> DroneUp Delivery was working on mock deliveries for Walmart and had set up a delivery point outside of Mr Winn’s ... home
> The defendant stated he had past experience with drones and believed they were surveilling him
The question I'm left with after reading that article - was this test delivery point for a single trial run, or did this company choose one random location and then repeatedly send tests there over and over? If it's the latter, that seems like it should also warrant criminal charges.
Companies should not be sending UAVs to anyone’s property without permission, period. This stuff needs to get sorted out in law and these bozos need to back off.
Shooting large, apparently car-sized, stuff down over populated areas isn't a good idea.
As an aside, I presume at this point, the military and FBI are stationing their SIGINT aircraft over the area and probably have a good idea what's going on but aren't saying publicly. These things are emitting electromagnetic energy in more ways that one, eg. radios and electric motor RF signatures.
Not confirmed but not unsubstantiated. A coast guard ship filed reports of them both arriving from out at sea and returning to sea. Also several local sheriffs have observed the same.
The War Zone is always a reliable source for national security related reporting -
"Shot down" with what? Surface-to-air missiles? Duck hunters with shotguns? Attack helicopters with miniguns?
Whatever you spray into the sky (to knock a drone out of it) will also fall back to earth, plausibly generating civilian casualties on the ground. (And if you use lasers - high power laser beams have plenty of safety issues, too.)
Ukraine's capabilities in that domain are plausibly far more advanced that America's.
Also - costs, casualties, & collateral damage may be far more acceptable in an active war zone, and against drones which are busy killing people & destroying valuables whenever they are not shot down.
Ukraine's capabilities mostly consist of ramming a cheap drone into an expensive one.
This is one of those times when the US has a Maginot Military - massively overpowered against traditional threats, inexperienced when dealing with something like this.
This is not a trivial problem. A cheap drone with a relatively small explosive payload flown into an air intake can take down a military aircraft and cause serious problems for an airliner or private jet.
An airfield is the ideal place to do that, because aircraft are most vulnerable during takeoff and landing.
A few people and a hundred drones launched from a few km away can significantly delay incoming and outgoing flights.
Equip the drones with weapons - or larger explosives - and it's potentially Pearl Harbour.
That's kind of reductive. I know some people who have, uh, relevant experience. The cheap drones are pretty comprehensively engineered and they're complex in the same way that a ballpoint pen is not as trivial to manufacture as it looks.
Shotguns are being used for that purpose. Single buckshot from the top of a AR barrel are in vogue too.
Someone should use a cheap arduino and a mike for aiming and shooting at fpv quadcopters.
I really don't understand why that's not here yet. They can literally convert a toy from github.
They are "being used" but shotguns are the last line of defense. Good luck stopping a little FPV drone with one. If you do not disable it by 50ft you dead. And you have like 10% odds. Way better than 1% odds you might have with a rifle or nothing but...
Jamming is first line of defense, a million times more effective FWIW.
One counter measure is no counter measure. If you look at toys like https://hackaday.com/2023/06/13/arduino-powered-missile-syst... and scale it up with bigger and stronger servo's for holding a shotgun instead of fake missiles; you'll have a second war - with the arms industry. For a bonus you'll also win the war of economy because the bill of materials costs less than a mad maxed FPV drone given you source the shotgun from the land.
It's always wrong (in every possible way) to be the first one to engage hostilities. To be morally in the clear, you should always wait for the other side to engage first. If we didn't follow this doctrine, we would've already had a nuclear holocaust. Warmongers and civilization don't mix.
We don't know anything about their capabilities as individual drones or as a cluster of drones. For all you know, when you shoot one, the other ten take that as declaration of war.
We should follow the drones to see where they land, and continue the investigation from there.
There is no evidence that the drones carry WMDs, or that they're dangerous like Iran. If we had reason to believe that the drones are associated with WMDs, then it would be okay to neutralize them, but we don't. Because of false assertions about WMDs, we've already had one unnecessary war in Iraq. How many more do you want?
