Man Flies Drone Near Seattle Residence | Hacker News Reader

Man Flies Drone Near Seattle Residence

theatlantic.com

48 pointsColinWright65 comments

There's simply not enough information in this story to tell what really happened. It could be a peeping tom who got busted. Or it could be a guy flying his new radio-controlled toy at the local park (they mention being next to Miller Playfield).

And there's conflicting information -- the guy refused to stop flying, but the police wouldn't come because he left? That kinda sounds like he stopped flying. These things have a max battery time of 20 minutes, and 10-12 minutes is more typical. It doesn't sound like it was an extended confrontation.

> And there's conflicting information -- the guy refused to stop flying, but the police wouldn't come because he left? That kinda sounds like he stopped flying.

I read that as, "the guy refused to leave when asked but left after he was told that they'd call the police."

The premise in the title seems be pulled out of thin air after actually reading the piece. You're right there just wasn't enough information to say anything either way.

So you would be ok with someone doing this at your home?

I'm asking both of you this question.

I think there is plenty in the story to know that this behavior is asking for trouble. Where I'm from this would not have resulted in a friendly chat with the fellow on the street.

First, I make unmanned aircraft as my day job. I'm comfortable with the technology, and my windows have curtains. So I have no problem with someone flying one of these on my property. (For the record, I do not think it's OK to fly on someone else's property without the property owner's permission.)

Second, I do not believe the story happened as the person claims. The details just don't add up. A guy takes his radio-controlled aircraft to a local park with a huge soccer field and chooses to fly in someone's side-yard instead? I think that's unlikely. Also, the interaction between the husband and the pilot? That sounds heavily weighted to make the husband seem uber-nice and the pilot seem like a dick. I'd bet the real interaction was different than described.

Of course, there's not enough info to know, so my interpretation is only speculation.

What "behavior" are you talking about, and did it actually occur?

Yeah you are right, nothing odd about this behavior (of flying a drone near someones house without permission and then claiming you are doing research).

In fact, if anyone wants to try similar research at my home, please email me, I would love to film my response. :)

Imagine 4-5 V for Vindetta mask wearing hockey players approaching you quickly and aggressively to get an idea of what would happen. I'll be the guy on the porch filming and laughing.

So is it at all possible to fly a drone "near someone's house" without permission for research purposes, or does it all simply deserve a beatdown?

If you thought the Atlantic's premise thin, here is the Raw Story:

Are Creepy Dudes Now Using Drone Technology For Their Nefarious Ends?

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/14/are-creepy-dudes-now-u...

Which takes what one human on the planet has done, and projects his behavior, his terrible attitude onto all men.

right. I had heard about this before and thought this was like a follow up about him refusing to stop. But really it is just the same story. And now I see the original story is hardly anything more than a police blotter type blurb without any real meat.

I agree, this story as written doesn't have nearly enough information but as this technology gets cheaper and more prevalent it's not difficult to imagine that this scenario, or something very similar, could occur. This exact thing or something very much like it will probably end up in court in the next few years.

I'm all for free air space for personal drones however; I have fishing net that can be fired from a potato gun.

Any drone flying that close will be captured and re-purposed for my personal pleasure.

Never bring a quadracopter drone to a monofilament fishing line fight.

If airspace is free for you, it's also free for me.

So I can fly my own drone, with a small curtain hanging down from it, programmed to keep directly between your drone's video camera and me/my house.

Or you could just invest in some curtains...

If the guy is truly a nuisance, get all the neighbors to pitch in and buy tons of drones and just take a day off work and follow that guy around constantly.

> If the guy is truly a nuisance, get all the neighbors to pitch in and buy tons of drones and just take a day off work and follow that guy around constantly.

That would be harassment, which is illegal. You don't want to break the law even if this guy is (debatable).

If the neighbors are really that concerned, and the guy is really that annoying, here's one possible neighborhood response: snap the guy's photo and send postcards around with the photo, including a short explanation of what the guy is doing. No accusations need be made nor should they be, just an exercise of your first amendment rights...

(this is roughly the same treatment sex offenders on the offender registry get when moving into a new neighborhood in my state)

My suggestion was in jest, however, would it truly be harassment? The drones wouldn't be directly affecting him, just moving in the public space around him and not even in his way.

