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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38814 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I'm surprised there aren't 24/7 surveillance drones hovering-around a presidential security detail. It seems a lot cheaper and more effective than SS operatives manually scouting out these locations.

The USSS does currently have anti-drone tech in its protection detail, I think they have some sort of roughly man-portable radio jammer/wave disrupter kind of deal IIRC, but yeah, using drones for law enforcement could very well be a thing. However, privacy concerns means that local PDs don't usually (and IMO probably shouldn't). It does seem like pretty low-hanging fruit, though. When in doubt, budget might be the issue.

I think part of why is that they already use extensive general-level jamming/GPS stuff at events, and that might mess with their own drones? Plus it's easier to do IFF if literally every drone is a "bad" drone, you can shoot down/react with complete confidence. If you have your own special drones, it makes IFF hard for regular dudes on the ground.

Edit: Reddit turned up this so they at least had one program in progress. They don't use the high-altitude spy drones like we use in Afghanistan over US soil usually at all, partly for privacy and legal reasons.

Give it a few years. In the short term, they're probably focused more on anti-drone countermeasures, and adding IFF to that raises the complexity beyond "shoot down all drones."

On the other hand, I think laser-based anti-drone systems are probably going to start appearing in all sorts of places like this within a couple years.

Lasers can be countered with foil on the drone. Mark Rober has a good video on the state of drone warfare.

Which video?

More than that, any laser powerful enough to knock out a drone at a reasonable distance is going to be too dangerous to use in some sort of automated system in a civilian area.

A laser powerful enough to knock out anything at all is too dangerous to use in an automated fashion in a civilian area unless it has hard stop that prevents aiming the laser at low enough targets to do anything useful against similar snipers.

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