Eideard

Daniel Gárate’s career came crashing to earth a few weeks ago. That’s when the Los Angeles Police Department warned local real estate agents not to hire photographers like Mr. Gárate, who was helping sell luxury property by using a drone to shoot sumptuous aerial movies. Flying drones for commercial purposes, the police said, violated federal aviation rules.

His career will soon get back on track. A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue…

“As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University…

Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Tex., near Houston, whose agency bought a drone to use for various law enforcement operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone cameras anyway. “We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We worry about criminal elements.”

Who determines who is an “criminal element”? You got it. Sheriff Randy McDaniel.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups are calling for new protections against what the A.C.L.U. has said could be “routine aerial surveillance of American life…”

“We see a huge potential market,” said Ben Gielow of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a drone maker trade group.

Anyone else see a huge potential for Uncle Sugar to watch over every waking moment of our lives spent outdoors?

Iran says it will put on display a series of foreign spy drones that it claims to have obtained, including four Israeli and three US unmanned aircraft…the exhibition will be held “in the near future”, and that foreign ambassadors based in Tehran and local journalists would be invited.

“The latest domestically manufactured electronic warfare equipment will also be put on show at the exhibition,” the newspaper said. “The foreign unmanned aircraft that Iran has are four Israeli and three US drones…”

Last week, Iran’s elite revolutionary guards put on show a US unmanned aerial vehicle, believed to be an RQ-170 Sentinel drone, which they claimed to have brought down electronically. However, military experts have questioned the veracity of Iranian claims, while the US insists that the drone malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran.

There was one Pentagon flunkie today who claimed Iran only had a replica of an RQ-170.

Mystery surrounds how Iran got their hands on the aircraft and whether it was genuinely intact, as shown on Iranian TV. Nato said earlier this month that a surveillance drone flying over western Afghanistan went missing and could be the one that entered Iranian airspace along the country’s eastern border. Iran says it downed the drone near the eastern city of Kashmar, some 140 miles from the country’s border with Afghanistan…

Iranian officials also promised to reverse-engineer the drone and decode its technical information. Iran has claimed that Russia and China have requested to see the drone.

The other two US drones were brought down by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps over the Persian Gulf in January, according to the Tehran Times report…

The Christian Science Monitor has published an interview with an Iranian engineer who claimed to be involved in the Islamic regime’s capturing of the US drone. The engineer said Iranian electronic warfare specialists brought down the drone by exploiting a navigational weakness in its GPS system.

Americans are well enough accustomed to our imperial bluster. There really isn’t any need to reassure the “patriots” – and those who oppose our arrogant tread across the landscape of the world will be ignored as usual. An area where true bipartisanship is foreign policy can be guaranteed.

Raytheon developing 13-lb smart bomb for drone delivery

Under mounting pressure to keep its massive budget in check, the Pentagon is looking to cheaper, smaller weapons to wage war in the 21st century. A new generation of weaponry is being readied in clandestine laboratories across the nation that puts a priority on pintsized technology that would be more precise in warfare and less likely to cause civilian casualties. Increasingly, the Pentagon is being forced to discard expensive, hulking, Cold War-era armaments that exact a heavy toll on property and human lives.

At L-3 Interstate Electronics Corp. in Anaheim, technicians work in secure rooms developing a GPS guidance system for a 13-pound “smart bomb” that would be attached to a small, low-flying drone.

Engineers in Simi Valley at AeroVironment Inc. are developing a mini-cruise missile designed to fit into a soldier’s rucksack, be fired from a mortar and scour the battlefield for enemy targets…

These miniature weapons have one thing in common: They will be delivered with the help of small robotic planes. Drones have grown in importance as the Pentagon has seen them play a vital role in Iraq, Afghanistan and reportedly in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan…

This comes at a time when expensive weapons programs, like Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles and Navy cruisers, are being eyed for trims…

“There are a lot of weapons in the military’s arsenal,” said Lt. Col. Brad Beach, an official who coordinates the Marines’ drone technology. “But what we don’t have is something small.”

