I was always suspicious of the "Don't be Evil" motto. If you ever have a dinner guest who tells you how honest he is, make sure to count all your silverware afterward. Also, fuck you New York Times and fuck your fucking paywall.
US states await key drones decision – and the billions that could follow | The Guardian • Six states will be chosen to host drone test sites • Oklahoma is one of 24 states in the running • Oklahoma's drones: the next generation By Ed Pilkington in Stillwater, Oklahoma http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/26/us-states-await-key-drones-decision-billions
Drones now have six American “test ranges” in which to fly | Ars Technica In November 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) published its “roadmap” for integrating drones (or, if you prefer the government’s term, "unmanned aircraft systems") into American skies. Part of that document included selecting six drone “research and test” sites across the country. On Monday, the FAA announced its nationwide picks for the six site operators. Continued here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/drones-now-have-6-american-test-ranges-in-which-to-fly/
US military report predicts drone swarms, highly autonomous UAVs | RT USA The US military hopes that drones will be capable of changing their own missions, altering course without a human command, and buzzing through the skies in coordinated groups within the next 25 years, according to a new Defense Department report.The US Department of Defense (DoD) explained its hopes for the upcoming decades in its Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, released to the public last week. At nearly 150 pages, the report outlines a variety of goals for air, land, and sea vehicles – yet the unmanned aerial systems (as drones are called) are featured prominently throughout.For all the science fiction fears drones have roused amongst the public, the technology that the military relies so heavily on is still in its relative infancy. The unmanned vehicles rely on GPS systems to determine their course and in some cases bombing routes, which explains in part why thousands of civilians across the Middle East have been killed without cause. Continued here: http://rt.com/usa/drones-own-decisions-soon-156/
Welcome to Joe Haldeman's The Forever War in reality, bitch! These idiots actually think they can just unleash swarms of autonomous drones and there will be no unforeseen consequences. [Buries face in hands and cries.]
This is nifty in the extreme - shapes and identification of known drones, plus some avoidance tips.. Drone Survival Guide - prints out into a poster scroll to the bottom of the page for the free downloads http://dronesurvivalguide.org/
It's sort of like the NSA's programs that automatically decide that someone is a target for perversion and penetration through router and browser exploits, and all before a human gets a heads up--only with guns and missiles. (I know the NSA has their own terms for their ops, but I can't be bothered remembering yet another cult language.) Oh, and will these drones be programmed to recognize a criminal order?
Incidentally, and almost unnecessarily, I'll point out this is EXACTLY why the Founders wrote the Constitution, to prevent exactly this kind of psychotic, totalitarian bullshit. There is nothing more profoundly un-American than this insanity. It took a while, but it finally reared its ugly, brainless head in a genuinely dangerous form.
A failure to recognize the perils of automation are reflected in the Challenger disaster, which involved a Space Shuttle launch that was exclusively controlled by computer. There were no humans in that launch loop. Brainless head, indeed!
U.S. drones killed no more than 4 civilians in Pakistan in '13: study | Reuters U.S. CIA drone strikes against militants in Pakistan killed no more than four civilians last year, according to an annual study by a British-based organisation, the lowest number of reported civilian deaths since the drone programme began in 2004. The study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released this month showed that the number of civilian casualties stood at between zero and four. The findings may reinforce the position of those who support unmanned drones in a debate over the legality, effectiveness and accuracy of the strikes compared to more traditional military operations. The United States releases no information about individual strikes. Information issued by Pakistan's government is patchy. The Bureau tracked 27 suspected strikes, using news reports, field investigations and research by Amnesty International. It said drones, used mainly in remote northwestern areas, killed altogether 112-193 people in 2013. The death tolls varied as different sources often gave conflicting accounts. Increased scrutiny, political pressure and a sharp drop in the number of strikes may have helped cut civilian casualties, said Alice Ross, who heads the Bureau's drone research unit. "The lack of transparency surrounding the drone campaign means it's very hard to say what's causing the drop in civilian casualties," she told Reuters by telephone from London. "The fact they can now take out a single room in a building does suggest the technology and intelligence are quite advanced, but we haven't seen a commensurate fall in civilian casualties in Yemen." Continued here: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/21/uk-pakistan-drones-idUKBREA0K08520140121
Leaked Pakistani document contradicts US accounts of drone strikes | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism http://www.thebureauinvestigates.co...ent-contradicts-us-accounts-of-drone-strikes/
""Although the FAA is working on new guidelines for unmanned aircraft, drones likely won’t be allowed to take to the skies until 2017, points out CNN."" Bugger! There goes my plan to take DM out with one. Ffffoiled again.
