Drones

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ADK

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ADK,
Get yourself a nice Mossberg model 500. Then, go buy some buckshot. Drones are typically pretty slow, and will make for loads of fun when shooting them out of the sky.
 
The problem with an EMP generator good enough to take out a drone at distance is that it's kind of non-selective and will take out a lot of other things at similar distances, while emitting a trackable signal to tell any listeners where it is.

I wouldn't worry about maple-seed sized versions of these for awhile, there are plenty of issues around how to power it for more than a minute or so...range and airtime will be very short. The military is lusting for these kinds of things, but found simpler solutions for most of it - a small robot you can simply throw like a grenade through windows or over walls or onto roofs is where they are at right now.
"Where are the guys with guns hiding?" is the question they want to answer.

The main threat to us at this time is the larger, already developed drones that have good enough optics etc to see you at a longer range than you can (easily) see them.

The only way to reliably take these out of the sky right now (and this is just the old contest between the locksmith and the lock picker) would be a very accurate gun hooked to a passive (optical likely) detection/aiming system that scanned the sky for this kind of things, and had automatic provision for things like ranging and wind estimation, so you could take it out with one shot (two and they know where you are again and can send the data before the second one gets it).

So, a feedforward CIWS kind of thing that only needs one shot is about the only defense. Anything else wins the battle but loses the war - reveals you as a hostile.

Edit: And of course if a lot of drones get taken out in a particular area, that's when it's worth it to put boots on the ground to find out why. This would be a very hard one to win.
 
...
I wouldn't worry about maple-seed sized versions of these for awhile, there are plenty of issues around how to power it for more than a minute or so...range and airtime will be very short. ...

I'm pretty sure I read an article years ago about some DARPA projects where they were trying to create "insect borgs" - insects they could control that carried cameras or mics. Power only needed for the camera/mic and not for transport.
 
Yup, you'd be right about that. But what works kinda-some in a lab vs what's practical to build and deploy in quantity...Insects are flakey even under some control, they might drift off to get a meal etc.

Again, something so short-range if you saw it you could probably easily find the ground controller and deal with that side of the equation directly instead. Great in a close-quarters city battle...not so useful in other situations.

Actually, the BW of video means so much xmitter power is required to move it any distance that power for that quickly becomes a limit as well. It's all about power density, here, electric cars, etc...the rest isn't so hard. Most of the DARPA work is for these things that only have to work a couple minutes to show our guys what's behind that wall. Those aren't going to be real useful for surveiling the general population.

That will be done by the big guys that can fly high and achieve lots of hours of in-air time. This little stuff is only for once you've really already figured out where a target probably is - if that happens to you, you're toast already anyway.

(very) Roughly speaking in aerodynamics, drag/loss goes up with surface area, whereas the power you can bring goes up with volume. So V^3 goes up a lot faster than V^2 - the old scaling issue.
 
ADK,
Get yourself a nice Mossberg model 500. Then, go buy some buckshot. Drones are typically pretty slow, and will make for loads of fun when shooting them out of the sky.

I'm an 870 man, myself :)

But, good point. Those newer drones, though, hover up so high I'm not sure that you could even spot them easily.

ADK
 
"Where are the guys with guns hiding?" is the question they want to answer.

This certainly seems to be the best use of these things. Hell, if I was next in line to walk into unknown territory, I'd sure want one of these things ahead of me.

All-in-all, I guess I just don't like the 1984-ness of these things.

Good point on the EMP. I guess we would need to get down to real basics (no electronics) in a shelter before using something of the sort.

I appreciate the comments though! I like to read other peoples opinions on this stuff.

:popcorn:
 
Charlottesville, Va., has become the first city in the United States to formally pass an anti-drone resolution.

The resolution, passed Monday, "calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court," and "pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones."

The resolution passed by a 3-2 vote and was brought to the city council by activist David Swanson and the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group based in the city. The measure also endorses a proposed two-year moratorium on drones in Virginia.

Councilmember Dede Smith, who voted in favor of the bill, says that drones are "pretty clearly a threat to our constitutional right to privacy."

"If we don't get out ahead of it to establish some guidelines for how drones are used, they will be used in a very invasive way and we'll be left to try and pick up the pieces," she says.
...

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles...becomes-first-to-pass-anti-drone-legislation-
 
So Senator Rand Paul has been pressuring the Obama Administration for a while on the drone issue:
This Isn't Hard, Mr. President: Do You Think You Can Kill Us on American Soil or Not?

...

I can't think of any reason why the Obama Administration would keep dodging this question save one: It believes that, under certain circumstances, perhaps spelled out in a secret legal memo, it is empowered to kill American citizens or non-citizens with drones inside the United States.

And it knows the citizenry would be alarmed by that belief.
...

