, and major industry lobbies including agriculture, oil, and mining, are pressing the civil aviation authorities for easier access to civilian drone technology.
Outside the US, especially in remote regions where aviation regulations are less strict, the commercial drone industry is already on the wing. In Brazil, small helicopter drones are used to survey large soybean and sugar cane plantations, looking for tracts of land that need to be resown. In Germany, drones are used to inspect the blades of remote wind turbines, and a helicopter drone is used in France used to check the tracks of high-speed TGV trains.
The potential civilian uses of drone are limited only by the imagination: helping police track stolen cars, keeping watch on remote oil and gas pipelines, assisting rescuers in disaster zones, and spraying fertilizer on farmland from the air. On Easter Island in the eastern Pacific Ocean, archaeologists are using a fixed-wing drone to conduct a high-resolution aerial survey of the stone statues and other World Heritage sites. The cameras on board are capable of resolving features as small as just two inches across — much finer than the aerial and satellite photographs used by services like Google Maps.
Many news organizations already use fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to cover big stories — the city of Los Angeles boasts around a dozen news helicopters that could be replaced at a fraction of the price by what are now called drone journalists. Already there have been reports of “flying paparazzi” peering remotely through the windows of high-rise hotel rooms.
Video and photographs from private drones have already made a splash in the news. In November of 2011, a Polish activist launched a small quadcopter drone and flew low over riot police lines to record a violent protest. The images went viral on the internet and found their way onto the bulletins and web pages of mainstream media. In Texas, a hobbyist testing the camera on board his small drone saw a creek outside Dallas running red with blood from a meat-processing facility. The company now faces criminal charges for polluting city waterways with a mix of pig’s blood and toxic chemicals. And in Australia, a team of journalists who were denied entry into a controversial immigrant detention facility launched a quadcopter to record exclusive aerial images of the camp.
The cloud around the silver lining for civilian drones is the clear potential for their abuse. At a security conference in 2011, researchers demonstrated a proof-of-concept civilian spy drone based on a surplus military target drone. The Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform drone was equipped with a Wi-Fi receiver, hacking software, and an antenna to spoof a cellphone tower — giving it the ability to sniff out wireless networks from the air, intercept cell phone calls, and launch denial-of-service attacks with jamming signals. The researchers warned that if they could think up and build a personal spy drone, then other people were already thinking about it too.
Recent events in Thailand have also highlighted the ambiguous role of civilian drones in the context of an urban civil conflict. The anti-government protests and rallies late in late 2013 and early 2014 have been covered extensively with camera drones by several local journalists and some foreign reporters. Half a dozen drones were reported over one protest site, and some of them were feeding live pictures through party-political television stations back to the big screens and cellphones of the rally below.
After some weeks passed and the anti-government protests turned violent, the news drones were on hand to to relay aerial views of the fighting between police and the rioters, some of whom carried firearms. These live video images, too, fed back into the politically-allied network of hardcore rioters and the wider, mainly peaceful, protest movement. Drone video posted on sharing sites showed the rioting on the barricades as it happened, and tracked police hunting groups of rioters through the streets of Bangkok at night. It is not impossible that some of the rioters had real-time mobile access to drone video that they could use to direct their actions against the police.
After the soldier drones and the police drones and the fireman drones and the news drones and the protest drones and all the other civil drones, maybe we will come to fear the criminal drones and then, some inevitable day, the murder drones and the terrorist drones. Just think of the possibilities: a drone spying for PIN numbers above an ATM, or scouting an open window for a burglar, or helping a hired gun track its victim. Drones might be about to revolutionise crime as effectively as they have revolutionised war and foreign assassinations. Just pick up the phone, and dial.