We certainly don't advocate illegal things here, but if your drone is for hobby rather than commercial use, you're good.
This drone can steal what's on your phone | CNN Hackers have developed a drone that can steal the contents of your smartphone -- from your location data to your Amazon password -- and they've been testing it out in the skies of London. The research will be presented next week at the Black Hat Asia cybersecurity conference in Singapore. The technology equipped on the drone, known as Snoopy, looks for mobile devices with Wi-Fi settings turned on. Snoopy takes advantage of a feature built into all smartphones and tablets: When mobile devices try to connect to the Internet, they look for networks they've accessed in the past. "Their phone will very noisily be shouting out the name of every network its ever connected to," Sensepost security researcher Glenn Wilkinson said. "They'll be shouting out, 'Starbucks, are you there?...McDonald's Free Wi-Fi, are you there?" That's when Snoopy can swoop into action (and be its most devious, even more than the cartoon dog): the drone can send back a signal pretending to be networks you've connected to in the past. Devices two feet apart could both make connections with the quadcopter, each thinking it is a different, trusted Wi-Fi network. When the phones connect to the drone, Snoopy will intercept everything they send and receive. Continued at http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/20/technology/security/drone-phone/
March 2014 Update: US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia By Jack Serle and Alice K Ross, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - There have been no reported drone strikes in Pakistan for more than three months - Strikes hit Yemen at an intensity not seen since July 2013 - Another month without a US operation in Somalia, while African Union forces make advances - Naming the Dead identifies sixteen people killed by CIA drones in Pakistan https://www.thebureauinvestigates.c...covert-actions-in-pakistan-yemen-and-somalia/
New bill would force President Obama to publish drone strike casualties By Jack Serle, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism A bipartisan Bill that would force President Obama to reveal casualties from covert US drone strikes has been put before the US Congress. If successful, the bill would require the White House to publish an annual report of casualties from covert US drone strikes. The reports would include the total number of combatants killed or injured, the total number of civilians killed or injured, and the total number of people killed or injured by drones who are not counted as combatants or civilians. The Bill would also compel the White House to reveal how it defines combatants and civilians in its covert drone war. However the annual casualty counts proposed by the bill will not include those killed and injured in drone attacks on conventional battlefields, including Afghanistan and any country where the US officially declares war in the future. The Bureau revealed the US and UK had launched almost 1,200 drone strikes in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2012. However in March 2013 the Bureau discovered the US military had stopped publishing data on drone use in Afghanistan and had deleted the few months’ data it had previously released from its publicly available records. Continued here: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.co...ent-obama-to-publish-drone-strike-casualties/
The Three Faces of Drone War: Speaking Truth From the Robotic Heavens | Truthdig Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus. Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group— the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away—whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard? After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get an order from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects. It sounds just like—and the comparison has been made often enough—a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life. And if you believed what little we normally see of them—what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting)—that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father. Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat. From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut U.S. Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh. That tool is named after a ruthless Sumerian king who ruled over Uruk, an ancient city in what is now Iraq. With the help of the massive trove of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill recently explained that Gilgamesh is the code name for a special device mounted on a Predator drone that can track the mobile phones of individuals without their knowledge by pretending to be a cell phone tower. Lopez’s resumé yields more details on what Gilgamesh is capable of. The profile writer claims that he “supervised a team of four personnel supporting the lead targeting force in Laghman and Nuristan provinces [in Afghanistan]. Assisted top-level commanders with developing concepts, approaches, and strategies to Capture/Kill HVTs [high value targets].” Last year, on completing his time in the military, Lopez says he took a civilian job operating Gilgamesh for Mission Essential, an intelligence contractor providing technical support for Pentagon drones. For that company, he says he conducted “pattern of life analysis” and provided support for “targeting and strike operations.” Lopez lives in Grovetown, Georgia, home to a joint Army-NSA code-breaking and language translation operation, involving 4,000 personnel that, since 9/11, has taken the lead in analyzing real-time data feeds from Central Asia and the Middle East. Gilgamesh is just one of several NSA tools used on drones to track targeted cell phones. Another program, Shenanigans, was designed specifically for use by the Central Intelligence Agency. According to other documents leaked by Snowden, an operation code-named Victorydance used these tools in March 2012 to map every computer, router, and mobile device in Yemen. What do men like Lopez actually think about the sort of human destruction, not to speak of the destabilization of whole regions, that Gilgamesh and its like help to unleash? In his online job pitch, Lopez indicates straightforward pride in his work: “My efforts, both as a contractor and in the military, yielded success in identifying, locating, and tracking high value targets, and protection of U.S. and coalition forces.” It would be easy enough to assume that the kind of analytical work such remote pilots do would result in a sense of job satisfaction and little more. And that, it turns out, would be a mistake. Continued at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item...e_war_truth_from_the_robotic_heavens_20140512
