After flying a drone “a few feet away” from a family home in Seattle, one man claims he was doing research well within his legal rights. The camera-clad drone, however, spiked justified concerns about the privacy of the family who lives there.

A woman in Seattle explained to the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog (CHS) that she heard a buzzing noise outside her home that she assumed was a weed-whacker. Instead, it turned out to be a flying drone with an attached camera, hovering near her third-story window. She spotted a man on the sidewalk outside of the house controlling the drone. Her husband did what any normal person would do: he asked the man to cut it out, but he refused saying it was within the law to fly the drone and that he was conducting research. The couple subsequently called the police, who decided not to come once as the man decided to leave the area.

“We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom,” she said, according to CHS.

The Atlantic points out that a 1946 Supreme Court ruling considers all airspace to be a public highway. But airspace or not, I assume you can’t take pictures of someone’s home through their windows without permission. If someone had a very long stick with a camera at the end and held it over your fence, you’d likely not consider that legal either. It’s yet another example of the dire situation we’re in trying to keep legislation up with technology.

Commenters on the CHS blog post speculate that the drone could have been used by a local paper’s reporters to demonstrate how “useless” they are. Others suggest it could have just been a weirdo.

Drone image via Don McCullough/Flickr

Ten drones joined the Navy today in its first drone squadron. The unmanned aircraft are joined by other manned aircraft to resurrect a retired helicopter squadron known as “The Magicians.”

The drones are Fire Scout MQ-8B helicopters, built by Northrop Grumman, that the Navy plans on arming. Currently, they can target individuals and send back images and video to a home base to alert those controlling the drones as to what is going on. They’ll likely be used in missions deemed extremely dangerous that the military will want to keep humans away from.

The Magicians squadron was retired in 1992 after 19 years of service and is today reborn with eight manned aircraft joining the drones. The drones will be armed and deployed in a year. Currently, both the Army and Air Force have their own drone programs.

Fire Scout MQ-8B drones can take off and land on ships, though we’ve seen a variety of bugs including one that brought a drone down in its attempt to land, as the Associated Press notes. Two of these drones crashed last year in separate instances. In 2010, one drone disconnected from its control base and flew into restricted airspace over Washington, D.C. Washington was warned of the meandering drone before it deployed fighter jets.

Commander of naval air forces Vice Admiral David H. Buss assures that these issues have been fixed.

Drone image via Northrop Grumman

Researcher and hacker Brad “Renderman” Haines knew airplanes could be hacked a year ago, before news hit of a German researcher’s app that can take over a plane’s flight controls. Now, he’s telling the nay-saying Federal Aviation Administration to prove its systems are safe, and says drones might have a similar problem.

“Really, it’s put up or shut up. If they say it’s secure, there should be no harm in publicly giving access to a test lab,” said Haines in an interview with VentureBeat. “Now, you don’t have to be a nation state in order to tinker with this stuff. You can be some bored guy on a couch.”

This week, German researcher Hugo Teso revealed an app that manipulates the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Report System (ACARS), which can give you access to the plane’s flight management system (FMS). You can communicate with ACARS through hacking the airline’s systems or using a special radio, according to Teso. From there, he could send his own information to the plane, such as “turn left.”

“Pilots receive no training on what happens … if there’s an outside intelligence manipulating the data. They’re not trained for that,” said Haines.

But the FAA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, as well as FMS creators Honeywell and Rockwell Collins have all denied that this can actually happen. They say Teso only tested his hack on simulated flight software and that the certified software couldn’t be tampered with or disabled in the same way.

The FAA’s statement as obtained by Forbes reads:

The FAA is aware that a German information technology consultant has alleged he has detected a security issue with the Honeywell NZ-2000 Flight Management System (FMS) using only a desktop computer. The FAA has determined that the hacking technique described during a recent computer security conference does not pose a flight safety concern because it does not work on certified flight hardware. The described technique cannot engage or control the aircraft’s autopilot system using the FMS or prevent a pilot from overriding the autopilot. Therefore, a hacker cannot obtain “full control of an aircraft” as the technology consultant has claimed.

