Finding Drones in Peace and War

 

DJI, the world's largest drone maker, has announced that it is stopping all shipments of new products to both Ukraine and Russia.  The Verge reported this on Apr. 27 following earlier stories that Russian troops were using a drone-tracking technology called AeroScope to locate Ukrainian drone pilots flying commercial drones that had been converted to combat use.  And last week, the White House announced that it was asking Congress to pass laws making it easier for government agencies to detect and track drones.

 

Drones, more formally known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), have changed from super-expensive military-only devices a couple of decades ago into popular consumer and professional products today.  Advances in software and hardware have led to over two million drone users in the U. S. alone, and the repurposing of consumer drones for military uses both by guerilla groups and defenders of the Ukraine. 

 

Most drones are not autonomous, but controlled from the ground by means of a radio link.  The radio link is the means by which both the controller and other parties can locate and track the drone.  In anticipation of the time when radio identification of drones would become a government requirement, in 2017 DJI began to include a signal broadcast from every drone they made which provides the drone's "position, altitude, speed, direction, serial number, and the location of the pilot."  This data is unencrypted, meaning that anyone with the proper receiver can pick it up. 

 

DJI also conveniently made available a system called AeroScope, which can receive this data and provide a readout of all drone locations within distances of a few kilometers, depending on the type of system.  Up to now, DJI has sold AeroScope only to law-enforcement agencies and other entities that it deems appropriate for the technology. 

 

Confirming DJI's intuition, in 2020 the U. S. FAA issued regulations that make it mandatory for any drone weighing more than 0.25 kilograms (about half a pound) to broadcast its location, the operator's location, and an identifying number by 2023.  So by next year, all drones big enough to do anything other than entertain the owner will have to have such radio identification means, whether they are new or old.

 

As an ethics issue, the question of drone identification and location technology has a number of ramifications.  From the Wild-West days when consumer drones were too rare for the FAA to have made detailed regulations, we have now reached the point that drones of any size must be trackable by authorities. 

 

If drone users aren't doing anything nefarious, it's hard to imagine why they would object to the requirement that drones must broadcast their identity and location.  A useful comparison might be made to automobile license plates.  The first state to issue state-made automotive license plates was Massachusetts, back in 1910.  Most automobile owners back then were glad that the states began to register and license their vehicles, because it freed them from having to follow a hodge-podge of local regulations that often put them at a disadvantage with respect to horse-drawn vehicles legally.  Massachusetts started their early license-plate numbers with 1 and went up from there.  I don't know if this is still the case today, but up to 1999 (the last year I lived in the state), it was possible to will one's legacy two-to-four-digit license plate to one's heirs, so that your low license-plate number let everybody know that your ancestors were among the first thousand or so people to own a car in Massachusetts. 

 

I doubt that any drone owners are going to get so attached to their drone ID numbers.  But there are real privacy and security issues in the question of who can access the drone ID signals.  Because DJI has not encrypted the data up to now, the company's AeroScope is simply a convenient way for a law-enforcement agency to get into the business.  I suspect that any well-informed engineer could come up with a similar system by combining the suitable microwave receivers with decoding equipment that would not have to be fancy at all. 

 

The White House's initiative seems aimed at giving more government entities permission to do this kind of snooping, and providing them with a list of approved equipment that does so.  There is an opportunity here for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor of drone-detection equipment, assuming that Congress responds, but that is an open question.

 

What is not in question anymore is whether a drone operator can fly with the assurance that nobody can find out whose drone it is or where he is.  That assurance, if it was ever present, is now gone.  And in the vast majority of legitimate-use cases, this can only be an asset to the situation.

 

As for Ukrainian drones, one must applaud the ingenuity of those who repurposed commercial and amateur drones for military purposes, either for surveillance or actual delivery of weapons.  At the same time, it's not at all surprising that the Russians would use AeroScope or something similar to track down the drone operators and attack them, although at this writing it is not clear whether this has actually happened.  One does not see license plates on tanks, and so the requirements of wartime use for drones are very different. 

 

Drones originated to meet wartime needs, and it's likely that the U. S. or other allied countries can supply Ukraine with military-type drones that will be far more effective than repurposed hobby-type units. 

 

Whenever I bring up the subject of engineering ethics in a discussion, if it goes on long enough sooner or later someone will come up with the bromide, "Technology is neutral—it's only how it's used that's good or bad." 

 

Like many sayings, this one has an element of truth in it.  But anonymized drones are obviously more suited to warlike uses than ones that constantly announce both their position and the position of the operator.  So the cases of drone identification in peace and war shows that this saying is limited in its applicability, to say the least. 

 

Sources:  The Verge carried articles I referred to on various aspects of drones and AeroScope at https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041869/white-house-biden-admin-counter-drone-legislation-plan-tracking and https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking.   A summary of the White House initiative is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/04/25/fact-sheet-the-domestic-counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems-national-action-plan/.  The FAA's new drone ID requirements are found at https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/28/22203398/faa-remote-id-rules-location-night-over-people.  And the story about the first automotive license plates in the U. S. is from https://time.com/4301055/license-plate-history/.

