Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro clutched his microphone stand during a televised address Saturday and looked skyward at what he thought could be a pyrotechnics display. Moments later, a second blast sounded somewhere in the vicinity—sending dozens of soldiers, previously standing in neat rows, scattering.
Venezuela’s Interior Minister said Sunday that six “terrorists” had been detained in relation to the drone-propelled explosions, one of which authorities were able to electronically intercept and the other of which hit an apartment building nearby. He said the two DJI M600 drones carried roughly two pounds of C-4 explosive and had been directed at Maduro.
The incident marked another escalation in the use of drones, this time allegedly in the form of an assassination attempt against a state actor.
“Previous assassination attempts required you to get somewhat close to the target,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor at the University of Texas. “But going forward, you could be miles away. You could be even a continent away and controlling these drones, say, over an internet connection and then over a wireless connection.”
Bombs with a timer can also detonate “on autopilot,” he says, but “in this case, it’s something that comes into the area right before it explodes—so you can’t do a sweep.”
A drone attack can be difficult to defend against, especially if multiple are used simultaneously. They can be taught to recognize a specific location or individual. “You could train a neural network to recognize a particular person, and the camera on the drone could be searching for that person.”
Plus, drones like those allegedly used Saturday are not especially difficult to procure and weaponize. “Wherever FedEx can deliver, you could buy one,” Humphreys says.
They vary by size, and their limits also vary when it comes to payload, flight duration, or speed. Militarized drones, writes Bernard Hudson, former director of counterterrorism at the CIA, “are heavier (but can weigh less than an adult human), and can carry several pounds of explosives at speeds up to 100 miles per hour with a range of 400 miles (about the distance between Washington and Boston).”
A number of non-state actors have used drones to their advantage, most prominently the Islamic State (ISIS). FBI director Christopher Wray expressed concern last September that terrorist groups could use drones against the U.S. “imminently.”
“They are relatively easy to acquire, relatively easy to operate, and quite difficult to disrupt and monitor,” he said.
Hudson warned that non-state actors could use drones to target commercial flights. “Even if they were carrying only a small quantity of explosives, they could bring down a civilian aircraft in flight,” he wrote. He cited recent claims from Houthi rebels that they had attacked the Abu Dhabi airport using a drone, claims that the United Arab Emirates denied. Even so, Hudson said, “it is technically possible—indeed, not difficult at all—for the rebels to have done so.”
But the security risk is not limited to attacks against the government or civilians. It can include intelligence gathering.
“Getting a look at what you’re facing, tactical intelligence, is going to be far and away the most important use of these kinds of small drones,” says Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University. “You don’t have to put a human in there. You don’t have to stick your head up in order to get a sense about what’s going on over the next hill.”
While the weaponization of drones by non-state actors is a growing threat, Anderson says, it is important to remember that their drone capabilities are not comparable to those of the United States and other established militaries. “It’s like the difference between an aircraft carrier and a little boat that carries two people,” he says.
He added that drones outfitted with explosives are similar to other weapons that are detonated remotely. “It’s got certain aspects of being just like a grenade, or something that is thrown, where the human, instead of throwing it, is using a little controller,” he says.
‘Jamming,’ or disrupting the signal between the drone and its operator, is one way to take down an off-the-shelf drone. But, says the University of Texas’s Humphreys, that has its limits.
“[One] could quite easily modify these drones so that they go into an autonomous mode after some point, and carry out their mission without any regard for the command coming from the ground,” he says. “If that’s the case, then you can’t simply ward off these drones by jamming.”
Another alternative is simply shooting the drone. As a defensive measure, Hudson also proposes installing security drones at airports to look out for threats.
But Trump administration officials say they don’t have sufficient legal authority to track and destroy threatening drones.
“DHS should be able to access signals being transmitted between a nefarious drone and its ground controller to accurately geolocate both quickly,” wrote Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen last month. “Yet current legal constraints prohibit us from doing so and from addressing other drone-threat scenarios, such as drones configured to operate without a human operator.”
Senator Ron Johnson introduced legislation earlier this year that would give the Justice Department and DHS the authority to track, destroy, and “seize or otherwise confiscate” threatening drones. However, some civil liberties advocates have raised serious concerns about that measure.
“This bill would give DOJ and DHS carte blanche to use potential safety threats posed by drones as a pretext to conduct warrantless and unaccountable surveillance,” wrote Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation. “The bill would go beyond enabling the US government to track the drones, and would actually permit the government to co-opt drones for their own surveillance purposes.”
