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Last winter, as an FBI hostage rescue team took up an elevated position to assess an unfolding crisis, agents heard the buzz of small drones approaching.
Soon, the tiny unmanned aircraft had the team surrounded, swooping past in a series of "high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them," Joe Mazel, head of the agency's operational technology law unit, told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver on Wednesday. The swarm caused the group to lose situational awareness of the target.
"We were then blind," Mazel said, according to a Defense One account of the session at the conference focusing on unmanned technologies. "It definitely presented some challenges."
Also at https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/4/17318080/criminals-drones-swarm-fbi-raid
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @11:35PM (1 child)
This reads like fake news to me.
Like, 'this is something that MIGHT happen, eventually, if we wait long enough, so let's just get out in front of things by publishing some fodder to the proletariat, pretending that it happened and getting the money flowing'.
Why?
Recently, traveling on Highway 101, in Northern California, I gave someone who lives in Humboldt County, a ride, via Craigslist's Rideshare board.
This person told me they had observed UAVs flying around in the darkness - large numbers of them - when they had been present in a region of Trinity County, known as Trinity Pines (which is largely populated by marijuana growers), during a raid, at another property, by the FBI, some time in the not too distant past.
(Trinity County is basically an agriculturally oriented county. Witness the name, and residents, of the nearest town - Hayfork. However, Trinity Pines is just over the county line from Humboldt County; and so there is a certain amount of bleedover, across county lines. There's also people growing hay, and running cattle, in Humboldt County - it's not all pot growers.)
I take tales told to me by anonymous travelers with a grain of salt, and so should you.
But so if the FBI *were* overwhelmed by an infusion of foreign flying objects they had not invited, it seems possible that whomever did such a thing was inspired by the FBI, itself.
Anonymous Cow Herd
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @12:09AM
What was this for? A bank robbery? Why not just one or two drones to get the positions of the agents? What software or manpower did they have available to coordinate such a swarm? Why did the suspects have time to fuck around with drones instead of getting their asses away from there? Did they get apprehended?
Now that the scenario (true or not) has been put out there, we can expect it to show up in Law and Order, CSI, NCIS or some other dumb show to help brainwash the public.
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