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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

I'm slightly surprised that it took this long for someone to try a drone assasination of a public figure. Drones have already been weaponised in Syria.

Of course, there are at least three competing suspects for this one - Colombia, Venezuela itself (false flag or internal opposition), or the CIA.

Edit: for "drone" read "quadcopter or similar multirotor electrically propelled craft"

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The US military has been using drones to kill people for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator

They’re referring to the use of an inexpensive, commonly available drone, not a four million dollar weapon.

I think theandrewbailey is maybe talking about the relatively low likelihood that the CIA would use a cheap and ineffective drone to assassinate a South American leader. Especially when there are so many more clean ways to do so.

I think a few years back a whole slew of South American leaders came down with cancer for instance. Not that the CIA was behind that, it may have been coincidence and happenstance, but you get the idea. When you decide you need someone dead, then you need them dead. You can't "miss". I don't think it likely at all that the CIA would do something so ham-handed as using a hobbyist drone to attempt an assassination.

The world is quite lucky that the current batch of terrorist orgs are relatively unsophisticated - mostly using small arms and driving cars into crowds.

The mass terror potential from even just slightly more sophisticated methods is chilling to consider.

One of the biggest hurdles is control, it's pretty easy to jam or just lose connection to these devices navigating to hit their target after that isn't trivial. GPS doesn't really work because that's also readily jammed and the small payload capacity requires more accurate targeting to be effective.

I think whoever might want to kill a public figure has at least few better ways to do it discreetly. Drone attack is either some amateurs with limited budget or an attempt to attrack attention and stir shit up.

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