More: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...u-can-kill-us-on-american-soil-or-not/273207/

This letter is a few days old, but is very important for every American to be aware of. Essentially, Rand Paul is threatening to filibuster Barack Obama’s nominee for the CIA, John Brennan, due to his refusal to answer a simple question:

Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial?

This should not be a complicated question to answer, yet it seems Obama, Brennan and pretty much every other little power consumed bureaucrat is incapable of doing so. Below is Rand Paul’s letter reprinted in full (my emphasis added).
...

More: http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/0...-the-cia-can-you-kill-with-drones-in-the-usa/

Looks like Holder confirmed it:
In a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Attorney General Eric Holder said that the President could theoretically order lethal strikes within American borders under "extraordinary circumstance." ...

More: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/5/4068580/attorney-general-holder-wont-rule-out-drone-strikes-in-us
 
And so it begins.....without due process........without discovery........without a chance to rebut or to face your accuser.......without a trial........and, for all we know, without any empirical evidence whatsoever.

How Kafkaesque of Obama, to declare [through the puppet Holder] that he can indeed sanction the assassination of an American Citizen on our own soil. Please stop the planet, I want to get off now. :+(
 


"He (Obama) wants a warrant, to tap a phone, but he doesn't want judicial oversight to kill an American" - that's something, isn't it?
 
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And so it begins.....without due process........without discovery........without a chance to rebut or to face your accuser.......without a trial........and, for all we know, without any empirical evidence whatsoever.

The scariest thing of all is, nobody seem to notice, that with "tools" like that, the gov.t can target ANYONE that's just simply inconvenient to them, first and foremost - their political opponents.

That's just staggering.
 
It's quite easy to jam GPS, encrypted or not. But unless you break the crypto, you can't make it go where you want, just confuse it. Of course, you have to know its there. The scary thing about the big drones is they fly so high you can't see them.

Be aware, an agency does have a sniffer/RDF satellite cluster to find sources of such jamming fairly quickly. So unless you're on the move, you'd be painting a target on your back.
 
If you stack some capacitors, you can pretty easily make an EMP generator. If you make the exploding wire kind, you get better distance out of it.
 
Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster will inevitably fail at its immediate objective: derailing John Brennan’s nomination to run the CIA. But as it stretches into its sixth hour, it’s already accomplished something far more significant: raising political alarm over the extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year “war on terrorism.”

The Kentucky Republican’s delaying tactic started over one rather narrow slice of that war: the Obama administration’s equivocation on whether it believes it has the legal authority to order a drone strike on an American citizen, in the United States. Paul recognized outright that he would ultimately lose his fight to block Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief and architect of much of the administration’s targeted-killing efforts.

But as his time on the Senate floor went on, Paul went much further. He called into question aspects of the war on terrorism that a typically bellicose Congress rarely questions, and most often defends, often demagogically so. More astonishingly, Paul’s filibuster became such a spectacle that he got hawkish senators to join him.

“When people talk about a ‘battlefield America’,” Paul said, around hour four, Americans should “realize they’re telling you your Bill of Rights don’t apply.” That is a consequence of the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that did not bound a war against al-Qaida to specific areas of the planet. “We can’t have perpetual war. We can’t have a war with no temporal limits,” Paul said.
...

More: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/rand-paul-filibuster/

*Update 5: After nearly 13 hours of filibuster, Paul yields the floor at 12:39am EST.
Rand Paul trending #1 on Twitter
Is this the turning point for America?

...

HR: We are done for the night? We should come back tomorrow?
RP: If the President or the Attorney General say citizens won’t be killed by drones on American soil, I will be done talking…
HR: silence….

For those who missed it, Senator Cruz reading America’s #StandWithRand tweets:



http://www.silverdoctors.com/watch-...-senate-over-drone-strikes-against-americans/

...
Paul’s comments from the Senate floor come after he’s raised objections in recent weeks. Paul first threatened to filibuster the Brennan nomination in late February, when he sent a letter to administration officials asking whether the U.S. government would ever use a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. responded to Paul’s inquiry Monday, saying the administration has “no intention” of carrying out drone strikes on suspected terrorists in the United States, but could use them in response to “an extraordinary circumstance” such as a major terrorist attack.

Paul called Holder’s refusal to rule out drone strikes within the United States “more than frightening.”

On Wednesday, Paul elaborated on his concerns: “When I asked the president, can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It’s an easy question. It should have been a resounding, an unequivocal, ‘No.’ The president’s response? He hasn’t killed anyone yet. We’re supposed to be comforted by that.”

Wyden agreed in part with Paul’s filibuster, even as he was mostly satisfied with Holder’s response: “I want it understood that I have great respect for this effort to really ask these kinds of questions … And Sen. Paul has certainly been digging into these issues in great detail.”