Mine was a joke too - I hope people wouldn't get that incensed!

I don't know what the limits are going to end up being with drones and the law. I think just following someone around can eventually be constituted harassment, and so I assume the same is true of doing it with drones.

Curtains don't protect me when I'm outside in my backyard, and convincing my neighbors to invest $500 doesn't really scale.

I was thinking it'd be a fun pellet gun target practice. Or maybe even an opportunity for you to build anti-spy-drone-pellet-gun-turrets....and then mount them on your house. Seriously. It's "The Bread and Butter Battle" of the makers.

> fishing net that can be fired from a potato gun

kickstarter that ASAP

Good thing all my drones self-destruct when captured and release clouds of toxic gas. /s

Wouldn't this be considered theft?

Or a weapon of mass destruction depending on the gas.

Or property damage

Hmm... if you knock down the drone, then it is no longer in public space though (assuming it lands in your property). I have no idea what laws there are around this sort of thing... but disabling without destroying the drone so it ends up on my property - what then? The owner would be (conceivably) trespassing should he or she attempt to recover the drone.

I was thinking super soaker

I like that, much simpler than a potato cannon. I would suggest a hose or power washer... Time to clean the siding...

[clenches fists, swings arms wildly, walks towards you] "It's not my fault if your face gets in the way of my fists. I'm just walking."

With a good fly and tackle you could reel that thing really easily

This has a couple different issues involved. Property rights to the air above you and privacy rights. It seems the court agrees that the air above you is a public space. For privacy rights, it uses the example of leaning a ladder against your neighbor's house to spy into it. So it claims that hovering the UAV just outside their window is also a privacy violation. But what about hovering it just outside the window but my side of the fence? What about using a telescope from inside my house to spy into their house? Or standing on the public sidewalk to spy into their house? Does a "peeping tom" need to be on your property to still get in trouble? And if he sees you undressing is it worse than if all he sees is you eating dinner? What about looking into their backyard from my second story balcony? or into their house?

The only complication that the drone adds is that is provides you additional vantage points that you didn't have before. But if the air above you is public space, the same rules should probably apply as if you were standing on the sidewalk.

I think your logic applies to almost every use of drones. Whether it is our government killing enemy combatants, our local police monitoring speeding, or our slightly creepy neighbor doing who knows what, they aren't exactly new issues. Governments have always killed, police always caught speeders, and neighbor were always slightly creepy. The only difference is that drones allow them to do these things quicker, more efficiently, cheaper, and with less risk. Therefore I don't really think we need new laws in place, we just need to be more mindful of the laws we already have in place.

You seem to be concluding that the same rules should apply based entirely on the notion that consistency with existing laws is the guiding principle yet I suspect that most people would not feel that way.

A helicopter passing over at 1000 feet is not the same thing as a helicopter hovering at 50 feet is not the same thing as a drone hovering 5 inches from your window. The law should treat these circumstances differently as I suspect it already does (IANAL).

We talked about this yesterday [1] as well when the link to Betabeat's similarly non-coverage coverage came out. The Atlantic adds commentary from John Villasenor (who actually has some interesting things to say [2]) but the Atlantic didn't actually do much more than quote nearly the entire blog component from the Capitol Hill Seattle blog.

And I'll repeat briefly what I wrote which is if someone (ideally not law enforcement) flies a drone with a camera over your property please disable it, or destroy it, if possible, so that a legal case can be started on it. There are conflicting laws here and a nice example case would do wonders for bringing out the arguments for and against.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5712423

[2] http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/36_2_...

wow, John Villasenor's article is excellent. Thanks for the link!

Thousands of drones flown by enthusiasts to learn about robotics > one idiot who doesn't know how to be a good neighbor. I'd hate to see a burgeoning field shut down because of a paranoid response.

If someone were flying a drone uncomfortably close to my house/window I'd just turn my hose on it.

Kinda concerned that a lot of replies here are all about destroying some potentially innocent hobbyist's property. Why the sudden macho destructive reaction? These drones are classic hacker territory, yet there is some quite disproportionate reaction.

Right now, we have no idea what was in the "pilot's" mind, to suddenly assume its some thing suspicious smacks of paranoia. The then start on about attacking and destroying the "toy" is absurd.

