Isn’t it easier to just remove the drone and go directly to the evidence fabrication?
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My thought too. The info may not be worthy of a court of law, but more than enough to harass and punish the pesky upstart do-gooders.
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Law enforcement agencies already have Predator-like aerial surveillance capabilities, it’s just easier for the moment to mount the sensors on manned light aircraft and helicopters. For one example, the Gippsaero GA-8 Airvans operated by the California Highway Patrol. Mounted in the belly is a gyro-stabilized high resolution telescopic color/infrared camera that exceeds the capability of the cameras mounted on Iraq war era Predator drones. I live in Oakland, CA, and whenever there are protests or disturbances downtown, one of these planes will circle overhead for hours (you can spy on them using flightradar24.com). These aren’t “drones” as they carry a crew of four, but these planes are not surveillance cosplay.
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So… my takeaway here is that we’re fine until the battery technology gets better.
Using a slingshot to fire a stone at a drone wouldn’t be the ideal way to take it down, anyways. What you really want to launch from your slingshot is some wadded-up netting or streamers with small weights, that would unfurl enough in flight to jam the drone’s propellers. It’d be light-weight enough that it wouldn’t do any damage to anything if it missed, too.
That rather leapt out at me, too…
That’s where “parallel construction” comes in - they use the drone to identify people, and with that knowledge backtrack to create some other line of evidence to actually convict them. (That other line of evidence being premised on knowing who the suspect was to begin with, but they hide that.)
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Maybe not, most of the rules around excluding evidence fall under rules protecting your constitutional rights and I’m not aware of any case law that would get this automatically thrown out and they could probably find one of the existing giant loopholes to drive it through. Beyond that, drone footage is a perfect candidate for parallel construction. They use the drone to easily obtain the, possibly legally shaky, evidence and work backwards to find more reliable evidence and just never mention the drone. It is also great for providing evidence they can use for unofficial harassment of people. Cops have been known to follow people at meetings and protests to their cars for later harassment. Once they have your plate number they can get a lot of other information. Drones make that really easy.
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I wonder would a large number of small helium balloons on long strings work like barrage balloons work?
Cheap, (mostly) Harmless and Fun!
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No. . . but if you hit it, so satisfying.
And good optics-- protestors all carrying colorful balloons. . . it’s a party!
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After watching “slingshot vs drone” videos, it appears the only way to take a drone down with a slingshot is to be about six feet away from it, otherwise the hits just aren’t enough to do enough damage. And that assumes you hit. Watching the “slingshot channel,” where he put together an anti-drone “slingshotgun” to fire a wad of stones at once, only one seemed to hit (and barely made it wobble).
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IANAL either but I think probably not. First, I think there is a “good faith” exception, where if the police “didn’t know” what they were doing was illegal it doesn’t count. Second, I have only heard of this being applied when the search violates the defendants 4th amendment rights to unreasonable search or other breaks rules meant to protect the defendants civil rights. Violating a drone flight restriction does not seem to fall into that category. Mostly it applies when the police either should have needed a warrant but didn’t get one, or exceeded the bounds permitted by the warrant. This case would be more like the police staking out your house to witness a drug deal and having the evidence thrown out because they were parked illegally.
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I don’t know, mass balloon releases have a history in my city. https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/562556/cleveland-balloonfest/
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While I of course would never do such a thing, I have heard that dangling a couple of meters of heavyweight monofilament line with a weight on the end from your super-cheap throwaway drone will work just fine for fouling the props on a much more expensive commercial drone.
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The charges they’ll be filing don’t need any evidence, they just want to know who to target.
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(drone jammers)
It won’t work, unless it also employs some GPS jamming. When drones detect they’re being jammed, even just by detecting the loss of signal from whoever controls them, they attempt to return home by planning the shortest route from where they are, that is using GPS. If they succeeded in taking photos, the police will have them.
So the best way to literally down a drone is to make it believe they’re somewhere else by launching another drone who will fly above the terrorists drone and direct a strong jamming signal down to it. The reason for flying above the terrorists drone is that the freedom fighters drone (let’s call things with their real name) must rely on GPS for its own route planning, therefore it has to implement a physical screen that allows sending strong jamming signals to the drone under it, while still receiving GPS satellites from above.
Of course this doesn’t take into account that in emergency situations, a government can order its military to jam GPS and other bands, which poses the question: do terrorists have privileged access to GPS?
However, even if they had, GLONASS receivers (the Russian GPS) are cheap and hardly controllable by any non Russian entity.
Edit: Also about countermeasures, anything that can throw a net with weights is damn effective device to neutralize and capture drones. Just be sure to always wear masks and immediately remove the battery, any battery, to avoid being recognized/followed.
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Speaking of “defund the police”, movie sets around the world are saving money on cranes and helicopters with drone shots. Not only has crime gone way down since cops justified those $12M helicopters, the easy of getting the only thing they do - aerial surveillance - has dropped a thousand-fold. I think if you drop $12K on a drone, you get one hell of a drone. They could buy a dozen of those, sell the helicopter, and we could still defund to the tune of $10M or more.
The cops should be given a choice between drones and the chopper. Not both.
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Even better, neither. Neither is good.
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That brings up a very shady concept the police love, called ‘parallel construction’. They’ll just construct a narrative (copspeak for ‘lie’) where they came across the evidence by some other method.
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I was going to suggest owning the drones that carry gallons of ink or carolina reaper matcha for aerosol distribution and that can supplex and defile other drones somehow, but I think you got it okay. After all, I heard the air-filter-in-a-bike-wheel notion win the iom3 plastics use contest and was pushing to feel empathy for that use case. Balloons and spinners, yay.
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I love the idea of chasing drones with a telescoping, long AF butterfly net. Generates a marvellous mental image.
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Balloon releases are always a bad idea. Frightening, enlightening story.