The military is flush with multi-ton bunker-busting bombs designed to reduce fortified buildings into smoldering rubble. But Marines on the front lines in Afghanistan say there is an urgent need for a weapon that is small and powerful enough to protect them from insurgents planting roadside bombs.

Marines already have small spy drones with high-powered cameras, but what they need is a way to destroy the enemies that their drones discover.

Looking to fill the need, the 13-pound “smart bomb” has been under development for three years. The 2-foot-long bomb is steered by a GPS-guided system made in Anaheim. The bomb is called Small Tactical Munition, or STM, and is under development by Raytheon…

The idea is that the small bomb could be slung under the spy plane’s wing, dropped to a specific point using GPS coordinates or a laser-guidance system, and blast apart “soft” targets, such as pickup trucks and individuals, located 15,000 feet below.

With budget cuts, how will members of Congress maintain their accustomed scale of kickbacks, lobbying contracts post-retirement and trips to golf courses near manufacturers of death and destruction?

Cripes – if Raytheon is funding research on a baby smart bomb all on their own what might be next?

Mexico has admitted that American unmanned drones operate over its territory, but denied that it constitutes a violation of its sovereignty.

Har. Send a copy of that memo to Pakistan!

U.S. Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles have been used to collect intelligence and track drug traffickers, but only under Mexican supervision, according to a statement by the technical secretariat for the Mexican National Security Council.

“Each of these actions is undertaken with full respect to the law,” the statement says…

The flights had been kept secret “because of legal restrictions in Mexico and the heated political sensitivities there about sovereignty,” The New York Times reported.

1. So what changed?

2. When will the joint committee supervising the flights ask that they be armed with missiles?

This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.

Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence – eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.

RTFA. Consider when this technology is coming to a city near you?

Can’t happen here? It is to laugh.

Japan’s Defense Ministry says it will investigate the use of high-flying surveillance drones to monitor activity in China and North Korea.

The ministry said it would send senior Self-Defense Forces officers to the United States to study how it uses and maintains the technologically advanced Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

Does no one tire of the pretense and hypocrisy of a Japanese “Self-Defense Force”?

Drones are widely used by the United States and Britain in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and Germany was reportedly considering their use…

The drones can stay aloft about 30 hours before refueling. The cost is about $3.2 million each, not including monitoring equipment…

Sometimes I think Japanese politicians are engaged in competition with the Brits to be our 51st state. Slavish imitation of Cold War policies remains stuck into the minds of militarist nutballs.

Japan’s military is adopting modern policies about as quickly as Japan’s banking and financial barons. Which means – not at all.

The U.S. Army could be streaming surveillance video images from unmanned planes to solders’ cellphones in about two years…

The Army remains committed to the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) as the main means for disseminating video images to the battlefield, a big program that is still under development and should be fielded in 2014, said Tim Owings, deputy program manager for Army unmanned aerial systems.

But technology developments and rapid advances in encryption software mean smaller-scale self-contained 4G networks could also be an option for allowing troops to see video images in about two years, Owings told reporters at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference…

“We’re probably going to look at that. We’d be somewhat short-sighted not to,” Owings said about streaming to smart phones, although he noted that the Army does not have a formal requirement for such a system.

Owings said new encryption advances mean that such systems would allow “pretty darn secure” transmission of data in a very limited area, and they would be fairly inexpensive since they could be used with commercially available smart phones…

Army equipment often requires extensive training for troops, but most recruits are already familiar with so-called smart phones, cell phones that can receive video images and photographs, which could reduce training costs, Owings said.

Part of such implementation is getting the officer corps to be as technically hip as the incoming grunts. And, I suppose, keeping the bean counters from offering more than 600% markups to their favorite military-industrial supermarkets.

The rapid rate of technological and social change means the future comes crashing towards us faster than ever before, says visionary science fiction author William Gibson.

