eagles on drone patrol

[space otter]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/02/465297445/rogue-drones-unleash-the-eagles

Published February 2, 2016·3:19 PM ET     
Updated February 2, 2016·3:53 PM ET

Rogue Drones? Unleash The Eagles

As recreational use of drones around the world continues to soar, authorities have been forced to get creative with how they deal with drones that fly into restricted airspace. In December, Tokyo police launched a drone designed to take out other drones with a net. In October, British tech companies unveiled a drone "death ray" that can disable drones in midflight.

Now, police in the Netherlands are turning to nature for another possible solution: eagles.

The birds of prey are a "low-tech solution to a high-tech problem," a police spokesman told Reuters. The news service reports that the Hague-based raptor security firm Guard From Above is working in conjunction with police to train the eagles.

The eagles can be seen in action in a video released by Dutch police. It shows two eagles in a warehouse with their handlers, taking out drones in the air. The drones are slightly smaller than the birds, and the birds are able to grasp them with their talons and bring them to the ground.



"These birds are used to meeting resistance from animals they hunt in the wild, and they don't seem to have much trouble with the drones," Sjoerd Hoogendoorn of Guard From Above told Reuters. But he said the birds must first be trained to recognize drones as prey.

Another issue: Are there potential adverse consequences for the birds? A separate scientific research group is doing research to determine whether the birds' drone-killing could affect their welfare.

Geoff LeBaron of the National Audubon Society, however, told The Guardian that the eagles' sharp eyesight and sense of timing likely protect them from harm:

"What I find fascinating is that birds can hit the drone in such a way that they don't get injured by the rotors. They seem to be whacking the drone right in the centre so they don't get hit; they have incredible visual acuity and they can probably actually see the rotors."

The real setback is replacing drones after they're destroyed by eagles. "It's a major cost of testing," Hoogendoorn said, per Reuters.

Dutch police expect to make a decision on whether to move forward with the drone-targeting eagle force by the end of the year.

Amateur drone usage has prompted concern in places around the world about the devices flying into off-limits air space, such as around airports and public events. As The Two-Way has previously reported, drone flights at sporting events have caused varying levels of disruption in the past few years:



"In September, a student flew a drone over the University of Kentucky's packed football stadium and crashed it into the stands. No one was injured. Just a few days before that, a New York City teacher was arrested after a drone flew into a stadium during a tennis match at the U.S. Open.

"While those incidents were ultimately harmless, drone usage is becoming increasingly problematic. Last year a drone incident sparked a riot at a soccer game between Serbia and Albania. In that instance, a drone carrying an Albanian nationalist banner landed on the field, fanning ethnic and nationalist tensions and provoking a fight between both the players and people in the stands."


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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/01/trained-eagle-destroys-drone-in-dutch-police-video/

By Peter Holley February 2 at 10:36 AM


For hundreds of years in the skies over Asia, people have used eagles to hunt down prey with deadly results.

That tradition has been in decline for decades, but now the bird's keen eyesight, powerful talons and lethal hunting instincts are being used to take out a new kind of 21st-century vermin: drones.

The animal-vs.-machine moment is brought to you by Guard From Above, which describes itself as "the world's first company specialized in training birds of prey to intercept hostile drones."

[The ancient and vanishing art of hunting with eagles] 

The Hague-based company's latest customers are Dutch police, who have been looking for ways to disable illegally operating drones. A police spokesman told Dutch News.nl that the effort remains in a testing phase, but he called the use of birds to combat drones a "very real possibility."

"It's a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem," national police spokesman Dennis Janus told Reuters.

He added: "People sometimes think it's a hoax, but it's proving very effective so far."

The rise of drone technology has been matched in speed by the rise of anti-drone technology, with companies creating radio jammers and "net-wielding interceptor" drones to disable quadcopters, according to the Verge.

"For years, the government has been looking for ways to counter the undesirable use of drones," Guard From Above's founder and chief executive, Sjoerd Hoogendoorn, said in a statement. "Sometimes a low-tech solution for a high-tech problem is more obvious than it seems. This is the case with our specially trained birds of prey. By using these birds' animal instincts, we can offer an effective solution to a new threat."

A video released on Sunday by Dutch police shows an eagle swooping in at high speed to pluck a DJI Phantom out of the air using its talons. The drone is immediately disabled as the bird carries it off.