But Haines is calling them out. Last year, he discovered a similar problem that lets you take over the transmissions between a pilot and the tower. He claims you can send fake transmissions that say things like, “There’s a plane coming straight at you!” The FAA — a year later — still hasn’t gotten in touch with him about the hack, according to Haines. Now, he’s turning his attention to drones.

As they start to enter our airspace, Haines says, drones are becoming aware of what’s around them so they can effectively get out of the way if a plane is headed in the same direction. But using the same hack as the one Haines created last year, he says drones could be tricked to actually move a plane’s path.

His research isn’t yet complete, but he says he’d like to “talk to [Teso] and compare notes and see if we can work together.”

He said, “It’s nice to see someone else looking at this and coming to the same conclusions. I’m not crazy.”

Brad Haines image via Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Last week, a Virginia House panel approved a two-year moratorium on drone use within the state. In December, Berkeley’s City Council debated a similar proposal from its Peace and Justice Commission. The commission wanted to prohibit the city from purchasing, borrowing, testing or using drones, or allowing “drones in transit.” Hobbyists would, however, have been allowed to use drones which didn’t carry cameras or audio surveillance equipment. The legislation was shot down because, as Berkeley Councilman Gordon Wozniak argued, “Berkeley doesn’t have jurisdiction over its airspace and can’t enforce it unless we buy Patriot missiles to shoot things down.” Both of these bills were prompted by law enforcement officials wanting to use drones for surveillance and intelligence gathering.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls this “spying.”

These are the harbingers of debates to come as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) moves towards approving the use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems for law enforcement. Groups such as the ACLU are working to stop this because of concerns over privacy. As M. Ryan Calo, my colleague at Stanford Law School and Director for Privacy and Robotics at the Center for Internet & Society, has written, U.S. privacy laws don’t address these issues. This means we are in for some significant legislative battles on Capitol Hill and in the Supreme Court. Calo says these “could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the twenty-first century.

”No doubt, privacy is an important issue. But this is going to be the least of our concerns as drone technologies advance further. We are entering the “drone age” writes drone-builder Chris Anderson, whose company 3D Robotics sells drone kits to mix and match capabilities. With sensors, optics, and embedded processors advancing exponentially and prices dropping precipitously, do-it-yourself-ers are building even more sophisticated and smaller drones than what the U.S. government had a few years ago.

But you don’t have to be a DIY-er. The Parrot AR.Drone can be purchased on Amazon.com for $299. This quadcopter transmits 720p high-definition streaming video to an iPad or smartphone used to control it. The drone is equipped with a three-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, and also pressure and ultrasound sensors. Two or three decades ago, such sensors would have cost millions of dollars and weighed hundreds of pounds.

These drones provide useful capabilities for peeping toms or other criminals watching out for law enforcement. But they become a real threat when equipped with weapons, as a hobbyist who calls himself “Milo Danger” showed by mounting a paintball gun on a DIY drone. In a video, he demonstrated a drone flying and firing at stationary targets. The drone could as easily have been equipped with an assault gun, grenade, or Semtex explosives.

Current generations of DIY drones are controlled by Wi-Fi, so the distances they can travel are limited. But it isn’t hard to add autopilot capability to drones, allowing them to fly on their own for several miles. A smartphone, for example, has the processing power and additional sensors needed. Face-recognition technology on smartphones has also advanced to the point where it can identify an individual in a crowd. This means a teenager can, today, build a device similar to what the military uses to hunt terrorists in Afghanistan.

The same technology with a potential for evil can also be used for good, as evidenced by the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to discover and monitor environmental damage and monitor the well-being of rare species. There’s even a community called “Drones for Good” on Google Plus. A company called Matternet, a spin-off of Singularity University that I have advised in my capacity as Vice President of Innovation and Research there, is building a drone network that will operate in parts of the world where there are no roads or infrastructure. Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos estimates that the network will be able to deliver packages for less than what the cheapest transport in the developing world—the motorcycle—costs.

