USAF Drones Trail Civilian Auto Traffic in New Mexico

In a 'lifestyles-of-video-game-war' piece by Mazzetti that appears in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, Mazzetti writes:


When I visited the base [Holloman Air Force Base, NM] earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at. A white S.U.V. traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs in the center of the screen and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road. When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.

"Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?" a reporter asked. One Air Force officer responded that this was only a training mission, and then the group was quickly hustled out of the room.

USAF Drones Trail Civilian Auto Traffic in New Mexico

I know I already have a thread that I have been trying to use to keep track of domestic use of drones HERE, but I thought I should bring this to the attention of ATS in it's own thread.

While I do think they are using this as a training method, I also think that they are preparing these drone pilots to work over U.S. soil.

Aim High...because civilians are tricky to get a bead on.

This is wrong on soooo many levels. This will end badly for us, just the same way it's working out for civilians overseas.

We really need a tech that will keep these aircraft on the ground -- or make them uncontrollable.

Originally posted by jcarpenter
This is wrong on soooo many levels. This will end badly for us, just the same way it's working out for civilians overseas.

We really need a tech that will keep these aircraft on the ground -- or make them uncontrollable.

I have a "portable digital trunking police scanner", the $500 piece of equipment required to hear most state police departments these days. It has a feature that allows it to discover very strong nearby signals, and it has a LOT of frequency capabilities. Some military frequencies are blocked but it can be modified to unblock them. So, you use this to find the data frequencies for the drones. Then you can build a signal jamming device that runs on those frequencies. I'm not sure what the drone would do when jammed, but it will block the signal.

Remember what iran did? They sent fake GPS signals to it to make it land at their airport. You could do it too, it probably wouldn't be very hard. These drones are too big for the average joe to steal, some of them are 80 feet long. So, i suggest landing it into a dense wooded area where it is guaranteed to wreck. Or land it into a big bonfire.....