Do you like having the government spying on you?

What do you think is the biggest threat to privacy in America today? Writing in the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf asserts that it may be drones. Many federal agencies are flying drones, Go here to read the examples given.

NYPD launches drone program

Fox 5 in New York City reports,

The skies above New York City will be covered by a fleet drones piloted by police officers.

The New York City Police Department announced its Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) program on Tuesday. Licensed NYPD officers of the Technical Assistance Response Unit will operate them.

Police officials say they will be used in search and rescue missions, to survey inaccessible crime scenes, a hostage situation, and even hazardous material incidents. The department claims that the drones will not be used for "routine patrols" and will not be equipped with weapons.

Read more here.

Guy uses a drone to catch his wife cheating on him

The outlook for nuclear-armed drones

Richard Bitzinger reports,

e US military increasingly relies on drones to carry out a multitude of tasks, usually those deemed too “dull, dirty, or dangerous” for manned missions. Most unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carry out routine reconnaissance. They also act as decoys, serve as communication relays, and even deliver light cargoes. But a growing number of drones are armed, such as the US Predator and MQ-9 Reaper, which are used mostly in tactical situations, such as targeting terrorists or insurgents.

Now military strategists are considering acquiring longer-range drones, especially those capable of carrying out nuclear missions. In 2015 there were reports that Russia was attempting to build nuclear-armed drone submarines.

Read more here.

Are you a drone flyer?

Jamie Condliffe writes at MIT Technology review,

Forget the football. The latest pastime to become a full-fledged sports phenomenon is drone racing.

Breakneck speeds, daring maneuvers, lucrative TV contracts, and large cash prizes—it’s way more exciting than golf.

Competing for supremacy in the air at small scale isn’t a new phenomenon: people have been going head to head with remote-controlled aircraft in fields for a long old time. But in the last few years, technology has provided competitions with a huge shot of adrenaline, in the form of the first-person view.

Nowadays, the small, nimble drones that zip through the air at speeds over 100 miles per hour are equipped with light, high-definition cameras, which wirelessly beam footage back to a pilot. A head-mounted display makes it feel as if that person controlling the drone is right on board.

...For some of the best drone flyers, though, straight-down-the-line racing is already starting to lose its appeal. In a recent Wired feature, the widely revered pilot Carlos Puertolas explained that as head-to-head races becomes the mainstream, there’s more excitement to be found in flying freestyle—as he demonstrates in this dizzying video. As in snowboarding or skateboarding, this is drone racing’s alternative scene, where tricks and stunts, rather than outright speed, are what demonstrates talent.

Drone racing, then, has all the attributes of a modern sport: big money, TV coverage, speed, fierce competition … and a breakaway tribe that prefers to shun the commercialized side of things. Sounds like it’s time to tune in.

Read more here.

Isis plotting to use drones to bomb crowds at major British events

Nick Gutteridge writes in the British paper Express,

ISLAMIC STATE (Isis) are plotting to use toy drones to bomb major events like football matches and music festivals in Britain, it emerged today.

Terrorists want to use the unmanned machines - available for as little as £100 on the high street - to drop explosives on large crowds at popular sporting and cultural gatherings.

Defence chiefs fear they could launch a multi-drone attack carrying several bombs, even using airborne cameras to film the bloody carnage below for twisted propaganda videos.

Senior MI5 figures believed that Isis has already tested how much plastic explosive the flying machines can carry, getting as far as experimenting with detonation devices.

...It would be easy for Isis to get its hands on cheap drones, with more than 127,000 being bought and sold on online auction site eBay in the last year alone.

Alternatively, it is thought the terrorists may attempt to build a copycat drone of their own to avoid having to buy one and potentially raise the suspicions of police and security services.

More worryingly still they could attempt to buy commercial drones like ones used by the military. These machines would be able to carry enough explosive and shrapnel to kill scores of people in a single attack.

Read more here.

Chinese military tries to jam U.S. drones

Bill Gertz writes in the Free Beacon,

China tried to electronically jam U.S. drone flights over the South China Sea in a bid to thwart spying on disputed island military construction, U.S. officials said.

Global Hawk long-range surveillance drones were targeted by the jamming in at least one incident near the disputed Spratly Islands, where China is building military facilities on Fiery Cross Reef.

Disclosure of the jamming came as a U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance flight on Wednesday was challenged eight times by the Chinese military to leave the same area.

A U.S. Global Hawk surveillance drone lands at the Misawa Air Base in Japan / AP

Read more here.

Increased security?

A little drone went on a long journey when Fort Carson controllers lost track of the 4-pound RQ-11 craft and it wandered all the way to a neighborhood near downtown Colorado Springs.


Tom Roeder reports at the Colorado Springs Gazette,

Last week, U.S. Northern Command at Peterson Air Force Base ordered increased security at all American military installations.

...It's the highest security level seen since 9/11 at local bases. The use of drones for base security was common overseas during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but uncommon in the crowded airspace of the U.S.

The Raven, the smallest drone in the Army's inventory, flies not far over rooftops at a sedate 30 mph, making it unlikely to tangle with larger craft. Batteries allow the Raven to stay aloft for about 90 minutes.

The tiny spy planes, though, have a tendency to get lost. Ravens have gone wayward on several Fort Carson training exercises over the past decade, spurring searches of the post's ranges.

Raven crashes occur on every flight. The small plane is designed to stall out at low altitude and fall to the ground where soldiers can recover it.

Read more here.

Drones and our future

Ryan Lovelace points out that Mexican drug smugglers

have come a long way from the days when border tunnels and small private planes were state-of-the-art. Their latest innovation: drones.

Read about them here.

