I Could Kill You with a Consumer Drone

bbookofjoe about 5 hours ago 23 commentsRead Article on defenseone.com

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Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mcphage•4 minutes ago

This is from 2017. Which isn’t to say it’s not real, because I’m sure you could, but it hasn’t really manifested as a civilian problem.

datadrivenangel•about 4 hours ago

"Meanwhile, on the military side, the Pentagon is still buying Boeing Scan Eagles at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop when they can buy a similar capability for only a few thousand dollars at a local hobby shop."

1.Your local hobby shop drone will not be able to fly for 20 hours like a fixed wing Scan Eagle. Bad comparison. 2. Modifying drones to be used for combat is cheap if you don't count the labor cost, and in relative peace time counting the labor costs and overall cost of fielding a system is fair. If you take a $5,000 consumer drone and want it to *reliably* explode on someone, at small volumes that will likely take enough labor time to verify, let alone certify, that it pushes the price up to closer to the price of the new dedicated loitering munitions...

mysterydip•about 2 hours ago

Not to mention logistics. It’s easy to support one of something. Supporting spares, upgrades, obsolescences, etc (plus documentation and training) for hundreds of drones across the globe is another story.

rolph•35 minutes ago

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has adopted the name small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) to describe aircraft systems without a flight crew on board weighing less than 55 pounds

thus you would be using an aircraft(sUAS) to attack people, or if your breaking porch lights security cameras, pushing gate control buttons, you are attacking a building or facility.

i would expect this to involve a severe enforcement effort, and a lot of litigation.

functionmouse•about 5 hours ago

Yeah but you won't so it's not a big problem

We can't orchestrate our society around what someone "could" do

You could kill me with a rock easier than you could kill me with a drone

ares623•about 4 hours ago

We absolutely can, we absolutely should, and we absolutely have been doing that.

When I get on a bus with other people, I can, with a fairly high degree of certainty, rest assured that the other passengers will not just randomly kill me to get something from me. That's because the people, just like me, have some level of comfort and their basic needs being met.

The further we slide away from that, the higher the risk for everyone. And to maintain that needs constant work, from everyone.

JumpCrisscross•about 4 hours ago

You both agree. What keeps someone from killing you on a bus is a combination of norms, morals and deterrence. The same apply to drone murder.

Norms and morals apply almost equally to murder by drone versus e.g. poisoning someone. The difference is largely in deterrence, i.e. having a clearly-communicated capability to find anyone who tries to pull this off.

sleepyguy•about 4 hours ago

>You could kill me with a rock easier than you could kill me with a drone

How about dropping a rock from a drone so it isn't up close and personal.

doug_life•about 4 hours ago

Note this is from 2017

HeavyStorm•about 3 hours ago

Only read the title. Going by it: you could also kill me with a kitchen knife, your car, a bat (if you're fit), multiple types of poison, a homemade firebomb, etc.

antonvs•about 3 hours ago

The difference is the range of the delivery system. None of the options you mention allow you to remotely deliver a deadly payload without ever going particularly near the target location.

nullc•about 4 hours ago

I could kill you with a pen.

boofus•about 4 hours ago

I could kill you with a consumer knife too. What's your point?

eddd-ddde•about 4 hours ago

I can run away from a knife holding psycho or fight back, a drone can fly into my bedroom. Same argument for guns really.

antonvs•about 2 hours ago

You can’t do it from a remote location. That’s a significant difference.

comrade1234•about 4 hours ago

Good luck getting an explosive payload to where I live.

dhx•about 3 hours ago

I change that slightly to "Good luck getting an explosive payload."

The difficulty for an attacker is the explosive payload, not the delivery mechanism. If it were easy for an attacker to get an explosive payload there would be car bombs going off every day as an easier delivery mechanism than use of quadcopters.

Thankfully it seems to be relatively easy to prevent people from making explosives, at least outside of warzones in countries with strict border control, because random people don't have a valid reason to buy industrial chemicals or equipment, and especially not chemicals identified as precursors for making explosive compounds. And for plants where such industrial chemicals are legitimately necessary to use, inputs and outputs can be measured, and detection taggants[1] used, and many other security measures, to prevent accidental or deliberate loss of control over such chemicals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taggant#Explosive_taggants

Ancapistani•about 1 hour ago

I can assure you, it is trivial to make effective explosives from easily-obtained ingredients.

toast0•about 2 hours ago

I dunno where you live, but I've got year round fireworks stands near me.

Is that the best explosive payload? Almost certainly not, but it would probably work.

briHass•about 2 hours ago

Enough for a drone strike on a single target? It could be fairly crude and still effective, if accurate.

comrade1234•about 4 hours ago

Society degrades from war. People that were in warfare shouldn't be allowed back into normal life. Even with a just war, like with Ukraine defending themselves from Russia, the soldiers coming back from the front are killing their wives.

I don't think there's a solution. I've worked on projects in the USA trying to predict behavior changes in veterans that lead to murder/suicide and it's just not possible.

Just try to avoid people that have been in warfare - don't hire them, don't date them, they're broken and can't be fixed.

bloppe•about 3 hours ago

It takes a lot of callous and privilege to have this kind of opinion

OutOfHere•about 3 hours ago

At the very least they should be tested for heavy metals and for basic psychological sanity. Just being in physical contact with firearm and ammunition risks lead exposure. If abnormal, it should be addressed at once.

I do think that war would be better off being done remotely via automated floating and aerial weapons platforms controlled remotely if not semi-autonomously. I mean without soldiers on the front line.