The invasion of privacy using a drone will be a clear cut criminal offence. Moving to criminalise the use of drones for any sort of anti-social behaviour empowers the public and private businesses to protect themselves against this behaviour. The single greatest drone defence is drone jamming. Drone GPS jammer already in use in sensitive areas surrounding government property and in some cases industrial property too. Legislation will soon be in place and a drone capture using drone jamming will tip the balance in favour of those on the right side of the law. Once a drone has been captured it can be electronically identified and the operator traced to source.
The DroneDefender works by directing radio energy at the drone, disrupting the remote control link between the drone and the operator. The jammer operates at common industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands. 2.4 GHz, one of the most common drone control frequencies, is part of the ISM band.
While the jammers look like automatic weapons their functionality is quite different. Most block the drone’s ability to receive signals. Davos deployed the HP 47 Counter UAV Jammer which last saw action during Barack Obama’s visit to Berlin, Germany last year.
Training to deal with jamming requires having jammers to train with. That’s tricky for the Army, which got rid of its electronic warfare units as part of the “peace dividend” in the 1990s. The service has short-range defensive jammers that prevent certain types of roadside bombs from detonating, but for offensive jamming it relies entirely on Air Force EC-130H Compass Call and Navy EA-18G Growler aircraft. The Army won’t have its own offensive jammer again until 2023.
There are some techniques to identify and stop these sorts of attacks. Wireless intrusion prevention systems (WIPS) can make the signal jammer apparent, WIPS is a network device that monitors the radio spectrum for the presence of unauthorized access points (intrusion detection), and can automatically take countermeasures (intrusion prevention). Some radio-based devices support spread spectrum modulation so that hardware can cycle through different frequencies to make the devices harder to jam.
Since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and moved into eastern Ukraine, several reports and military assessments have warned of growing Russian EW capabilities. These include airborne jammers that reportedly disabled electronics on a U.S. destroyer in the Black Sea, radar cell phone jammer of aircraft, GPS jamming of drones and disruption of military communications in Ukraine.