Deer Trail, Colo. residents are already lining up for permits, reports Reuters, apparently keen to blast unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky. Town clerk Kim Oldfield said the
whole thing started when resident Phillip Steel, worried that the
country’s becoming “a surveillance society,” pitched the idea of issuing
permits to hunt drones as a way to protest their rise (hypothetically
anyway) on the national scene.
That led town trustees to decide last month that the question
warranted a public vote. And once the decision to put it to a vote was
reached, applications for the $25 permits began pouring in — not just
from Deer Trail residents, says Oldfield, but everywhere, including a
few from folks living in the U.K. and Canada.
“I stopped counting when it hit 985,” Oldfield told Reuters. Deer Trail’s population was 546 as of the 2010 census.
Not that anyone’s looking to pick off a bunch of unmanned vehicles,
says Oldfield, noting that those in favor of the drone-hunting permits
want to stage a contest — basically a skeet shoot using drones in lieu
of clay disks — which could promote tourism and allow the city to reap a
little extra revenue.
Still, the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t amused, issuing a
note last summer when the ball started rolling pretty much warning
people to keep their weapons holstered if a drone happens by, permit or
no. ”Shooting at an unmanned aircraft could result in criminal or civil
liability, just as would firing at a manned airplane,” said the
government agency.
A Strange Funny by: TIME online
A Washington, D.C.-based engineer is working on the "Drone Shield," a
small, Wi-Fi-connected device that uses a microphone to detect a
drone's "acoustic signatures" (sound frequency and spectrum) when it's
within range.
The company's founder, John Franklin, who has been working in
aerospace engineering for seven years, says he hopes to start selling
the device sometime this year. He is using the Kickstarter-like IndieGoGo to finance the project.
The device will cost $69 and will be about the size of a USB thumb
drive. It will use Raspberry Pi – a tiny, $25 computer – and
commercially available microphones to detect drones. He says he imagines
that people will attach the Drone Shield to their fences or roofs to
protect their home from surveillance.
"People will get the alert and then close their blinds," Franklin says.
He is currently working on an open-source database of drone sounds
that the detector will check what it's hearing against. Other devices
with motors, such as lawn mowers and weed-whackers, will also be
included to reduce false positives. Drone owners will be asked to record
the sound of their drones to be included in the database. When the
Drone Shield identifies a drone, it'll flash and send an email and text
message alert to a homeowner.
Franklin says that most commercially available drones have to come
relatively close to a home in order to spy. More sophisticated drones,
such as Predators, would fly too high to detect.
He got the idea for the device after getting into a bit of hot water
with his neighbor, which Franklin says alerted him to the reality of
people's concerns about drones.
"I bought a [drone] from Amazon and was going to use it to look at my
roof. The wind took it and I crashed it into my neighbor's yard. It
freaked him out once he noticed it had a camera on it," Franklin says.
"It sort of dawned on me that it's so easy to invade someone's privacy
with a couple hundred dollar drone."
VIDEO: USNews