What's Wrong With Police Drones?

Recently the online journal Slate carried the news that DJI, the world's largest maker of consumer drones, is teaming with Axon, which sells more body cameras to police in the U. S. than anyone else.  Their joint venture, called Axon Air, plans to sell drones to law-enforcement agencies and couple them to Axon's cloud-based database called Evidence.com, which maintains files of video and other information gathered by police departments across the country.  Privacy experts interviewed about this development expressed concerns that when drone-generated video of crowds is processed by artificial-intelligence face-recognition software, the privacy of even law-abiding citizens will be further compromised. 

Is this new development a real threat to privacy, or is it just one more step down a path we've been treading for so long that in the long run it won't make any difference?  To answer that question, we need to have a good idea of what privacy means in the context of the type of surveillance that drones can do.

The Fourth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution asserts "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. . . . "  The key word is "unreasonable," and due to reasons both jurisprudential and technological, the meaning of that word has changed over time.  What it has meant historically is that before searching a person's private home, officers of the law must obtain a search warrant from a judge after explaining the reasons why they think such a search may turn up something illegal. 

But drones don't frisk people—they can't generally see anything that anybody at the same location of the drone couldn't see.  So as a result, there are few restrictions if any against simply taking pictures of people who are out in public places such as streets, sidewalks, parks, and other venues that drones can easily access.  As a result, security cameras operated both by law enforcement personnel and by private entities have proliferated to the extent that in many parts of the U. S., you can't walk down the street without leaving evidence that you did so in a dozen or so different places. 

This capability has proved its value in situations such as terrorist bombings, where inspection of videos after a tragedy has provided valuable evidence.  But the price we have paid is a sacrifice of privacy so that the rare malefactor can be caught on camera.

So far, this sacrifice seems to be worth while.  I'm not aware of a lot of cases in which someone who wasn't breaking the law or looked like they were, has been persecuted or had their privacy violated by the misuse of privately-owned security cameras.  There may be the odd case here and there, but generally speaking, such data is accessed only when a crime has occurred, and those responsible for reviewing camera data have done a good job of concentrating on genuine suspects and not misusing what they find.

Is there any reason that the same situation won't obtain if police forces begin using drone-captured video, and integrating it into Evidence.com, the Axon cloud-based evidence database?  Again, it all depends on the motives of those who can access the data.

If law enforcement agencies don't abuse such access and use it only for genuine criminal investigations, then it doesn't seem like moving security cameras to drones is going to make much difference to the average law-abiding citizen.  If anything, a drone is a lot more visible than a security camera stuck inside a light fixture somewhere, so people will be more aware that they're being watched than otherwise. 

But my concern is not so much for misuse in the U. S. as it is for misuse in countries which do not have the protection of the Bill of Rights, such as China, the home country of the drone-maker DJI. 

The Chinese government has announced plans to develop something called a Social Credit System, and has already put elements of it in place.  According to Wikipedia, the plans are for every citizen and business to have some sort of ranking rather like a credit score in the U. S.  Only the types of behavior considered for the ranking range far beyond whether you simply pay your bills on time, and include how much you play Internet games, how you shop, and other legal activities.  Already the Social Credit System has been used to ban certain people from taking domestic airline flights, attending certain schools, and getting certain kinds of jobs. 

While I have no evidence to support this, one can easily imagine a drone monitoring a Chinese citizen who goes to church, for example, and sending his or her social credit score into the basement as a result.  So whether a given surveillance technology poses a threat to the privacy and the freedom of the individual depends as much on the good will (or lack of it) of those who use the data as much as it does on the technology itself.

Some groups in the U. S. have little confidence in the average police organization already, and see drones as yet another weapon that will be turned against them.  Genuine cases of police who abuse their authority should not be tolerated, but statistics can be used by both sides in a controversy about arrest rates of minority populations to show either that blatant discrimination goes on (as it surely does in some cases), or to show that because certain groups historically commit more crimes, they naturally show up more in the category of suspicious persons that tend to be interrogated and surveilled.  There is no easy answer to this problem, which is best dealt with on a local level by identifying particular problems and solving them one by one.  Blanket condemnations either of police or of minority groups does no good.

When all is said and done, the question really is, do we trust those who use surveillance drones and the databases where the drone data will wind up?  Any society that functions has to have a minimum level of trust among its citizens and in its vital institutions, including those that enforce the law.  Surveillance drones can help catch criminals, no doubt.  But if they are abused to persecute law-abiding private citizens, or even if they are just perceived to contribute to such abuse, surveillance drones could end up causing more problems than they solve.

Sources:  On June 7, 2018, Slate carried the article "The Next Frontier of Police Surveillance Is Drones," by April Glaser, at https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/axon-and-dji-are-teaming-up-to-make-surveillance-drones-and-the-possibilities-are-frightening.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the U. S. Bill of Rights and on China's Social Credit System.