WikiLeaks @wikileaks 5m Recommended: Most US drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses Most US drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals. By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research project based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks. The project examines, for the first time, the types of target attacked in each drone strike – be they houses, vehicles or madrassas (religious schools) – and the time of day the attack took place. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/05/23/most-us-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-attack-houses/
FAA grounds Amazon’s drone delivery plans | Ars Technica The Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon. The revelation was buried in a FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft." The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. A federal judge ruled in March, however, that the FAA enacted the regulations illegally because it did not take public input before adopting the rules, which is a violation of federal law. Flight regulators have appealed the decision, maintaining that commercial applications are still barred. The agency has promised that it would revisit the commercial application of small drones later this year, with potential new rules in place perhaps by the end of 2015. But for now, the agency is taking a hard line against the commercial use of drones, and it's unclear whether that policy would change. Continued here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/faa-grounds-amazons-drone-delivery-plans/
Ergh! It's only a model aircraft if it's an amateur hobbyist drone. If it's commercial, the FAA calls it an unmanned aircraft system, and the paperwork weighs more than the drone. This is nothing new, and can't be a shock to Amazon. Obviously Ars Technica doesn't keep up in the Imperial Probe Droid thread. https://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/imperial-probe-droids.45809/page-2#post-2238928
Seriously. Can you imagine? I know people who are one backward step away from thinking the world is flat.
Amazon seeks FAA permission to test drones outdoors near Seattle | Reuters Amazon.com Inc is seeking permission from U.S. regulators to test its delivery drones near Seattle, as part of a rapid expansion of a program that has sparked widespread debate over the safety and privacy implications of drone technology. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos wants to use drones - small unmanned aircraft - to deliver packages in 30 minutes or less as part of the program dubbed "Prime Air." The company is developing drones that can fly at speeds of 50 miles per hour. Now Amazon is seeking permission to test drones in outdoor areas near Seattle, where one of its research and development labs is working on the technology, according to a letter posted on the Federal Aviation Administration's website on Thursday. Currently Amazon can test drones indoors and in other countries. But it cannot conduct R&D flight tests in open outdoor space in the state of Washington, where Amazon has its headquarters. "Of course, Amazon would prefer to keep the focus, jobs and investment of this important research and development initiative in the United States," the company said in the letter, dated July 9 and signed by Paul Misener, head of global public policy for Amazon. Continued at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/11/us-amazon-com-drones-idUSKBN0FG08B20140711
Which other countries? Canada has similar restrictions to the US for commercial drones, and probably other counties do too.
Despite Repeated Denials, San Jose Police Definitely Have a Drone | Motherboard After repeatedly claiming it had no records about its drone program, the San Jose Police Department has confirmed that it does indeed have a drone — it just hasn't flown yet. Two weeks ago, we reviewed the San Jose Police Department’s puzzling inability to locate any documents regarding its purchase of a small drone with federal grants. With some additional prodding, the SJPD has at last tracked down its drone receipts and grant application. The documents indicate that the SJPD's bomb squad took possession of its Century hexacopter drone in January 2014 for just under $7,000, but has yet to fly the unit in operations, train any officers on its deployment, or apply for federal authority to do so. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/despite-repeated-denials-san-jose-police-definitely-have-a-drone San Jose Police Have Finally Found Their Drone Documents | Muckrock FOI Requests: Drone Documents (San Jose Police Department) Drone Documents (San Jose Police Department -- third request) San Jose, CA Police Drone Documents https://www.muckrock.com/news/archi...se-police-have-finally-found-their-drone-doc/
http://time.com/3053003/martha-stewart-drone/ In just a few minutes I was hooked. In near silence, the drone rose, hovered, and dove, silently and surreptitiously photographing us and the landscape around us. The photos and video were stunning. By assuming unusual vantage points, the drone allowed me to “see” so much more of my surroundings than usual. The view I was “seeing” on my iPad with the help of the drone would have otherwise been impossible without the use of a private plane, helicopter, or balloon. With any of those vehicles, I would have needed a telephoto lens, and all of them would have made an unacceptable commotion on the beach. What’s more, I would not have been in the photos!
