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World’s Smallest Drone Shows Privacy May Be Dead Forever [+video]

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By Brad Reed. Privacy seems like such a quaint 20th Century concept, doesn’t it? Unbox Therapy has posted a video of the CX-10 Mini Drone, which is described as the world’s smallest drone and is a definite harbinger of things to come. In other words, it looks like privacy is finally toast . . .

All the same: At least with standard-sized drones there’s no way to miss them. If you’re being trailed by one or if one is hovering outside your window, there’s a decent chance you’ll see it. But as they get smaller and quieter as technology improves, they’ll be much harder to detect and will open up the door for every amateur NSA agent in your neighborhood to keep an eye on everything.

(Read more about the world’s smallest drone HERE)

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The First Drone Film Festival

By David Schneider. It shouldn’t take the whirring of a small drone to remind you that many people are awfully leery of these little aerial contraptions, fearing threats to privacy – and also to airliners.

But others see great benefits, particularly cinematographers, who are thrilled to make use of the unique perspectives drones can provide. Some of the best examples of what they can achieve will be screened March 6 and 7 at the first-ever “drone film festival” in New York City.


The inspiration for the festival came from Randy Scott Slavin, who is the founder and the festival director.

“I bought this thing called a DJI Phantom. It’s the iPhone of drones,” he says. “I had hours and hours and hours of footage around New York, and I finally decided to edit it.”

Randy put the film online and within the next couple of days, received calls from Fox News, Time magazine, Mashable and Gizmodo. (Read more from this story HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Mystery Drone Crashes into Window of yet Another Home

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Normally when you hear a window shatter at your home you think a burglar is breaking in or a kid’s baseball smashed through it, maybe even a hurricane is sweeping by. But what about a high-tech drone?

Not even Andres Buksh imagined that one on Thursday night.

“I thought it was the neighbors throwing the big garbage out for Friday pick up,” said Buksh.

Instead when he checked Friday morning, he found unmanned drone had crash into his Hialeah home and it had broken his bedroom window.

“I guess somebody lost control of it,” said Buksh. (Read more about the mystery drone HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Private Drones are Spying on Phone Signals While the Feds are Using the Mysterious “StingRay” to Eavesdrop

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By Barry Levine. It was only a matter of time before drones started monitoring signals from mobile devices.

Since early February, several small drones flying around the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles have been determining mobile devices’ locations from WiFi and cellular transmission signals.

They are part of an experiment by Singapore-based location marketing firm Adnear, which has offices around the world. The firm told me that, to its knowledge, this is the first time an adtech company has employed drones to collect wireless data.

The capture does not involve conversations or personally identifiable information, according to director of marketing and research Smriti Kataria. It uses signal strength, cell tower triangulation, and other indicators to determine where the device is, and that information is then used to map the user’s travel patterns. (Read more about how the new drones are spying on the phones HERE)


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Secrecy Around Police Surveillance Equipment Proves a Case’s Undoing

By Ellen Nakashima. The case against Tadrae McKenzie looked like an easy win for prosecutors. He and two buddies robbed a small-time pot dealer of $130 worth of weed using BB guns. Under Florida law, that was robbery with a deadly weapon, with a sentence of at least four years in prison.

But before trial, his defense team detected investigators’ use of a secret surveillance tool, one that raises significant privacy concerns. In an unprecedented move, a state judge ordered the police to show the device — a cell-tower simulator sometimes called a StingRay — to the attorneys.

Rather than show the equipment, the state offered McKenzie a plea bargain.


Today, 20-year-old McKenzie is serving six months’ probation ­after pleading guilty to a second-degree misdemeanor. He got, as one civil liberties advocate said, the deal of the century. (The other two defendants also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.)

McKenzie’s case is emblematic of the growing, but hidden, use by local law enforcement of a sophisticated surveillance technology borrowed from the national security world. It shows how a gag order imposed by the FBI — on grounds that discussing the device’s operation would compromise its effectiveness — has left judges, the public and criminal defendants in the dark on how the tool works. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Quadcopter Drone Crashes On White House Grounds

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By Anthony Domanico. The US Secret Service said Monday that a quadcopter drone crashed on the White House grounds just after 3 a.m. ET, causing a brief lockdown while the agency investigated to determine if there was a threat to the site.

After it ruled out a potential threat, the Secret Service revealed that the drone was a run-of-the-mill quadcopter that is sold in stores, though stopped short of identifying the exact make and model. The crash occurred on the southeast side of the compound.

The Secret Service is still working to determine who was controlling the drone, though no additional information on suspects was provided. The Federal Aviation Administration bans unmanned aerial flight systems in a 10-nautical-mile area around Washington’s Reagan National Airport, which according to Time would include the White House, Pentagon and the CIA.

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were in India at the time. There’s no word on whether other family members were staying in the White House when the drone crashed this morning.

Even though it may be tempting to get an inside look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with your fancy new drone, the risk far outweighs the reward as you’d likely end up in jail, or at least on the wrong side of a Secret Service interrogation. So remember, if you try to take drone images of the White House, you’ll probably end up in the Big House. (Read more about the quadcopter drone crashing HERE)

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White House Drone Crash was Accidental

By Tribune Wire Reports. A two-foot-long drone apparently flown by a hobbyist crashed on the White House grounds Monday in an extraordinary, if unintended, breach that raised fresh questions about the president’s security — and a growing threat from the sky.

A man later came forward to say he was responsible for the mishap in the middle of the night and hadn’t meant to fly the drone over the complex, officials said. “Initial indications are that this incident occurred as a result of recreational use of the device,” said Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary. . .

Officials believed the intrusion to be the first of its kind on the White House grounds, although not the first in the vicinity.

