Drones Are Being Frequently Used Against The Authorities During The Criminal Activities
Last updated May 3, 2024
- Criminals are increasingly using drones against the FBI agents.Â
- Drones can disrupt monitoring equipment and make hostage rescues more difficult to handle.Â
- Consumer drones can also be used for spying on the security patrols in organized robberies or to avoid border controls.Â
- There are ways to suppress drone usage for criminal purposes.
Drones are great if you want to make cool looking panoramic video footage of your neighborhood, or some pictures from the nearly impossible angles. But it turns out they are quite useful for something else too. Newest reports are showing a massive increase in drone usage during the criminal activities such as robberies, hostage situations, etc. It looks like the FBI is having a lot of trouble dealing with drones in this kind of scenarios.
The Verge mentions one particular case of the hostage situation where an FBI hostage rescue team had set up an observation post to carefully monitor the situation. Agents were really surprised when they saw a swarm of small drones making low and fast flybys in order to flush them out of the observation post. Not only, the criminals managed to make the team on the field stay "blind" of what is going on, but they also received additional information of the agents' whereabouts through the drones' camera feed.
Image Courtesy Of Staff
There were a lot of similar occurrences where organized crime groups would use drones to perform their criminal activities. For example, gangs tend to use them in order to put a surveillance on the police officers, identify witnesses and also provide support during the robberies. One consumer drone can easily show the current location of the security patrols in one facility. Other than that, some cases were reported when the international smugglers would utilize drones to avoid border controls.
These illegal uses of drones can be stopped with technologies like drone jamming equipment like the one military uses in Syria and Iraq. However, these techniques can cause a lot more problems in the urban city areas since they can unintentionally jam mobile phones and even airplane signals in that area. Another way to approach this problem is a legislation change that would force drone manufacturers to put drone operator's identity in every footage created with these devices. The government could also ban the use of "weaponized" drones altogether or allow the use of anti-drone guns which is currently illegal. Whatever the case may be, legislation needs to follow the rising misuse of technology without hurting the common users and drone manufacturers.
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