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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Seems to be a very cheap (and relatively safe) way to cause a lot of financial damage. I wonder if we will see more of such events coming from activist or foreign agents trying to destabilize a system.

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There's an infinite number of ways to asymmetrically attack a system. A single person in Australia caused millions of dollars of damage by just sticking needles into strawberries in supermarkets. People have rented and driven light vehicles into crowds. People have deliberately poisoned food at restaurants. The attack surface is limited only by the imagination, while defending against each scenario carries immense financial and personal freedom cost.

The whole point of asymmetric attacks is that they use the size of the target against it. It's impossible to stop these kinds of attacks without completely taking away personal freedoms and instituting some kind of pre-crime surveillance state.

And a pre-crime surveillance state is exactly what most governments seem to want to build today. The historical scales are rapidly tipping towards tyranny in the name of illusionary safety. As Franklin aptly put it, "They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

As far as drones go, it's comparatively simple to build what's effectively a supersonic missile for about 10K usd worth of easily obtainable hobbyist parts. It's been possible for the better part of the decade. The fact that no one has done it suggests that maybe there aren't that many bad actors out there after all.

This, our systems that power the modern world are incredibly fragile.

Plus terrorism isn't a numbers game, it's about shocking people. Torture a single victim live on youtube and you will get more coverage than a 20 victims rampage. The 24h news cycle "everything is breaking news", "this incredibly rare thing could happen to you" is incredibly helpful to terrorists.

> It's impossible to stop these kinds of attacks without completely taking away personal freedoms and instituting some kind of pre-crime surveillance state.

It's likely impossible in that kind of state as well.

Well if you ignore the commission of crimes by government officials charged with that power, it might mostly work. If only because those bad actors will just work for the government.

I remember one of those huge DDOS attacks a few years ago, where the online speculation of who the perpetrator was centered mostly on Russia, the Mossad, or a guy with a botnet on 4Chan who claimed it was him.

Since then we're living in the future, as far as I'm concerned.

Are you thinking of the one that turned out to be some idiots running minecraft server renting business?

https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brou...

It reminds me some of driving trucks into crowds to terrorize. Not sophisticated or expensive but effective.

Only effective because of overreaction.

I think this was very sophisticated. They planned. They hid. They monitored media and adapted plans. They minimized thier efforts to obtain a result. This was leagues ahead of any recent terror attack. It would be no shock to learn that they had some military, officer, training.

It occured to me, that once the military became involved, the perpetrator would have the sense to cease his/her activities.

The fact this didn't happen leaves me to believe they were not so clever after all?

They expected and were ready to be caught.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

We've asked you before particularly to avoid religious flamewar on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Unless the goal was to make the military look the fool. We dont know what they were thinking just yet.

Were there any drone reports after the army was deployed?

There was a 'suspected drone sighting' around 17:00 on Friday but flights resumed.

The oddity about the whole event was that there was no evidence presented at all other than phone-videos showing a variety of lights.

Tower controllers and reports from other airport staff are always sufficient evidence for anything related to flight safety.

Rubbish. It's just fundamentally difficult to track down a drone. There was nothing clever about this.

That's what the French authorities are pretending to make it look like a foreign aggression and not home grown terrorism. But the planning required for an operation like that is pretty trivial.

Cheap? Just wait until they make an example out of those two. It definitely won't be a cheap event for them.

Right before Christmas... oh boy. I bet the terrorism charges will be thrown at those two. Anyone can come up with similar case from the recent past ?

Law was passed sometime ago - it's up to five years in prison:

https://www.techradar.com/news/new-uk-drone-laws-come-into-f...

Just 5 years?

I suppose it’s good from a rehabilitation perspective but it’s kind of weak as a deterrent - where 10 years might be more appropriate.

Why even five years?

Let the airport,airlines and insurera sue any culprits for losses. Why should I pay for their incarceration? No harm was done to persons or property.

in an ideal world, all non-physical harm would be handled this way. unfortunately, such attackers can cause multi-million dollar (or pound, in this case) losses in a short period of time and probably have minimal assets. you might get a few grand out of them if you're lucky.

It's called indentured servitude [1] and it's still practiced in the US [2], but only to benefit the state and its cronies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude_in_the_Am...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...

If five years won’t deter you I doubt ten would.

The perception of 5 or 10 years as a deterrent doesn't make a difference to the average person.

Citation needed.

A decade in prison is twice 5 years. That’s a lot of time to waste.

Edit: Guess downvotes are abused here too ...

Edit2: Would be interesting to see how low this post will go. Guess some people don’t like their abusing of the moderation system called out.

Citation needed that longer sentences work as a deterrent.

The reason you don't steal from your coworkers has little to do with the sentence that would be imposed and a lot to do with your personal values: you know theft is wrong.

Edit: talking about downvoyes will always attract downvotes. HN's voting culture may not even what you're used to. People can down item for any, or for no, reason. A few people can down vote, but most people with an account can upvote. Corrective upvote will often be provided - there are people on HN who look for unfairly downvoted posts to supply corrective upvote.

If your post is downvoted and remains downvoted it means that someone downvoted it, and no-one else who read it thought it deserved different.

Phrases like [citation needed] are often going to get downvoted. Downvotes are likely because you're claiming prison is a deterrent and that longer sentences are a stronger deterrent with nothing to support that claim, while asking someone else to support their claim that longer sentences aren't a deterrent.

Actually the only psychological profile that wouldn't be deterred by 10 vs 5 years would be the psychopath (who is largely immune to punishment, and often regards it with complete serenity). An "average person" would make tremendous sacrifices to get 5 instead of 10. Plea bargain justice makes this clear.