Low-flying drones like the quadcopter — a craft lifted by four propellers — have become increasingly sophisticated and affordable instruments that authorities worry could also become tools for terrorists or others meaning to do harm. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Officials: Air Strike Kills 15 Civilians in Yemen by Mistake

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Fifteen people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy, local security officials said on Thursday.

The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.

“An air strike missed its target and hit a wedding car convoy, ten people were killed immediately and another five who were injured died after being admitted to the hospital,” one security official said.

Five more people were injured, the officials said.

The United States has stepped up drone strikes as part of a campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), regarded by Washington as the most active wing of the militant network.

Read more from this story HERE.

Father Uses “Personal Drone” To Follow His Son to School

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A genius dad invented something to make dad life easier: a flying, camera-equipped quadrocopter that could follow his kids to the school bus stop. That’s right, a personal drone for his kids. Genius, I say. Genius!

Paul Wallich, the guy who cooked up the flying drone, used to walk his grade school son 400 meters down a hill to the bus stop. But he was always curious to make a drone with a camera follow his son so he could watch the trip from his computer. So he did it. And it’s a lot easier than you think.

Wallich simply bought a quadrocopter kit and attached a smartphone with a video chatting app enabled. The tricky part was to have the drone follow his kid.

Read more from this story HERE.

Did Iranian Drone, Shot Down by Israel, Include Technology From US Drone Captured Last Year?

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The Israeli Defense Forces initially played down the intrusion of an Iranian-made drone in Israeli airspace last week. Now it turns out, not only did the drone transmit intelligence back to Iran, it also evaded several efforts by an IDF F-16 to shoot it down.

The New York Post revealed these details earlier today:

A drone plane transmitted live pictures of secret Israeli military bases back to Iran’s military, marking a rare breach of Israeli airspace and a new kind of arms race in the Middle East.

The drone, launched by Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon on Oct. 6, is also believed to have transmitted pictures of preparations for a joint Israel-US military exercise, ballistic missile sites, and possibly Israel’s top-secret nuclear reactor near Dimona.

The three-hour drone flight was initially downplayed by Israeli officials red-faced over the shocking breach of their airspace.

Even the drone’s ultimate interception by an F-16 jet was botched — it took two tries for the pilot to down the unmanned plane.

An Israeli defense source blamed the drone’s infiltration on its “unfamiliar stealth elements.”

After finding out that an Iranian drone, with presumably homemade technology, avoided one of the world’s most advanced military’s radar, antiaircraft, and fighter jet capabilities for hours, some are wondering if the drone capitalized on some of the technology harvested from the U.S. drone captured by Iran last year.

We must fight the emerging drone culture

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Photo credit: An Honorable German

As instruments of war, pilotless aircraft have already become essential. The Washington Post reported last year that more than 50 countries had developed or purchased drones to use in surveillance — and that many of those nations were working to weaponize the aircraft. Deadly missiles fired from drones are among the most effective U.S. weapons against the Taliban and al Qaida.

There has been far too little discussion of the moral calculus involved in using flying robots as tools of assassination. At the very least, the whole thing should leave us uneasy. Collateral damage — the killing of innocents — can be minimized but not eliminated. And even if only “bad” people are killed, this isn’t war as we’ve traditionally understood it. Drone attacks are more like state-sponsored homicide.

But similar complaints were raised when tanks replaced horses on the battlefield, and nothing stopped the mechanization of war. Drones allow governments to achieve military objectives without putting the lives of soldiers, sailors and pilots at risk. Robots do not bleed and do not vote, so they will do much of the fighting for us.

The thing about drones, though, is that the technology required to deploy them is nowhere near as daunting as is needed, say, to develop nuclear weapons. As they become more commonplace in the arsenals of the world, we will surely begin seeing them used by “rogue” nations — or even by nonstate actors such as terrorists and drug smugglers.

If Colombian cartels are able to build dope-smuggling submarines, when will Mexican crime lords begin sending up surveillance drones to identify unpatrolled sectors of the U.S. border? Soon, I reckon, if it’s not already happening.

Read more from this story HERE.

Court upholds first-ever use of a DHS drone to assist in arrest of citizen inside US

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A North Dakota court has preliminarily upheld the first-ever use of an unmanned drone to assist in the arrest of an American citizen.

A judge denied a request to dismiss charges Wednesday against Rodney Brossart, a man arrested last year after a 16-hour standoff with police at his Lakota, N.D., ranch. Brossart’s lawyer argued that law enforcement’s “warrantless use of [an] unmanned military-like surveillance aircraft” and “outrageous governmental conduct” warranted dismissal of the case, according to court documents obtained by U.S. News.

District Judge Joel Medd wrote that “there was no improper use of an unmanned aerial vehicle” and that the drone “appears to have had no bearing on these charges being contested here,” according to the documents.

Court records state that last June, six cows wandered onto Brossart’s 3,000 acre farm, about 60 miles west of Grand Forks. Brossart allegedly refused to return the cows, which led to a long, armed standoff with the Grand Forks police department. At some point during the standoff, Homeland Security, through an agreement with local police, offered up the use of an unmanned predator drone, which “was used for surveillance,” according to the court documents.

Grand Forks SWAT team chief Bill Macki said in an interview that the drone was used to ensure Brossart and his family members, who were also charged, didn’t leave the farm and were unarmed during the arresting raid.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Lockheed Martin-plans swarms of miniaturized drones “we couldn’t even fathom 20 years ago”

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It’s real, it’s inspired by maple seeds, and the company behind it, Lockheed Martin, envisions a future in which swarms of the new drones can be deployed at a fraction of the cost and with greater capabilities than drones being used today by the military and other agencies.

Read more HERE.

Photo credit: hieu.ngo