Sensors are not just for toilets and smartphones

Shawn DuBravac writes about:

the potential of sensors and how they could hold the key to significantly reducing the world’s hunger problem. Sensors are everywhere and in everything, at least in developed nations such as the United States. They’ve revolutionized our mobile phones, and are now powering the next wave of wearable tech devices. Sensors are the reason the automotive industry is poised to deliver a driverless car.

...Sensorized devices are multiplying across every sector of the economy. Heavy industry uses sensors to increase productivity. Airplanes employ sensors in their “fly-by-wire” systems. Physicians can prescribe digestible sensors to monitor and wirelessly transmit biometric data.

...So, what does this have to do with solving the global food crisis? There’s enough food in the world to feed every person on the earth, yet through a combination of inefficiencies, supply-chain obstacles and oppressive government regulation, hundreds of millions of people are undernourished. Indeed, many food shortages arise because of misallocation of information. Suppliers of food are unaware of shortages and unaware of market prices. I’ve heard stories of food rotting on African farms only miles away from desolate starvation.

Equipping food-supply material such as storage containers, warehouses and shelves with sensors allows us to know instantly the moment a shortage exists. And I mean instantly in the literal sense. With sensors, we don’t need to wait for a person to count hundreds of containers to realize that there won’t be enough food for the community –a time-consuming process that too often doesn’t happen anyway. Sensors help remove those layers of inefficiency, shortening data’s transmission chain, skipping potential inhibitors and triggering faster response times.

Let’s take it one step further. The rise of commercial drones removes perhaps the biggest obstacle for food supply efforts – the need to take food from point A to point B over treacherous roads. Drones are possible only because of sensors. While we are farther away from seeing the “Drone Delivery Age” than we are from equipping storage facilities with sensors, we’re closer than you might think.

Read more here.

Drone lands on White House lawn

Today a drone landed on the White House lawn. Luckily it was not loaded with explosives like the drones Obama has been using to kill people in the Middle East. I guess it's just a matter of time. Josh Lederman and Joan Lowy reported for the Associated Press:

Paul McDuffee, vice president at drone-maker Insitu, said of the device that crashed: "Something of that size is going to be very limited in terms of what it can carry, probably down to a few ounces in payload."

Even so, a small drone at low altitude is hard to intercept.

"There's probably nothing they have that could stop it, particularly at night," said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The sniper would be shooting at the drone and his bullets would be going past it into the buildings on Connecticut Avenue. If it's a crisis or emergency, sure, that makes sense, but what goes up comes down, and that includes bullets."

The New York Times reports that

The drone, which was about two feet in diameter and weighed about two pounds, was operated by a government employee whom the Secret Service did not identify. The agency said the employee was flying the object near the White House around 3 a.m. for recreational purposes when he lost control of it. Officials did not explain why the man, who does not work at the White House and who has not been charged with a crime, was flying the drone at that hour.

The incident comes just days after the Department of Homeland Security held a conference in Arlington, Va., on the dangers that such drones pose to the nation’s critical infrastructure and government facilities. On display at the meeting was a DJI Phantom drone — the same type of drone that crashed at the White House on Monday. But the drone on display had three pounds of fake explosives attached to the payload as part of an effort to show how easily it could be used to launch an attack, according to a participant at the conference.

A counterterrorism official at the meeting warned that small drones could also be used to launch chemical and biological attacks, according to Daniel Herbert, who attended the conference.

Read more here.

Got a "mosquito" bite?

Paul Joseph Watson reports:

Harvard Professor Margo Seltzer warned that miniature mosquito drones will one day forcibly extract your DNA on behalf of the government and insurance companies as she told elitists at the World Economic Forum in Davos that privacy was dead.

Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University, told attendees, “Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible… How we conventionally think of privacy is dead.”

Seltzer went on to predict that in the near future, mosquito-sized robots would perpetually monitor individuals as well as collecting DNA and biometric information for governments and corporations.

Read more here.

The drones are coming

Buying those heavy bags of dog food can be a drag. Not in Australia!



The use of drones to deliver goods is mostly banned in the US. Amazon, Dominos Pizza, and now Google have all been experimenting. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at it today:

"I don't know that Google is much better positioned than Amazon or anyone else in terms of technology, but the company has a track record of being influential in terms of policy," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington who studies robotics and privacy.

Read more here.

Dave Barry's review of 2013

Dave Barry is out with his review of 2013. Some excerpts:
September:

Just when it seems as if there is no good way out of the Syria mess, help miraculously arrives in the form of our generous old friends the Russians, who, despite being longtime allies of Syria, are willing to lend us a helping hand without any thought of benefiting themselves. Under their plan, Assad gets to remain in power but must give up his chemical weapons and go back to killing people in a more humane, less Hitlerish way. With the crisis averted, everybody in Washington heaves a sigh of relief, and that is the last we hear about the crisis in Syria.

October: The federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park — ALL of it — is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.

November: Public dissatisfaction with Obamacare continues to grow as many Americans discover that their current insurance plans are being canceled. A frustrated and — it goes without saying — surprised President Obama reveals to the nation that “insurance is complicated to buy” and clarifies that when he said “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” he was using “you” in the sense of “not necessarily you personally.” Observers note that the White House has stopped referring to the program as “Obamacare” and is now calling it by the more formal legal name “George W. Bush.”

December: In other retail news, Jeff Bezos reveals that Amazon is experimenting with a system that would deliver parcels weighing up to five pounds via drones; heavier packages would be delivered via surplus World War II howitzers. Some observers express concerns about this concept, but it gets a rare five-star rating from The Washington Post.

Pure evil

Have you heard about the talking snowman who sings like Burl Ives? Once again, Manhatten Infidel has the story.

The President has also ordered that the a new drone program against snowmen be set in place.

“The ones that don’t look like Burl Ives will be taken out. The ones that do will be co-opted.”