A plea bargain is after the event though. If you have been caught and are likely to be convicted then 5 years sounds a lot better than 10. That has nothing at all to do with deterrent effects.

The thing is, an 'average person' has no real idea or mental model of what five years in prison actually entails. They haven't been locked up ever, even for shorter stretches, and most likely neither have their friends. Basically they know its bad, but with no frame of reference it gets left at that and filed away as irrelevant anyway since prison happens to other, bad people. So there's no way to make a risk calculation about e.g 6mo vs 5y sentences, they are both just vague bad things. Monetary fines work because people understand money and what losing a sum of money means because they deal with money all the time. I assume corporal punishment works too, since everyone has experience with pain?

I'm sure they can find lots more to charge these two with. I fully expect they'll be put away for a very long time.

I suspect they won't get a prison sentence, or if they do it'll be months not years.

15 activists were just convicted under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act for obstructing a deportation flight:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/stansted-15-depo...

The 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act says:

"It is also... an offence for any person by means of any device, substance or weapon unlawfully and intentionally to disrupt the services of such an aerodrome in such a way as to endanger or be likely to endanger the safe operation of the aerodrome or the safety of persons at the aerodrome." and provides that "A person who commits an offence under this section is liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for life."

Perhaps for these two it won't be so cheap, but they just PoC'd a drone DOS rather effectively.

For example, if the control system can be adapted to be driven very remotely (think US military drones -- operator sits in an office building in the US, drone is flying around the middle east) then there's no reason this couldn't be perpetrated by someone very far away, potentially outside of the jurisdiction of the country they're unleashing their drones on. They could go and set up the base stations months in advance of an attack in relatively remote areas, as little drone sleeper cells. When the attack happens, the perpetrators are far away, and much harder to stop.

I expect we'll see more of these, but I hope that this attack made it very clear that there needs to be more effective ways to track and disable rogue drones. I do wonder how they finally found these two (and if they are even the actual perpetrators) but I think they're gonna want to keep those cards close to their chest.

I'm kinda surprised that after three days of disruption, the British authorities still haven't found a way to shoot down the drones. It was just a DoS this time, but there could very well be an explosive payload the next time. Drones could enter secure facilities, take pictures, infiltrate or exfiltrate various objects, and even press buttons using 3D-printed appendages. Criminals of the future won't even need to be on the same continent to get past physical security.

Heard on the news that they did not want to shoot it down to avoid collateral damage from bullets falling around.

The UK is much more gun-averse than anywhere else I’ve been. Even the police are not routinely armed with only a few exceptions (airports being one, but the point is about the attitude).

I think over the course of three days, they could have someone drive down to the station and pick up the guns.

As pointed out by others, there's concern about the bullets causing FOD, or potentially hitting people.

Shotgun shot has none of those issues. Has no one on HN been around firearms?

Someone above suggested the drones were at 10,000 ft. That is way out of shotgun effective range.

Possibly did not want the risk of littering bullets on the runway as well; it’s actually impressive the amount of effort that goes into keeping a runway free of small metal objects: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage

That's a good point. We haven't actually seen what a full response from the authorities would be. I would imagine if there was actual imminent danger they would not hesitate to begin shooting down the drones and using more disruptive countermeasures.

I actually kinda wonder if you can train any birds of prey to go after drones. Airports already use some so keep birds away from runways, but that's still mostly the birds doing what birds do.

This has already been shown to be possible. Example from the Netherlands police:

https://youtu.be/b5DEg2qZzkU

In the meantime it's been found to be impractical https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/12/16767000/police-netherla...

Seems dangerous for the birds.

Maybe attack drones that can shoot string - since practically every drone uses rotors.

Dragging a net has been tried:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/01/21/tokyo-poli...

Unless the drone is really large, you don't need to shoot actual bullets at it. Strings, fishing nets, plastic bags, water cannons, or anything else that can mess up the propellers for a few seconds would be enough to crash them.

ISIS has been using drones a lot, for filming propaganda, reconnaissance, dropping grenades, and even drone suicide bombing.

I think this future is already here, it's just you only see them used in-theater because ISIS has terrible force projection ability and don't have any way of getting their drones and weapons into Europe to commit attacks there.

The biggest reaction of friends and colleagues seems to be one of surprise that drones can cause such disruption for so long. It is a little concerning - what if the operators had had more malicious intent?

Friends and colleagues are right to be surprised. If the official story is true two people with a couple of drones outclassed the entire British security establishment for a couple of days.

It's not that drones hadn't been considered a threat, or that there weren't similar events in the past. Threat assessment studies were done because similar events did happen in the past - although not on this scale.

But there seems to have been absolutely no contingency planning, and no clear demarcation of responsibility between the police, the military, the civil aviation authority, and the rest of the government.

The reality is that a lot of infrastructure of all kinds is ridiculously exposed and vulnerable. But the government hands out corporate welfare to trophy projects like a pointless aircraft carrier while making almost no preparations for even the most obvious and predictable technological threats.

Could it be that with security services under such financial pressure they decided to ignore the drone threat? Now the government will probably give police extra cash just to combat drones. 1-nil to the police administrators.

Call me cynical, but I had thought exactly the same thing.

More malicious than shutting down a major airport? The only example I can think of is bombing a crowd but fortunately nobody has tried that yet.

Surely there's a vast gap between inconveniencing/causing financial loss and injuring/killing people? I can imagine one being considered a reasonable act of protest by some whilst the other puts one beyond the pale.

How about flying a drone into a plane engine.

The Future of Violence [0] explores this further. Its TLDR is something like: technology enables distributed offensive capabilities leading to many-to-many threats. Technology also creates distributed vulnerabilities by increasing attack surface. Finally, technology also enables distributed defensive capabilities.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Violence-Robots-Hackers-Confro...

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