Now, in the developed world, imagine Dominos delivering pizza, FedEx shipping packages from their local hubs to your house by drone, or Starbucks “drone-mailing” you a hot cup of coffee within 3 minutes of your having placed an order. All of this will soon be possible. Government regulations in the U.S. prevent drones being used for commercial use, but this is not the case in other countries. Entrepreneurs in Germany are already toying with pizza delivery.

Technology advances will rapidly increase the capacity and range of these delivery drones to the point that within a few years, we will be able to ship heavy goods—and even ourselves—using these technologies. The possibilities are endless: drones can be used to monitor and control road traffic, track endangered species, assist in disaster relief, crop management, and so on.

Regardless of how the legislative battles go, we need to be prepared. The U.S. is not the only country developing drone capabilities. Governments and DIY’ers all over the world are doing the same. The Chinese, in particular, are marketing military-quality drones that cost less than $1,000, according to Anderson.

There are, of course, deeply troubling security questions around America’s use of drones abroad, as evidenced by a classified 16-page Department of Justice white paper acquired by NBC News. In it, the government outlines its legal rationale for killing Americans abroad — Americans deemed to be a “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda or an affiliated group who pose an “imminent threat” to the United States.

Then there are the growing number of legal and security questions here at home. Is the Air Force able to shoot down swarms of drone bots should they attack? How can we fortify our schools and public facilities to keep them safe from unmanned drones? Then there is the question of gun rights — a particularly hot topic in recent weeks.

If we have the right to carry our own guns, why not our own drones?

Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University and Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. His other academic appointments include Harvard, Duke and Emory Universities as well as the University of California Berkeley.

This story originally appeared in the Washington Post.

Photo credit: The U.S. Army via photopin

That’s the view of Chris Anderson (pictured), editor of Wired magazine and a drone hobbyist and businessman on the side. He spoke about this DIY trend and his own efforts to lead it in a talk at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today.

Anderson said the whole project is “open sourcing the military industrial complex.” Drones have been the domain of the U.S. military, which has created huge awareness about drones such as the Predator and the Reaper by using them against terrorist targets in a variety of areas where troops can’t go. Those drones cost millions of dollars, but the DIY drone business is focused on created ubiquitous drones that cost tens of dollars.

Anderson’s interest started five years ago as he sought ways to get his kids interested in science. He got them to make robots with Lego Mindstorms robot kits, but their interest didn’t last. Then he tried to get them to fly a remote-controlled airplane, which ended up stuck in a tree. The kids lost interest. But the idea of combining the DIY nature of the robot and the airplane sent Anderson “straight down the rabbit hole,” he said. Then he created the first Lego unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone.

His interest in drones led to a web site called DIY Drones, which has blossomed into a community of 30,000 registered members. The site gets 1.4 million page views a month, has 6,000 blog posts, 8,000 discussion threads, and 80,000 comments a year. Anderson has marshaled that community to create open-source software for all sorts of drones. And Anderson co-founded a for-profit company, 3D Robotics, (with a 19-year-old Mexican teen) that creates computing hardware for drones. That hardware itself is built on the Arduino open-source computing platform. The DIY software helps hobbyists create a wide variety of drones, like a drone you can fly with a Wii game console controller.

That hardware can be used to build all sorts of drones, such as “quad copter” drones based on the hardware of the Parrot AR Drone. The Parrot drones are controlled by humans, but the 3D Robotics hardware converts them so they can be completely autonomous, fulfilling the definition of a drone.

3D Robotics sells the drone hardware for $199 or so, enabling community members to take their software and run it on a hardware platform and thereby field their own flying drones.

“Anything that is remote-controlled, you just put this in there and suddenly you’ve got a drone,” Anderson said.

There are some legal issues around drones and whether they can be flown in commercial airspace, but Anderson said he has a legal opinion from lawyers that the business is legal, since the DIY drones are so far used for non-commercial purposes.

The drones have gotten quite creative. You can go surfing and have a drone take off from the beach, fly over you, turn on its camera and then film you from above as you surf.

