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207 Drones Operating In US Air Space
There are currently 106 federal, state, and local agencies operating 207 drones in US skies. And the question being askled is, are there good enough safeguards on the rapidly proliferating use of drones in law enforcement?
Beyond the constitutional issues, there are matters having to do with how drones could be hijacked by terrorists, as well as their threat to civil aviation.
In June, Humphreys and his research team from the University of Texas at Austin's Radionavigation Laboratory conducted a demonstration for the Department of Homeland Security at the missile range at White Sands, N.M., in which they were able to seize the flight control of a sophisticated $80,000 Hornet Mini UAV rotorcraft as it hovered 50 feet off the ground.
They accomplished this by tricking its onboard navigation system to stop accepting data from the Global Positioning System satellite network. Instead, they gave the drone counterfeit commands from a ground transmitter half a mile away.
"Spoofing a GPS receiver on a (unmanned aerial vehicle) is just another way of hijacking a plane," Humphreys told Fox News.
The so called "hijacking" was achieved with barely $1,000 in equipment and four years of software development that left the device completely unaware that it had been redirected.
