A look inside illegal drone deliveries at B.C.'s prisons | Hacker News Reader

A look inside illegal drone deliveries at B.C.'s prisons

vancouverisawesome.com

47 pointsluu52 comments

This was literally a plot point during the Trailer Park Boys: Jail series where the boys used a drone to bring in weed and a flat screen television to the Nova Scotia prison.

I feel like this is the most Canadian story ever.

It's prolific in the UK.

When I was a kid I had a friend that lived near HMP Altcourse and we would see the local drug dealers catapult cut tennis balls over the prison walls.

you would imagine some technology would be able to detect this no?

Government and technology seem to not go too well together.

My favorite part was the ad at the bottom of the article “Best top 5 drones”

Rather than intercept them a solution that triangulates the pilot seems a better idea. Let it make the delivery.

A junior product manager at DJI could have spotted this as a risk on day two. This is a predictable problem that is completely solvable, if only the company had an interest in doing so. There are a lot of people who have done a lot less who are currently sitting in prison.

In that case they would just use a non-DJI drone.

why should DJI care?

Regulations.

If they don't care, some government will force some worse regulation on them.

... and DJI is a Chinese company, where the government have no shame making up ad-hoc arbitrary rules.

because the technology exists for DJI's drones to not work near prisons, which means there's a lawsuit waiting to happen, which means monetary fines for the company, which means the executives get paid less (sometimes) so they should theoretically care.

Are they legally required to prevent it though? Like I know people are prohibited from flying drones near airports but don't know if the manufacturer is required to prevent it too and whether the manufacturer is required to prevent it near prisons too?

They definitely do care - DJI devices block you flying in any kind of prohibited airspace out of the box and it's very difficult to override. In many countries, there's prohibited airspace over prisons for this reason.

> if only the company had an interest in doing so.

The criminals who do the deliveries also "have an interest" in stopping it (threat of prosecution). This is a complete rehash of the gun control argument: Whether you believe people who commit crimes are responsible for their actions or if the blame should be shifted to corporations or the ever-overused scapegoat "society".

What's sad is that ultimately the prisoners are going to suffer with less yard time. In my state, they had a couple fentanyl laced letters, so they blocked all prisoners from receiving letters (they get a photocopy). I believe that applied to pictures too. They got rid of all in person visits and replaced them with video calls, either blaming covid or staff shortages.

There's basically no way to prevent drone drops without building a canopy.

I swear I remember reading a paper discussing training crows to attack drones. Can't find it now

Closest I remember is the French anti-drone eagles.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/21...

Don't know if they're still at it.

You can use drones to attack drones. Autonomous as well as human piloted.

Keyword in the article though is that searches and lockdowns are expensive, ie overtime, guards love it. So I wonder how much the real interest, if any, in solving the issue.

There's a company (Androidil?) that's doing exactly that.

As long as the state pays their bills why should they care about solving the issue?

Drones are now used as weapons as well, which means we need to figure out a good counter to them anyway.

Some (most?) prisons are near built-up areas, which means non-kinetic solutions.

- glue-ball cannon

- EMP cannon

- water cannon

- an eagle

- Windows that can‘t open? - Nets?

An eagle!

That's a thing! https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000004415524/e...

I've had a drone taken down by an eagle. But I've also had larger eagles completely ignore drones coming quite close to them because they don't think it's food or a threat.

I feel like the criminals would kill the eagle pretty quickly

John West endured the worst, to bring you the best.

Birds are actually fairly straightforward to evade—you rapidly ascend vertically. If the bird tried to follow, its wings would stall (they can feel this happening and avoid it).

> Using nets around the facilities was discussed, but posed environmental concerns, human rights issues and wildlife risks.

The article does address use of nets

A bigger faster apex drone optimized for killing lesser drones

Isn’t that what Anduril was showing off in the recent Mark Rober video?

If we spam critical EM frequencies drones may fall out of the sky. For example a laser pointer may overwhelm optical sensors, while ultrasonic distance sensors are often used to determine height and proximity to obstacles. Some pilot software may fail gracefully, by safely flying blind and landing gently - but I’m guessing most will fail spectacularly.

> If we spam critical EM frequencies drones may fall out of the sky.

1. Now everybody within X miles hates your guts because phones and wifi are broken and emergency services can't talk to one another and airplanes have to detour while the FCC is sharping their knives.

2. Criminals who don't care about being nice people will just use frequencies you can't/won't jam, perhaps even the ranges that let the guards' walkie-talkies work, as long as the encoding doesn't lead to telltale noises.

Many fly back to the pilot if disconected which could be interesting.

I expect savvy criminals won't have too many problems adopting a system where an aborted run causes the drone to automatically divert to a different recovery site, so that the operator has options on how and when they want to try getting it back.

I imagine the ideal location would be one where (A) the drone can sit unattended without being in casual view from passerby (B) it's hard for law-enforcement to set up an ambush (C) someone can walk/drive past without looking suspicious.

Come to think of it, that might be good operation-security even for regular runs, where the drone never returns to the same starting point. That way if someone sees where it came from, they don't necessarily know it will go, and vice-versa.

Savvy criminals dont go to prison? As long as you catch some of them the game of cat and mouse can continue.

A friend flew his drone from the car window. It flew back 10 km.

Quite hard to fly back if the GPS signal is also jammed.

A path can be reasonably retraced using inertial guidance, if things aren't too windy.

It doesn't need to get all the way home, just far enough away in the right general direction without hitting an obstacle... And most prisons are not surrounded by skyscrapers.

A yagi antenna is VERY directional and at these frequencies line-of-sight only. You are aiming into the air. I'd say it would be practically impossible to accidentally interfere with cell-phone communication.

This is a realistic counter-attack (and theoretically easy).

High powered laser would also work.

repurpose the mosquito laser!

A camera to look at the skies and penalties for inmates that accept packages?

They are in that institution because they didn't respond to the threat of penalties.

Even if the penalty were death, a new inmate would be coerced to grab the package under threat of a worse death.

Just lock down and intercept the drugs. problem solved.

Plenty of anti-drone companies around. Mostly defense focused. One off the top of my head is Drone Shield.

cope cage

Multiple drones, carrying a net!

I watched the tv series mayor of Kingstown and in that, they used tennis balls filled with stuff.

A lightweight net will do the trick. Super simple, cheap, as close to 100% effective as you're likely to get.

Boredom is mind damaging too. Drugs could be alleviating a prisoners mental suffering by allowing a mental escape. And preserving their mental health in the long run. Something worth preserving assuming the person will reintegrate to society. But that probably depends on the person's propensity to get addicted.

If they will allow prisoners to MAID themselves, why is it worse to let them use drugs to reduce their suffering?

The bigger issue, IMHO (more damaging to society) is government corruption (looting, no bid contracts, bribes, over budget, under delivery services, and just comically bad ideas being funded). Billions of dollars have been misappropriated. And it's all legal. Or near legal, as white collar crime is rarely punished. And it can eventually turn into inflation and a declining standard of living.

Well the same goes for the society as whole, why just prisons?

Nothing makes them special. Please drop drugs to 47,06554 -24,7557. I will write you a thank you note.

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