The hardware is priced at about 2.6 times the hardware bill-of-material cost, allowing a 40 percent margin for retailers and a 40-percent margin for the company. But since the software is free, the end product can be quite cost efficient compared to competitors who have to try to keep pace with an all-volunteer software community, Anderson said. That means that Chinese knock-off rivals can copy the hardware but will have a tough time keeping up with 3D Robotics as it launches new software-driven varieties. Right now, the company offers 150 different products, including 75 from the community.

“They can’t clone our community,” he said.

The company has two factories and 50 employees now. In addition, 3D Robotics rewards its community contributors with T-shirts, coffee mugs, free travel, free hardware, and — if they contribute enough — equity in the company. All of the drones are under $1,000. Competitors include other open-source DIY communities where the model is similar: charge for hardware, give away the bits.

Drones still have a lot of room to improve before they become mainstream toys for more consumers, especially those who would never pick up a soldering iron to assemble a product.

“In two years, we have begun disrupting a multimillion-dollar industry with the open-source model,” Anderson said. “We can deliver 90 percent of the performance of military drones at 1 percent of the price.”

Of course, at least so far, the hackers aren’t “weaponizing” the drones.

A team from the University of Texas at Austin showed Homeland Security just how detrimental GPS spoofing can be to our drones program. The group hacked a school-owned drone using a cheap, home-made spoofing tool.

With Homeland Security officials standing by, the team confused a hovering drone from nearly a mile away using GPS spoofing. GPS spoofing is the act of hacking into a GPS system and tricking it into believing it’s somewhere it’s not. From here, a hacker could provide new coordinates for the drone to follow and eventually ground the aerial vehicle in their desired location. While the process seems complicated, Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin created a spoofer for less than $1,000 that could execute the necessary instructions.

“In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” Humphreys told Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”

The spoofer convinces the target drone into believing all the information it is being fed is legitimate — that nothing is unusual. He then is able to change the drone’s course to his liking.

In 2011, Iran captured a U.S. drone. It was believed that engineers in the country had detected the drone and used GPS spoofing to bring it down. At the time, the American Civil Liberties Union called for more restrictions on drone usage in U.S. airspace, as many begin to fear how these drones could turn on us.

via Fox News; Drone image via AN HONORABLE GERMAN/Flickr

1. Oliver North, retired U.S. Marine Corps officer who was indicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair,  served as a consultant for the design team. He was particularly helpful in describing the environment for black operations, or secret military missions, of the 1980s.

2. Los Angeles is destroyed. The city was evacuated, but the drones didn’t like the architecture and attacked en masse. You discover this in the first mission of the game. Well, if Washington, D.C.; New York; Paris; and London had their turn in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, it’s logical that the entertainment capital of the world would be next on the list.

3. Rare earth elements. We’re going to be fighting over these 17 metals in the future. When you think about it, Iran has 10 percent of the world’s oil, but China has a lock on 95 percent of these minerals, which are used in all sorts of electronic products and batteries.

4. Frank Woods, an iconic soldier from the first Black Ops game, is back in the new game, even though he died already.

5. Zombies will be back and bigger than ever with a brand new world and in brand new modes. The undead have been sighted in Santa Monica.

6. Flying drones are going to take over combat in the future. Don’t go into battle without one. In the future, a madman villain will be able to hack into the military infrastructure and take control of the entire fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

7. The second Cold War will be between the U.S. and China.

8. The 3D graphics on consoles will look better than in previous games thanks to improvements in software efficiency. But the game still runs at 60 frames per second.

9. Strike Force Mode will allow you to play from different combat perspectives, including a commander with an overhead view of the battle, a mech-like robotic CLAW, a drone, or an individual soldier. You can switch from one role to another to bring the most firepower upon the enemy.

10. The last frontier for making realistic human faces is getting the lips to look right during speech. If the computer animators succeed in this regard, then video game characters will look as real as we do. Meet the face of Raul Menendez, the villain of the game.

11. One of the sniper guns has a scope that lets you see the outlines of enemies hiding behind barriers of wood, metal, or concrete. If you fire at them, you can kill them.

12. They did motion capture with a horse. And you get to ride a horse as a player.

13. The audio team used the sound of metal on dry ice to simulate the sound of a skyscraper falling.

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