"The bird sees the drone as prey and takes it to a safe place, a place where there are no other birds or people," project spokesman Marc Wiebes told Dutch News.nl. "That is what we are making use of in this project."
Said Hoogendoorn, according to Reuters: "These birds are used to meeting resistance from animals they hunt in the wild, and they don't seem to have much trouble with the drones."

Janus, the police spokesman, told the Associated Press that the birds get a reward if they snag a drone.

[Winged beast descends from heavens to trash Missouri man's bedroom] 

Eagles' talons, as the New York Daily News points out, are known for their powerful grips; it's unknown whether they could be damaged by a drone's carbon-fiber propellers.

HawkQuest, a Colorado nonprofit that educates the public about birds of prey, says eagles have enough power to "crush large mammal bones" in animals such as sloths.

"Scientists have tried to measure the gripping strength of eagles," HawQuest notes. "A Bald Eagle's grip is believed to be about 10 times stronger than the grip of an adult human hand and can exert upwards of 400 psi or pounds per square inch."

According to a study cited by Wired in 2009, raptor talons are not merely powerful, but also finely tuned hunting instruments:


"...accipitrids, which include hawks and eagles, have two giant talons on their first and second toes. These give them a secure grip on struggling game that they like to eat alive, 'so long as it does not protest too vigorously. In this prolonged and bloody scenario, prey eventually succumb to massive blood loss or organ failure, incurred during dismemberment.'"

A handler in the video, the Daily News notes, claims the birds are adequately protected by scales on their feet and legs, but researchers hope to equip the animals with another layer of defense.

The potential impact on the animals' welfare is the subject of testing by an external scientific research institute.

"The real problem we have is that they destroy a lot of drones," Hoogendoorn said, according to Reuters. "It's a major cost of testing."

The decision about whether to use the eagles is still several months away.

This post has been updated.


...........................................

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/02/police-are-using-eagles-to-take-out-rogue-drones.html

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/so-dutch-cops-are-teaching-majestic-eagles-to-hunt-drones/

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-police-drones-idUSKCN0VB136

[zorgon]

Eagle Drones

Who needs a drone when you have a pet Eagle

[funbox]

Eagle Drones

Who needs a drone when you have a pet Eagle

amazing, but doesn't it get upset when you try to replace the batterys or insert a charging lead ?

funbox

[space otter]

welllllll the british and americans capture drones in a different way....ah the world is changing


https://theintercept.com/2016/01/28/israeli-drone-feeds-hacked-by-british-and-american-intelligence/

Cora Currier, Henrik Moltke
Jan. 28 2016, 10:08 p.m.

Spies in the Sky

Israeli Drone Feeds Hacked By British and American Intelligence

AMERICAN AND BRITISH INTELLIGENCE secretly tapped into live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets, monitoring military operations in Gaza, watching for a potential strike against Iran, and keeping tabs on the drone technology Israel exports around the world.

Under a classified program code-named "Anarchist," the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, working with the National Security Agency, systematically targeted Israeli drones from a mountaintop on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. GCHQ files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include a series of "Anarchist snapshots" — thumbnail images from videos recorded by drone cameras. The files also show location data mapping the flight paths of the aircraft. In essence, U.S. and British agencies stole a bird's-eye view from the drones.

Several of the snapshots, a subset collected in 2009 and 2010, appear to show drones carrying missiles. Although they are not clear enough to be conclusive, the images offer rare visual evidence to support reports that Israel flies attack drones — an open secret that the Israeli government won't acknowledge.

"There's a good chance that we are looking at the first images of an armed Israeli drone in the public domain," said Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice, a history of drone warfare. "They've gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress information on weaponized drones."

The Intercept is publishing a selection of the drone snapshots in an accompanying article.

Additionally, in 2012, a GCHQ analyst reported "regular collects of Heron TP carrying weapons," referring to a giant drone made by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, known as IAI.

Anarchist operated from a Royal Air Force installation in the Troodos Mountains, near Mount Olympus, the highest point on Cyprus. The Troodos site "has long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey," according to an article from GCHQ's internal wiki. Last August, The Intercept published a portion of a GCHQ document that revealed that NSA and GCHQ tracked weapons signals from Troodos, and earlier reporting on the Snowden documents indicated that the NSA targeted Israeli drones and an Israeli missile system for tracking, but the details of the operations have not been previously disclosed.

"This access is indispensable for maintaining an understanding of Israeli military training and operations and thus an insight to possible future developments in the region," a GCHQ report from 2008 enthused. "In times of crisis this access is critical and one of the only avenues to provide up to the minute information and support to U.S. and Allied operations in the area."