Did any one care when people used RC helicopters in the same way?

I think that partly the word "drone" has become a scary word because of its association with government evil doing.

> Did any one care when people used RC helicopters in the same way?

Interestingly, the incentives have changed. A camera-rigged RC helicopter used to be expensive. Flying without permission and risking collision or the wrath of a property owner had a greater potential penalty.

Also, there was a larger barrier to entry for the hobby. Different sort of people...

> These drones are classic hacker territory

Part of the problem here: the AOLers have arrived.

This references a supreme court decision from 1946. It's hard to imagine that the court was trying to protect this behavior, my guess is that they were addressing the issue of whether a property owner had rights to control air travel over their property.

Likewise, it's almost inconceivable that there are not guidelines covering minimum cruise height or similar. You can't just go buzzing everyone's house with your private ultralight, can you? If not, I expect the same guidelines should apply to your United Twerpists dodecacopter(tm) drone.

You're right that the earlier decision was more related to air travel. The precedent that was set is that a property owner can only claim air space up to a height that is actively used by the property owner. So if you have a windmill, for example, you can claim the airspace to a greater height than your neighbor with only a trampoline.

FAA defines minimum heights manned aircraft, usually 1000ft above the tallest obstacle when flying near a city (helicopters are exempt from this rule, though). FAA also defines rules for radio-controlled aircraft. Namely, small r/c aircraft must fly below 400ft and within line-of-sight of the pilot.

Maybe the person has the same business idea as Black Hat: http://xkcd.com/1207/

One thing to do is to take a picture/video of the guy doing it and post it publicly. Fight fire with fire, as it were.

Let's just solve this technical problem with technology. Drones can be blinded by bright lights or low-power lasers; we need a device that attempts to blind drones when they are over a person's property. Of course, it is more likely that such a device will be made illegal than that flying a drone will be made illegal -- after all, what ever will the police do if drug dealers are blinding surveillance drones?!

> Drones can be blinded by bright lights or low-power lasers

Do you have evidence to support this claim?

Furthermore, so can people.

> we need a device that attempts to blind drones when they are over a person's property

It's probably easier to look into your own windows from your neighbor's property.

Your plan does not sound particularly well thought-out to me.

It is fairly well known that lasers can (temporarily) blind digital cameras, even at power levels that are safe (i.e. your blink reflex can protect you). You can try this at home if you have a laser pointer, though that is far more powerful than you would need unless you want to do this at long distances (hundreds of feet).

The real trick, however, is aiming:

http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html

Aiming the laser at a moving target (like a drone) would probably be very difficult, though not technically impossible. You would not necessarily need to keep the laser fixed on the camera; a lot of rapid hits would be sufficient to stop something casual, so something akin to a bar-code scanner might work.

Really, the biggest issue is with the fact that the laser would be pointed upward. This could be dangerous if you live near an airport or if you use a needlessly powerful laser. On of the other hand, drones are probably not going to be spying on you from more than 50 feet away, so around 1mW would probably be enough to protect a bedroom window.

"It's probably easier to look into your own windows from your neighbor's property."

Yeah, but you can bet that if my neighbors had a camera pointed into my window, I would be upset. Sure, I can draw my curtains, but why should I not be able to both enjoy the sunlight and not be recorded in my home?

As long as we're dreaming, let's build a larger drone that can swoop down on the annoying guy's drone and grab it from the top, then fly up and deposit it in the top of a tree. After dropping a net over its rotors to be sure it can't take off again.

Shouldn't your neighbors be able to open their eyes in their own backyard without having to rely on their blink reflexes to protect their retinas from burns from your anti-drone laser system?

It is not as though the system is always-on, nor is the system pointed downward. The point of the system is to activate when a drone is detected, then shine a laser at the drone. Unless your neighbors are standing between the laser and the drone, it's not even remotely dangerous to them. Even if they were somehow struck, there is not reason for the laser to be powerful enough to cause permanent damage even at point-blank range, even with >1s exposure. A typical laser pointer is more powerful than what is needed to blind a CCD at the distances we're talking about.

You are exposed to the sort of laser I am talking about whenever you go to a supermarket. Yes, your blink reflex is protecting you from the laser when the clerk puts down their barcode scanner at an odd angle.

