Thursday night Mountain View power outage the result of a drone crash

What is your suggestion? By and large, society has gotten farther than folks realize by advantage of cooperation and a shared goal of peers. It has always been somewhat trivial to concoct a major threat to a lot of folks. Your local library has a ton of these ideas in the fiction section.

The expense of making things sabotage proof is substantial and hard to really accomplish completely. Even massive feats of engineering, such as the moon landing, all would have failed had a single actor been a saboteur.

The entire world is not quite ready for what these devices are and what they enable. It's not surprising at all.

Also worth noting that the FAA has been trying to regulate these devices and that attempt failed in court. So right now the rules are incredibly lax, and most folks don't file flight plans because usually the folks at airports won't even talk to you when you try and call them about it (or so has been my experience).

But it's disconcerting, because its just not that hard to imagine someone using these devices for all sorts of previously unimagined crimes.

We are and continue to be vulnerable. Bruce Schneier used to run a competition about plots until he got too spooked with how vulnerable we are:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/movieplot_thr...

We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

The solution is that you keep trucking along and you ignore terrorists. Many other things in life have a much higher probability of killing you, and you don't fret over them.

I'm pretty sure that one drone causing a car crash that kills one person would be more effective terrorism than 20 drones taking out lots of electricity. I.e., you're right, it's just probably not what terrorists would do with drones.

They still haven't caught the people who attacked the power substation south of San Jose on purpose in 2013. There are so many of these things scattered around the country it's kind of difficult to protect without a lot of money.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/05/experts-sniper-attack-...

Worth noting: Mylar balloons are conductive and extremely effective at causing power outages. We've been living with this exact vulnerability for decades.

Undergrounding is very expensive, and does not protect against deliberate attacks on infrastructure. Ultimately, local power line cuts are merely an annoyance and it's not worth the effort to fix it.

The specificity is misleading you.

My guess is that if you look at the giant basket of things a group of terrorists could do in the US with modest funding, this is pretty low down on the list of harms, and solving it would be very low down on the cost/benefit list of harm reduction options.

Power outages happen frequently regardless. We've reduced the frequency to a level where it's not a big deal. If they were a really big problem, we already would have hardened things.

You can not protect against this sort of thing. The whole point is that any kind of destruction vs creation is asymmetric and that the destroyers will therefore always have the edge.

The kind of damage that you could do to power infrastructure with a length of chain, a bolt cutter, a wrench or even a hacksaw is huge, the amount of money you'd have to spend to protect against such damage would be many orders of magnitude larger, possibly to the point that power generation / transportation would no longer be feasible.

The same goes for most forms of transportation (a rifle bullet in the right place will bring down a passenger aircraft) and all other things that we've created assuming that people will 'play nice'.

And that in turn links to a concept called the open society which most Western countries subscribe to and which is a combination of freedoms and a resulting vulnerability that we all feel is balanced quite well.

Killing people or destroying is super easy, and if we want to stop that from happening we will need to fundamentally re-think how we live. Personally I don't mind the risks given the advantages.

Ah. Fear. It's cheap.

We used to play a game in high school: "How to destroy the United States for less than $100,000." One obsolete example: destroying the six mammoth machines and two spares that processed all physical checks, bringing transactions to a halt for weeks. There were hundreds of ways.

Our greatest defense has always been being a reasonable people full of smart citizens.

Angry people would quickly move them to the side.

Much more worrisome is snipers shooting industrial transformers, causing massive damage while spending close to nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

It's already been done in the Bay Area: https://twitter.com/i/moments/689241776549269504?lang=en

The law states that FAA owns airspace and that flying within 5nm of towered airport without contacting tower is illegal. Simple.

Safe and efficient flight routes, like useful frequency spectra, are a high demand limited space quantity that can't be used by two people at the same time. To my mind, flying near an airport is actually the more troublesome crime, because people will assume it doesn't matter, but it definitely does.

An international flight system is only possible because a highly regulated system exists to ensure that a French plane flying east over Ukrainian airspace won't collide with a Norwegian plane going south, which is why all major flight plans are filed in advance.

If some scrub with $500 and no brain forces a plane to deviate from it's flight path to avoid sucking his $350 drone into its $12,000,000 engine, it could cause a chain-reaction of re-routing that costs tens of thousands of dollars in fuel and delay associated costs.

Don't fuck with airports. If you've got to scratch that public nuisance itch, go fishing with dynamite or something.

Squirrels, mice, rats, raccoons, and birds take out power stations all the time. Many transformer stations are exposed to open air for cooling, with nothing more than a fence topped with razor wire for a barrier. This makes for easy, easy entry.

Mandating insurance perverts incentives. Insurance wouldn't necessarily pay out the claim, putting the drone owner in a position of the liability (s)he is in now.

Also, this does nothing to change incentives for the electrical grid, which should not be nearly as brittle as it is.

That said, this is probably the simplest single solution to address what happened -- assuming anything should be done.

Also mandatory insurance for kites and balloons, either of which could have caused the same damage.

I'm against a complete ban, but there should definitely be more restrictions than we have currently. Strict licensing requirements and a total ban on flying over private property (without explicit, written permission) seem like no-brainers to me.

I thought power lines, in contact with the dirt, can make the ground electrocutive.

You can fly your drone around people as long as those people don't include me.

of course underground power lines will be more expensive for the moment.

So will drones produce more values than the cost to invest on underground power lines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrounding

Advantages

    Less subject to damage from severe weather conditions (mainly lightning, wind and freezing)

    Reduced range of electromagnetic fields (EMF) emission, into the surrounding area. However depending on the depth of the underground cable, greater emf may be experienced.[2] The electric current in the cable conductor produces a magnetic field, but the closer grouping of underground power cables reduces the resultant external magnetic field and further magnetic shielding may be provided. See Electromagnetic radiation and health.