RAF_TroodosMap_01 Map: The Intercept
GCHQ documents state that analysts first collected encrypted video signals at Troodos in 1998, and also describe efforts against drones used by Syria and by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

A 2009 document notes that "no tip-off exists for Hezbollah UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] activity;" apparently the spies had few signals that they were sure were associated with Hezbollah's drone program. Another report recounts that Troodos had captured video from an Iranian-made drone flying out of a Syrian air force base in March 2012, resulting in "presidential interest in further samples of the Regime launching attacks upon the general populous [sic]," presumably referring to U.S. President Barack Obama, whose administration had first called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down the year before, a few months after his regime began a crackdown on Arab Spring protests. Indeed, also in March 2012, unnamed U.S. officials told the press that Assad had been supplied with Iranian drones.

But much of Anarchist's focus was on Israel. The drone-watching documented in the GCHQ files covered periods of Israeli military offensives in Palestine, and also indicates that the intelligence agencies monitored drones for a potential strike against Iran.

The documents highlight the conflicted relationship between the United States and Israel and U.S. concerns about Israel's potentially destabilizing actions in the region. The two nations are close counterterrorism partners, and have a memorandum of understanding, dating back to 2009, that allows Israel access to raw communications data collected by the NSA. Yet they are nonetheless constantly engaged in a game of spy versus spy. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that, although President Obama had pledged to stop spying on friendly heads of state, the White House carved out an exception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials. Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and NSA, told the Journal that the intelligence relationship with Israel was "the most combustible mixture of intimacy and caution that we have."

GCHQ and the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment. The NSA acknowledged receipt of an inquiry but did not respond to questions by the time of publication.

Drone's-Eye View

On January 3, 2008, as Israel launched airstrikes against Palestinian militants in Gaza, U.S. and British spies had a virtual seat in the cockpit.

Satellite surveillance operators at Menwith Hill, an important NSA site in England, had been tasked with looking at drones as the Israeli military stepped up attacks in Gaza in response to rockets fired by Palestinian militants, according to a 2008 year-end summary from GCHQ. In all, Menwith Hill gathered over 20 separate drone videos by intercepting signals traveling between Israeli drones and orbiting satellites. The NSA's internal newsletter, SIDToday, enthusiastically reported the effort, noting that on January 3, analysts had also "collected video for the first time from the cockpit of an Israeli Air Force F-16 fighter jet," which "showed a target on the ground being tracked." Menwith Hill had worked "closely with a GCHQ site in Cyprus for tip-offs."

In July 2008, GCHQ ordered Anarchist technicians to look for drones flying over a number of "areas of interest," including the Golan Heights (a region of southwest Syria seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War), the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Israel's borders with Lebanon and Syria.

"Due to the political situation of the region there is a requirement for Israeli UAV operations in certain areas to be intercepted and exploited so that assessments can be made on what possible actions maybe [sic] taking place," read the request, dated July 29, 2008. The memo asked for analysts to record and send video to GCHQ, along with ground plots showing where the drones had flown, and information about the signal.

Anarchist operators were able to snag the feeds of several different types of Israeli drones, according to an Intercept analysis of the snapshots and presentations from GCHQ summarizing Troodos achievements. The 20 snapshots identified by The Intercept in GCHQ files include several video stills clearly taken from Israeli drones, dating between February 2009 and June 2010.

According to one GCHQ presentation, technicians first collected signals from a Heron TP in February 2009. Intercepted images indicate that they also picked up video from other models and configurations of the Heron, and from the IAI Searcher drone. Another GCHQ presentation shows that by 2009, technicians had tapped into data from Hermes drones, manufactured by the Israeli company Elbit systems. In January 2010, Troodos reported that in the previous six months they had collected data from the Aerostar tactical drone and the Orbiter mini-drone, both made by the Israeli company Aeronautics.

In several snapshots of the Heron TP, there are objects under the wings that appear to be mounts for missiles or for other equipment such as sensors. In one image, from January 2010, a missile-shaped object is clearly visible on the left wing, while the mount on the right appears to be missing its load.

The Heron TP, which the Jerusalem Post described as "the drone that can reach Iran," has an 85-foot wingspan — larger than that of the Reaper, the largest armed drone flown by the United States Air Force — and can carry a 1-ton payload. Israel recently reached an agreement to sell armed versions of the TP to India.


Israeli soldiers with an IAI Eitan, also known as the Heron TP, a surveillance unmanned air vehicle on display at Tel Nof Air Force Base near Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010.