At 4:45 p.m., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the floor to see if Paul would say when he will end his filibuster so that senators could prepare for a vote to end debate and bring the nomination to a vote.

Paul dug in, saying he would be happy to end it, but only “if the president or the attorney general will clarify that they will not kill Americans on American soil.”

Reid informed senators before leaving: “Everyone should plan on coming tomorrow. We’re through for the night.”

Just after 7 p.m., Paul asked for Democrats to consent to vote on a non-binding resolution that would express opposition to the drone killings of American citizens on American soil. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) rejected it, promising a committee hearing on drone strikes instead, and Paul continued his filibuster.

Paul noted that he has voted for Obama’s previous Cabinet nominees, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and suggested that his cause was not partisan.

“I have allowed the president to pick his political appointees,” Paul said. “But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution. … I would be here if it were a Republican president doing this. Really the great irony of this is that President Obama’s opinion on this is an extension of George Bush’s opinion.”

Paul also said that he was “alarmed” at the lack of definition over who can be targeted by drone strikes. He suggested that many college campuses in the 1960s were full of people who might have been considered enemies of the state.

“Are you going to drop … a Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda?” Paul asked.
...

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...gins-talking-filibuster-against-john-brennan/

...
What began as a one-man crusade to delay the Brennan nomination ended as a team effort as Wednesday turned to Thursday in the nation's capital. Even Paul's Kentucky colleague, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, took part in the discussion, announcing that he would not only vote against Brennan's confirmation, but would vote to block the Senate from even considering the nomination when a procedural vote occurs, probably later this week.

McConnell was one of a cast of Republican reinforcements who came to the Senate chamber in the filibuster's 12th hour. In all, 15 senators joined Paul – 13 Republicans and two Democrats. The cast included two senators who hours earlier had dined with President Obama at a nearby restaurant. Several freshman Republicans who had yet to deliver a speech in the chamber made their first in support of Paul's filibuster.

Hours earlier, Sen. Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois, still impaired as he recovers from a stroke, came to the chamber to deliver an apple and green tea in a Thermos his office had just purchased for $35 from a nearby Frager’s Hardware store.

"I think most Americans think about that scene out of 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' " Kirk explained as he left the Senate, referring to the 1939 film that boosted the career of star Jimmy Stewart. “There was a lot of caffeine in that green tea to get him going.”
...
Paul talked alone until about three hours into the filibuster, when two Republicans – Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas – came to allow Paul to rest by yielding so they could pose questions to him. Cruz compared Paul with the heroes of the Battle of the Alamo, which ended on this day 177 years ago.
...

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/politic...n-brennan-filibuster-20130307,0,6264955.story

...
Related: Earlier Wednesday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz did manage — after a bit of a struggle* — to get Eric Holder to admit that the Constitution does not allow a drone strike on a U.S. citizen on domestic soil who is not posing an imminent threat.

Update: The White House is remaining silent on the Rand Paul filibuster. The optimist in me hopes that’s because Jay Carney has been furloughed due to the sequester, but unfortunately I doubt it.

Wildly rhetorical question: Will the Democrats who criticized the Bush/Cheney drone policies #StandWithPaul tonght? A liberal actor is asking the same question.
...

http://michellemalkin.com/2013/03/06/poll-americans-spending-cut/

* =

 
If you think you're going to sit on the ground with even my 18kj maxwell cap bank (the kind of thing we invaded iraq around - and that will make a 50ft ball of plasma out of 1/2" copper conductors shorting it) and burn the front end out of the radios in a drone 30k feet up, without some pretty hard work, you're dreaming.

This is how it's done these days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator

The cap only provides the initial magnetic field for an explosive-driven generator that puts out the real juice. By choosing the output device and antenna appropriately, you can pick what you burn out. You can tune things to the little slots in the back of a PC act like slot antennas and just burn out PC's. Or cell towers, or...power lines (all at different output frequencies). But, square law attenuation if you don't have a *directional antenna* which the better it is, the harder it is to aim right - and the bigger it is. Therefore, it will show up in sat pix.

Believe me, every major intelligence agency would be knocking on your door very shortly after making a spike like that. All of them, and not just ones from this country. There's a constellation of birds, "assets", constantly looking for just that kind of thing (partly because other things of interest also make such spikes). Even if the state of the current art is as retarded as it was when I myself designed such assets for a living.

I think the record jamming time, when someone took over a satellite feed to put porn on a christian station feed, lasted all of 30 min before they shut him down - physically, and in person. In other words, he was located in a fraction of a second, and that was the drive-time to his place for the feds. If you want to knock down drones, you'd better look for something that they can't see coming. Or more importantly, tell where it came from.

