The flying machines of the big brother! For the police, they are the ideal complement to the generalized surveillance, but for a photographer they become the wedding videography tool and for some voyeuristic pleasure-seeker, an extension of his predatory gaze. For the criminals? For this other, competitive half of police forces, what has drone technology offered? Until now we knew that they have been used extensively to smuggle various necessities to the inmates in prisons. But our naive minds could not conceive what criminal brains are concocting in order not to miss the train of technological developments.
Last April, at a technology exhibition of the “International Union for Unmanned Vehicle Systems” in the US, a senior FBI official described a story straight out of the future. During a hostage situation, a swarm of drones appeared and began vertical assaults against the special forces operatives, aiming to force them to reveal their positions. And not only that: the drones played the role of the gang’s “eyes”, uploading live video to YouTube, so that the gang members who had been surrounded could have an accurate picture of the FBI’s movements. Via live streaming! While you watch videos to kill time, others have been working hard to find a way to use drones and streaming in their work!
And that was just one example! There have been incidents where drones were used to surveil police departments and prosecutors’ offices in order to locate protected witnesses, or to fly around protected locations in order to identify gaps in security systems that would facilitate a break-in attempt. In Australia, a gang of smugglers used drones to mislead authorities at the country’s ports. If a coast guard patrol approached a container with contraband, the gang had a view through the drones and made calls to the coast guard reporting fake incidents of fire or break-ins in order to draw the coast guard away. A few months ago in China, police dismantled a network that was smuggling smartphones across the border using drones. The value of the devices that the drones had transported was estimated at over 80 million dollars.
With gangs constantly coming up with original ways to use technology, authorities struggle to keep up with them. Thus, in addition to the mandatory registration of all drones in special registries, the next thing they are considering is to make the navigation lights emit a unique code that can be read by smartphones and identify the drone. Will such measures prevent gangs from using drones? Certainly! Until pirated drones of unknown origin, manufacture, and identity appear, with tampered frame numbers and fake plates…