A Use Of Drones Nearly Everyone Will Like
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
Pay the poachers to be rangers instead.
We found that the primary motivation for poachers was profit, so we approached them and essentially said "We'll pay you more if you protect the cats instead of hunting them." The 180s we observed were remarkable, and the money they made from poaching was usually so small that beating it was almost trivial for us. So while the price of drones (and program maintenance) are decreasing, I can't help but wonder how many ranger salaries could have been paid instead.
Nonetheless there's a large reward incentive offered in South Africa and neighbouring countries for information leading to the arrest of a poacher or the head of a poaching syndicate, amounting to $10 000 for the former and $100 000 for the latter. It's too early to say how well it's working, but it is being supplemented by military patrols, drone and aircraft operations and sophisticated sensors and early indications are promising.
How much does Rhino Horn go for?
And, since its matted hair, and since it does not actually increase male virility when mixed with water, why do the criminial syndicates not just stop poaching and hand out ground up hair. I mean, they are criminials. Its not like they are opposed to lying.
Edit: 60-80K/kilo it seems - in bitcoins.
Fake horns do make up a lot of the consumer trade in rhino horns, with most made from water buffalo horns, but these have had the effect of increasing demand. High-end buyers get their rhino horns from syndicates that are able to guarantee the provenance of their horns and can command a higher price as a result.
Err, if its a crime its a crime. Upping the detection rate is not a bad thing in itself - it merely hastens the day when we reduce the number of crimes because if we prosecute we manage to bang up 20% of the population.
(See the US approach to mandatory drug sentences for a tired example)
Actually increasing the detection rate is IMO a Good Thing. I would like it if violent crimes were caught on CCTV, then the MIT-derived algorithm to pick individuals from stance and gait is used to follow them through the streets out and the taxis, to their front door where a cop car pulls up.
Add to that all the white-collar crimes, the lax banking departments that move billions around for terrorists, tax evaders and criminals.
It is a real problem though, because I think many laws only exist so that law enforcement can take action with regard to extreme cases (ie. when they are alerted to an egregious enough example that they have to take action). If we have robots constantly watching us, it will drastically change that dynamic, and I think many of us could be getting ticketed all the time for things that are technically legal violations, but don't actually hurt anyone (the reason why laws exist in the first place) unless taken to the extreme.
PS: I am the PI of the Dutch http://www.fireswarm.nl project in which a group of companies and universities use drones to detect a fire as quick as possible.
In any case, such an attack is unlikely to work. The crash into the ground is least likely to work since most drones will likely have an independent altitude information. The stall method may work - if the drone has no INS and the operator is asleep.
US influence extends further.
For example, Boumediene v. Bush establishes that the US has "complete jurisdiction and control" over Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, even though Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty. And US jurisdiction in parts of Antarctica is .. complicated. http://219mag.com/2011/03/23/u-s-government-fails-to-protect... .
Perhaps someone else can identify it, but from it's specs, it looks like it can probably fly reasonably high... if it can manage 6-8 hours at 400km range, it looks like it kind of slots in somewhat below http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScanEagle in terms of performance (and cost).
From that guess, I'm thinking that this sucker is flying well over a mile high, which makes most gun approaches (unless they brought in a whole anti-aircraft platform...) pretty unfeasible. In any case, the cost of shooting down one of these would be pretty high - you would almost certainly need a weapon with guidance somehow (ie, a missile, which is going to really cut into your profit margins), extreme luck and patience, or lug around anti-aircraft platforms... which might not actually be out of the picture.
One of the things this article doesn't really tap into is how the nature of the poachers themselves are changing. The poachers themselves are becoming more militarized (as are the wardens now), partly due to the hilarious amounts of money poaching generates - it apparently, they represent a significant revenue stream for various African Paramilitary groups. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rhino-horn-crisis-and-the-d...
In any case, like most illict trades, constraining the supply rarely makes the problem go away - you gotta shutdown the demand somehow.
That "If you can see or hear that drone" probably is where the problem lies, but that might be solved by having your drone listen for the distinctive hum of the drone's engines. That way, you don't have to be able to continuously see that drone from the ground. Just launch your own drone; if it hears another drone, it will home in on it.
Alternatively, I would try jamming the drone's signals or taking over its controls.
Plus, neither South Africa nor Kenya can be considered 'oppressive' governments.
Communication tools have so far managed to undo repression more than enable it. Hopefully the trend will continue.
As soon as this happens (5 years? 8 years?) I am pretty sure there will also be a service like silk road using drones and bitcoin as payment to deliver drugs (and probably everything else) to your doorstep a few minutes after ordering it.
Only problem with an anonymous order (hey, of course it should be anonymous!) is that people might want to take the drone instead of the pizza so maybe they will have to parachute the pizza from some altitude :) … oh I love this idea :)
… ok so maybe the drone would not operate 100% automated and the pilot would drop the pizza only some meters away from any person that might want to snatch the drone?
This is welcome from Google, as focused aid of this sort can often have an outsize effect, but we must be careful to avoid believing this can solve the problem.
For one, sophisticated UAVs that are much more capable than those the WWF is getting are already being used to combat rhino poaching. SANParks, the state agency responsible for South Africa's state-run national parks, has deployed the Seeker II military-spec UAV[0], ground radar, thermal imagers, cameras and dedicated teams of heavily armed rangers in the Kruger National Park, one of Africa's largest wildlife reserves. All anti-poaching resources have been placed under the command of Major General Johan Jooste, a highly-regarded retired military commander and a rewards program giving approximately US$ 10 000 to anybody whose tip-off results in the arrest of a poacher and about US$ 100 000 for a tip-off leading to the arrest of the head of a poaching syndicate has been created. At the same time the South African Army has deployed units in both the border patrol and anti-poaching role in certain parks.
These measures are all helping, but it's important to understand just what an impossible task this is. SANParks's 19 national parks alone cover 37 000 km², that's larger than Belgium, Israel and Lebanon. Moreover those 19 parks are dispersed across South Africa's 1.2 million km² and many of them are on the border of neighbouring countries from which many of these poachers come. It also doesn't include the hundreds of private wildlife reserves across the country which have been badly hit by rhino poaching. As the US has discovered on its southern border with Mexico, trying to prevent small bands of people from crossing a border this large is impossible even with UAVs, manned aircraft and massive resources.
So technology alone is not going to solve this, though it and other measures are hopefully going to help reduce the rate at which rhinos are being killed. The only long-term solution is to somehow stop the demand for rhino horn from Asia and thus remove the profit motive for poaching rhinos in the first place.
[0] The Seeker II is a 9-12 hour endurance UAV with all the standard surveillance gear such as FLIR cameras that is being provided free of charge by Denel, a South African arms manufacturer. The intention is to supplement that with a longer-ranged model, the Seeker 400, sometime next year. At the same time they're finalising development of a much smaller UAV, the Hungwe, that can be deployed by ranger teams for short-range surveillance.
Supply and demand rule it seems.