“In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was actually about three or four years long,” he said, “because in three or four years relatively little would change.”

That stood in sharp contrast to late 2010, he said, when big changes had become a daily occurrence.

“Now the present is the length of a news cycle some days,” he said in an interview with BBC News.

That ferocious rate of change made writing about the present day exciting, he said, and explained why his current novel, Zero History, is set around about now.

“The present is really of no width whatever,” he said…

For instance, he said, the flying drones depicted in Zero History and used for surveillance have the potential to inflict big changes very quickly once they become cheap and ubiquitous.

“They are actually going to change the landscapes of cities,” he said.

“People in tall buildings, particularly in cities like New York or Chicago, have been living lives of utter privacy quite unconcerned that anyone might be looking in the window.”

“That’s just not going to be the case anymore,” he said…

Big Brother will be watching 24/7. With the full collaboration of our legislatures, politicians and pundits, media and most ignorant voters. Security is the watchword for cowards.

It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster: A group of insurgents hack into American military drones, using software they got off the Internet, according to The Wall Street Journal. But, for the benefit of that screenwriter likely pounding away right now to get his idea in first — as well as for the general public — what actually happened?

First is the growing use of unmanned systems, something I explore in my book “Wired for War.” Just a few years ago, the U.S. military had no interest in unmanned systems. Indeed, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, we had only a handful of unmanned systems in the air and zero on the ground in the invasion force, none of them armed.

Today, we have more than 7,000 in the air, ranging from the 48-foot-long Predator to tiny ones that can fit in a backpack, and 12,000 on the ground, such as the Packbot and Talon systems that hunt down roadside bombs. Many of these systems are armed, giving new meaning to the term “killer app…”

The problem of the relatively open video feeds has been known for a while. Indeed, back during our operations in the Balkans, it was discovered that just about anyone in Eastern Europe with a satellite dish could watch live overhead footage of U.S. Special Operations forces going out on raids of suspected war criminals. One joker commented that it was harder to tap into the Disney Channel.

But the Pentagon assumed that foes in the Middle East wouldn’t be smart enough to figure this out, and underestimated how quickly the technology to tap in to the feeds would advance, becoming cheaper and widely available. The problems were not fixed, and more and more of these relatively open systems were deployed…

The U.S. military has responded to the reports with a mix of public calm and private consternation. Officials have said they are fixing the problem, such as by working to encrypt the video downlinks, and that this is a tempest in a teapot.

The first problem, though, is the scale. There are literally thousands of unmanned systems in the air (as well as the current ROVER models that only receive the unencrypted video feed) that will need to be retooled for encryption. This will be expensive and arduous, and all while the war goes on. There are also worries that layering the encryption on top of the system software will slow down the communications and make them hard for multiple users to access at once.

More important, though, is the ad-hoc, back-end nature of the response. It is far different from having your entire system design of both hardware and software take into account how to protect information efficiently but effectively, throughout the communications and operations chain.

The result could be that our patched systems may end up still less protected than the movies or video games you download at home on your DVR or X-Box.

What happens when a Predator drone readies to fire a Hellfire missile – and gets the X-Box red eye of death? What happens when ping time from a tech sitting under a dish in Alamogordo triples out-and-back to that Raptor over South Waziristan?

Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training.

Then, the job in North Waziristan done, the C.I.A. officers could head home from the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters, facing only the hazards of the area’s famously snarled suburban traffic.

It was only the latest strike by the agency’s covert program to kill operatives of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their allies using Hellfire missiles fired from Predator aircraft controlled from half a world away.

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region…

Yet with few other tools to use against Al Qaeda, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under President Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

On one hand, this is a means to an end. My experience with national liberation movements, what knowledge I have of Islamist bandits – passing themselves off as holy warriors – is that the end is what is worth considering in warfare.

There is also the value of acting against insurgencies which limit a region’s population to the standards and way of life of the bandits rather than anything they might choose on their own – given the opportunity to be free of warring bands.