    Underground cables need a narrower surrounding strip of about 1–10 meters to install (up to 30 m for 400 kV cables during construction), whereas an overhead line requires a surrounding strip of about 20–200 meters wide to be kept permanently clear for safety, maintenance and repair.

    Underground cables pose no hazard to low flying aircraft or to wildlife.

    Much less subject to conductor theft, illegal connections,[3] sabotage, and damage from armed conflict.

    Burying utility lines makes room for more large trees on sidewalks,[4] which convey environmental benefits and increase property values [5]

Disadvantages:

    Undergrounding is more expensive, since the cost of burying cables at transmission voltages is several times greater than overhead power lines, and the life-cycle cost of an underground power cable is two to four times the cost of an overhead power line. Above ground lines cost around $10 per foot and underground lines cost in the range of $20 to $40 per foot.[6] In highly urbanized areas the cost of underground transmission can be 10-14 times as expensive as overhead.[7]

    Whereas finding and repairing overhead wire breaks can be accomplished in hours, underground repairs can take days or weeks,[8] and for this reason redundant lines are run.

    Underground cable locations are not always obvious, which can lead to unwary diggers damaging cables or being electrocuted.

    Operations are more difficult since the high reactive power of underground cables produces large charging currents and so makes voltage control more difficult.[citation needed]

    Whereas overhead lines can easily be uprated by modifying line clearances and power poles to carry more power, underground cables cannot be uprated and must be supplemented or replaced to increase capacity. Transmission and distribution companies generally future-proof underground lines by installing the highest-rated cables while being still cost-effective.

    Underground cables are more subject to damage by ground movement. The 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand caused damage to 360 kilometres (220 mi) of high voltage underground cables and subsequently cut power to large parts of Christchurch city, whereas only a few kilometres of overhead lines were damaged, largely due to pole foundations being compromised by liquefaction.

The advantages can in some cases outweigh the disadvantages of the higher investment cost, and more expensive maintenance and management.

Here are the rules in Canada: https://www.tc.gc.ca/media/documents/ca-opssvs/Infographic_-...

"[Do not fly your drone:] closer than 75 m from buildings, vehicles, vessels, animals, people/crowds"

Yes they should be

That being said, it's still the responsibility of the operator to not collide with anything in the air

Thats most likely heavy guarded by lobbyist. On average while in transmit, power companies get 20% more of electricity just by putting cables in the air.

No, you cannot fly your drone over people. The exception being surveying construction sites as it is assumed that people on construction sites are already wearing hard hats.

Ironically parks, which would be an ideal place to fly, are often no-fly zones. For example all national parks in America ban drones as do many state parks.

You can fly them around people, you're just not supposed to fly them over people [1]. However, if you're flying commercially, you can get a wavier for this.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/

Interestingly enough, almost all transmission lines in San Francisco are underground; almost all of what you see overhead are either telephone/cable, or overhead wires for powering MUNI, our municipal light rail.

I mean wouldn't that be an issue for areas with tectonic activity? I wouldn't imagine they would be as easy to repair if they were under ground.

> More evidence that power lines should be under ground.

I agree in principle, and there are places that do this, but there are a lot of practical considerations too. A neat story about what it's like when there's a failure in a big underground line: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/net/user/tytso/archive/high-power

In California, you have problems with tectonic movement -- even small fault activity will stretch, relocate, and damage buried lines. In nearly everywhere else, you have underground water tables seeping in around your buried lines.

None of these are insurmountable, but they don't make it an easy job either.

Simply: it took skill to pilot an RC plane or helicopter until the current round of autopilots.

The amount of time you had to expend until you could simply keep the thing in the air without crashing was large. This tended to keep the idiots out of the hobby.

With modern drones, there is no such entry barrier. Any idiot can throw a drone in the air and make it go somewhere.

Without power the drones won't work, so at worst we have dynamic equilibrium.

Temporarily knocking out power to a local area doesn't really instill terror. Maybe if we called them "nuisancists."

For anyone else who might be slightly confused (like I initially was), "nm" here means "nautical mile"[1], not "nanometer".

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile

Are you serious that you would advocate for a multi-decade sentence for what this man did?

Nanometers?

You sound very passionate. "A few decades should do" to what? Make an example out of them? For restorative justice? To get back at them? To keep society safe from them?

Surely you don't think a prison sentence is warranted for a nonviolent offense such as this? Maybe if he had flown the drone with the intent to hit a plane in that airfield, that might be a different story. But more likely, he may have just not known the law, or realized he was still in the offending zone.

That’s like saying we should lock people up who drive >15 mph over some speed limit that they didn't notice (which is also breaking the law). “This time he only hit a power line. Next time he’ll collide with a bus full of children.”

From what I've seen the distance is measured in regular miles [1,2]. Also, I'm not sure what him hitting the power line has anything to do with contacting the airports. Even if he had contacted them, they can only tell him no if they think he would "endanger the safety of the airspace" [3]. So if he had called, he could have just said he'd be flying at a nearby park. Additionally, most of the airports I call are totally clueless (ex: someone told me I couldn't fly a drone within 35 miles of DC - completely not true), and the FAA doesn't even provide a way to contact them. I had to download 3rd party apps to find this information. This guy messed up, but the FAA has created a bunch of complex rules that are hard to follow and provide little benefit.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/uas/where_to_fly/b4ufly/media/UAS_B4UFLY... [2] https://www.faa.gov/uas/where_to_fly/airspace_restrictions/ [3] https://www.faa.gov/uas/faqs/

Probably next season. This season's already been shot.

We have a bunch of drones in the title cartoon thing...