A Criminal Gang Used a Drone Swarm To Obstruct an FBI Hostage Raid
A Criminal Gang Used a Drone Swarm To Obstruct an FBI
Hostage Raid
BY PATRICK TUCKER TECHNOLOGY EDITOR MAY 3, 2018
And that’s just one of the ways bad guys are putting
drones to use, law enforcement officials say.
DENVER, Colorado — Last winter, on the outskirts of a
large U.S. city, an FBI hostage rescue team set up an elevated observation post
to assess an unfolding situation. Soon they heard the buzz of small drones —
and then the tiny aircraft were all around them, swooping past in a series of
“high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them,” the
head of the agency’s operational technology law unit told attendees of the
AUVSI Xponential conference here. Result: “We were then blind,” said Joe Mazel,
meaning the group lost situational awareness of the target. “It definitely
presented some challenges.”
The incident remains “law enforcement-sensitive,” Mazel
said Wednesday, declining to say just where or when it took place. But it shows
how criminal groups are using small drones for increasingly elaborate crimes.
Mazel said the suspects had backpacked the drones to the
area in anticipation of the FBI’s arrival. Not only did they buzz the hostage
rescue team, they also kept a continuous eye on the agents, feeding video to
the group’s other members via YouTube. “They had people fly their own drones up
and put the footage to YouTube so that the guys who had cellular access could
go to the YouTube site and pull down the video,” he said.
Mazel said counter surveillance of law enforcement agents
is the fastest-growing way that organized criminals are using drones.
Some criminal organizations have begun to use drones as
part of witness intimidation schemes: they continuously surveil police
departments and precincts in order to see “who is going in and out of the
facility and who might be co-operating with police,” he said.
Drones are also playing a greater role in robberies and
the like. Beyond the well-documented incidence of house break-ins, criminal
crews are using them to observe bigger target facilities, spot security gaps,
and determine patterns of life: where the security guards go and when.
In Australia, criminal groups have begun have used drones
as part of elaborate smuggling schemes, Mazel said. The gangs will monitor port
authority workers. If the workers get close to a shipping container that houses
illegal substances or contraband, the gang will call in a fire, theft, or some
other false alarm to draw off security forces.
Andrew Scharnweber, associate chief of U.S. Customs and
Border Protection, described how criminal networks were using drones to watch
Border Patrol officers, identify their gaps in coverage, and exploit them.
“In the Border Patrol, we have struggled with scouts,
human scouts that come across the border. They’re stationed on various
mountaintops near the border and they would scout … to spot law enforcement and
radio down to their counterparts to go around us. That activity has effectively
been replaced by drones,” said Scharnweber, who added that cartels are able to
move small amounts of high-value narcotics across the border via drones with
“little or no fear of arrest.”
Nefarious use of drones is likely to get worse before it
gets better, according to several government officials who spoke on the panel.
There is no easy or quick technological solution. While the U.S. military has
effectively deployed drone-jamming equipment to the front lines in Syria and
Iraq, most of these solutions are either unsuitable or have not been tested for
use in American cities where they may interfere with cell phone signals and
possibly the avionics of other aircraft, said Ahn Duong, the program executive
officer at DHS’s homeland security, science and technology directorate.
The most recent version of the FAA reauthorization bill
contains two amendments that could help the situation, according to Angela
Stubblefield, the FAA’s deputy associate administrator in the office of
security and hazardous materials safety. One would make it illegal to
“weaponize” consumer drones.
The other — and arguably more important — amendment would
require drones that fly beyond their operators’ line of sight to broadcast an
identity allowing law enforcement to track and connect them to a real person.
“Remote identification is a huge piece” of cutting down
on drone crime, Stubblefield said. “Both from a safety perspective… enabling
both air traffic control and other UAS
[unmanned areal systems] to know where another is and enabling beyond
line-of-sight operations. It also has an extensive security benefit to it,
which is to enable threat discrimination. Remote ID connected to registration
would allow you to have information about each UAS, who owns it, operates it,
and thus have some idea what its intent is,” said Stubblefield.
But even if both amendments pass as part of the
re-authorization, it will be some time before they take effect, so it will be
the Wild West in America’s skies a while longer.
Comments
Post a Comment