There are other options, but they are probably more dangerous. Shooting drones out of the sky? Crashing your own drone into the drone that is harassing you? Laws that prohibit, regulate, or restrict civilian drone use? A laser can blind a camera without causing any damage to anything, it can be automated, and you can build safety measures in if you want to be extra-cautious.

> Unless your neighbors are standing between the laser and the drone, it's not even remotely dangerous to them. Even if they were somehow struck,

Like if, for example, the drone triggered your system and flew behind the neighbors on purpose.

> there is not reason for the laser to be powerful enough to cause permanent damage [...] to blind a CCD at the distances we're talking about.

Please cite something in the scientific, engieneering, or hacker literature showing this.

Because I think silicon detectors and solid state optics are a lot more resilient (and easier to repair) than human retinas.

"Please cite something in the scientific, engieneering, or hacker literature showing this."

http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html

Really, you can just try this yourself; it is entirely safe and causes no permanent damage to anything. Take a handheld laser pointer and aim it at a webcam from some distance (say, down a hallway). If you do not have a laser pointer, take your camera of choice to the supermarket and point it at a barcode scanner.

"Because I think silicon detectors and solid state optics are a lot more resilient (and easier to repair) than human retinas."

Well I'm not going to recommend that you shine a laser into anyone's eyes, but like I said, it is easy to see the effect a low-power laser has on a typical CCD camera. In simple terms, what happens is that electrons "spill" into neighboring pixels, which causes more "spilling" to occur (the technical term is "blooming"). The more light the CCD receives, the worse this effect becomes; lasers are an extreme case, since all of the energy is focused on a very small area. There are technologies that reduce this effect, but it is all relative: a cheap cell phone or webcam is easily blinded, whereas a decent point and shoot will still capture at least some of the frame (but with a big circle surrounding the laser dot).

As for power levels, I have done the above with a red laser pointer that emits roughly 1mW. To my knowledge, there are no recorded cases of any permanent eye damage from such a laser. There is a reason such devices are considered safe even for indoor use.

I was going to say that Infrared LEDs often wreak lots of havoc on CCD-based cameras, but this [1] seems to indicate otherwise.

1: http://hackaday.com/2008/08/27/testing-ir-camera-blocking/

Just phone the cops and say he is spying on patrol cars.

I assure you that drone will never fly again.

Can you imagine someday soon when an army of "news drones" start following car chases down the highway?

ps. this is a joke, do not lie to police, ever

Somehow I actually think this is an okey thing to do. Maybe it 's the child in me that likes the idea of controlling an aircraft remotely and spying on people/exploring the world. If a neighbor asks politely you should of course spy from further distance or get a more silent motor.

Dear fellow entrepreneurs, I'm disappointed nobody sees the business opportunity here: with right marketing, demand for cheap, heat seeking or optical recognition rockets could skyrocket (pun intended).

Home Defender™

Oops, my rocket launched from my backyard and accidentally hit your drone, neighbor ;)

If this guy, on the sidewalk, had a long pole with a camera on it would it be illegal? In cases like this, I see the drone as a simple extension of self. The technology seems to cloud that fact.

Also there are legal concepts of Air Rights and even airspace has its limits (500 feet).

Would it possible to build a jammer to jam the remote control signals and make the drone crash? At what frequency do these things operate? Shouldn't be too hard ;-)

Shouldn't be too hard to sue for criminal damage to the legal drone either. On top of that, there would be liability for any damaged caused.

as the article notes, you can achieve invasion of privacy by using a stepladder and a camera; this should be no different.

Why not hire someone to shoot that with a shotgun?

On a third or fourth drone the guy is going to get the hint.

Beyond all the concerns about destroying other peoples property, discharging a firearm in a residential area can carry pretty stiff penalties depending on the local laws.

I wonder if fireworks are legal there. A couple of roman candles could work nicely.

Hitting it with a roman candle would be difficult if it was moving. Better to use a pellet or BB gun.

Well, there's no way I could hit a moving target with a projectile that small. Maybe a gun pro could.

Fireworks would at least give me a chance.

Or mount a remote controlled gun to the drone to shoot back...

That would be a major crime.

And shooting property out of the sky is legal in the US? Ok.

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