One precise projectile with passive aiming...a computer handling all the trajectory variables (wind, spin drift, Coriolis effect, lead etc). Chey tac makes something like that, but not good enough for this. Theirs won't handle moving targets.

But you still have the issue - if drones start falling out of the sky in an area, someone's going to be very interested in who can do that, why they are doing it, and they'll put a stop to it quick. Even I out in the boonies couldn't escape that level of scrutiny. Best just to stay under the radar - or work against the drone base itself.

Why do you think the people we currently use them against hate them so much? There's almost no effective countermeasure.
 
well the MSM ridicule of Paul has begun, spearheaded by McLame.
 
McCain and Graham are looking like desperate, old hacks. Their Jedi mind tricks aren't fooling anyone. Republican old guard seriously damaged themselves over this issue.
 
Love to hear the voice of reason over the partisan side-blindedness: Cenk from The Young Turks, with whom I disagree more often than not, is absolutely, 100% supporting RP on the recent filibuster (despite being sworn progressive democrat himself), and his reasoning is iron. It is piece of straight talk, that everyone who loves the truth has to agree with, and cherish. Such a refreshing thing:


Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
 
Read the subtitles. Bad speech->text converter, it's hilarious!
The "constitution bidet" at the end? Damn, I'll have to steal that line!
:rotflmbo::clap::popcorn:
 
I wouldn't worry about maple-seed sized versions of these for awhile, there are plenty of issues around how to power it for more than a minute or so...range and airtime will be very short. The military is lusting for these kinds of things,(...)
I don't know, in case of such small things, the amount of power required to get them airborne is not that big, so things like remote powering, using radio frequencies, maybe some resonance thrown in the mix (something like that remote gadget charging, that has been announced by TI maybe year-two ago), plus some narrow band antenna (one thing to remotely charge stuff in your living room, another power the "bug" drone few hundred meters away or so), and who knows... OR - who says, that these micro-drones cannot use something like micro fuel cells? After all, insects are capable of flying some significant distances without "refuelling", and they are not using anything nearly as energy dense, as chemical fuels that we have at our disposal...

I would not rule them out completely, in the near future... That would be real shit, but hey, we are getting there anyway...
 
The micro drones could be set up to use as signal repeaters could they not? this may extend the range of a much smaller unit and permit it to be used in situations where you need a signal to turn a corner, like inside a structure.
 
Oregon Company to Sell Drone Defense Technology to Public
The company says it won't knock drones down, but will stop them from 'completing their mission'
Do you want to keep drones out of your backyard?

An Oregon company says that it has developed and will soon start selling technology that disables unmanned aircraft.

The company, called Domestic Drone Countermeasures, was founded in late February because some of its engineers see unmanned aerial vehicles—which are already being flown by law enforcement in some areas and could see wider commercial integration into American airspace by 2015—as unwanted eyes in the sky.

"I was personally concerned and I think there's a lot of other people worried about this," says Timothy Faucett, a lead engineer on the project. "We've already had many inquiries, a lot of people saying 'Hey, I don't want these drones looking at me.'"

Domestic Drones Countermeasures was formed as a spin-off company from Aplus Mobile, which sells rugged computer processors to defense contractors—though the company won't discuss its specific technology because it is still applying for several patents. Faucett says that work has helped inform its anti-drone technology.

The company will sell land-based boxes that are "non-offensive, non-combative and not destructive." According to the company, "drones will not fall from the sky, but they will be unable to complete their missions."

Though Faucett wouldn't discuss specifics, he says the boxes do not interfere with a drone's navigation system and that it doesn't involve "jamming of any kind." He says their technology is "an adaptation of something that could be used for military application" with the "combat element replaced with a nondestructive element."

"We understand the nature of the equipment drone manufacturers are using and understand how to counter their sensors," Faucett says. "We're not going to be countering Predator drones that are shooting cruise missiles, but we're talking about local law enforcement drones and commercial ones that people might be using for spying."

For now, Faucett admits the technology is "expensive," but the company is already ready to design custom anti-drone boxes for customers.


"We envision it could be cheap enough for residential use very soon," he says. "It's quite possible to deploy it if you were shooting a movie and wanted to protect your set, or if you had a house in Malibu and wanted to protect that, we could deploy it there. If a huge company like Google wanted to protect its server farms, it can be scaled up for a larger, fixed installation."

As drones become more commonplace, Faucett says more people will begin searching for a way to protect their privacy.

"The thing that brought it home for me was Senator [Rand] Paul doing the filibuster, there's a lot of unanswered questions," he says. "We think there might be as much business for this counter drone stuff as there is for the drones themselves."
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles...ny-to-sell-drone-defense-technology-to-public
 
... soon to be a must have accessory for every car and truck on the road.
 
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