Photo: Gil Cohen Magen/Reuters/Newscom

Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher on arms transfers with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told The Intercept that the items visible under the wings in the snapshots "appear to have the kind of fins such missiles have," but noted that "there could be other payloads that could be fitted in the same position." Chris Woods, the drone history author, said that they could be sensor pods for intelligence gathering.

It has been widely reported that Israel launches attacks from the smaller Hermes 450s, although the GCHQ documents do not specify whether the Hermes drones recorded at Troodos were armed.

Reports surfaced of Israel launching missiles from drones in Gaza as far back as 2004, and more than a decade later, drones have become a fact of life for residents. Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British army officer who has investigated drone strikes in Gaza for human rights groups, said that "during periods of tension, you can seldom go outside without the buzz of drones overhead." A Gaza City bar owner complained to the Washington Post in 2011 that drone patrols often interfered with his satellite TV signals. In 2014, the London Telegraph reported that 65 percent of Israel's air combat operations were conducted by drones. Yotam Feldman, an Israeli filmmaker who made a documentary about Israel's drone industry for Al Jazeera last year, said that he has been told the figure is even higher.

During Operation Cast Lead, a three-week Israeli offensive that began in December 2008, Human Rights Watch reported dozens of Palestinian civilian deaths from drone strikes. In diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, an Israeli commander told a U.S. State Department official that a "UAV fired two missiles" against militant operatives outside a mosque, and that shrapnel from the strike hit civilians.

Yet the Israeli government still maintains an official stance of secrecy (a tactic akin to the United States' refusal to formally acknowledge its drone program until 2013, despite years of reporting and commentary on it). In sanctioned interviews, Israeli military personnel are careful to describe the drones they fly as being used for surveillance and marking targets for manned warplanes to strike. Aviation and defense bloggers are left speculating about blurred photos and industry rumors about how drones might be equipped with missiles. The Israeli media is subject to a strict censorship regime, and the military does not allow mention of armed Israeli drones, unless quoting foreign sources.

"Releasing full details about which munitions were used and how they were used can raise many other questions about these attacks — about the targets, about what the army calls collateral damage, about the command chain," said Feldman, the Israeli filmmaker. "I think it is really the Israeli military throwing sand in the eyes of outside observers on Israeli strikes."

The Anarchist images don't show any drone strikes in action. It is not always clear from the images precisely where the drones were located, and it is thus impossible to tie the intercepts to specific attacks. A note on January 12, 2009, in the midst of Cast Lead, directs technicians "with the current situation ... to keep a watch and report on where the majority of UAV flights are being conducted." But the snapshots identified by The Intercept date from after Israel withdrew from Gaza in January 2009.

In several cases, the images were taken on the same day or just before reported Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, which continued after the ceasefire. For instance, on August 25, 2009, after months of relative quiet in the border area between Gaza and Egypt, Israel bombed a tunnel on the border, killing three Palestinians and wounding seven. That same day, Anarchist technicians at Troodos captured an Israeli drone signal.

Decoding the Drone

Drones communicate with their controllers on the ground via satellite; the transmission to the home station is known as the "downlink." The antennas at Troodos grabbed that downlink by finding the right frequency for each drone.

Drone feeds are vulnerable to interception not just from the NSA — even cheap, commercially available equipment can be used to get the downlink. In a 2009 article in Wired, a U.S. military official likened such interception to "criminals using radio scanners to pick up police communications."

Indeed, in 2009, U.S. forces in Iraq discovered laptops with video from Predator drones in the hands of insurgents. It couldn't have come as a total surprise — military officials had noted the vulnerability as far back as 1999, and a 2005 CIA report stated that one of Saddam Hussein's technicians had likely "located and downloaded ... unencrypted satellite feed from U.S. military UAVs."

In 1997, Hezbollah killed 12 Israeli commandos in an ambush in Lebanon. It emerged years later that Hezbollah had plotted the ambush after intercepting unencrypted drone video. The revelation caused a scandal, and led the Israeli military and drone industry to invest "significant efforts to encrypt the transmission of UAVs to their ground bases," said Ronen Bergman, an investigative journalist with the paper Yedioth Ahronoth, who is currently writing a book on Israel's intelligence service, Mossad.

"The broadcast was supposed to be completely secure," said Bergman. "If the NSA and GCHQ were able to crack that, it would come as a big surprise, and might well lead to the launch of an inquiry."

Israel appears to have since expanded encryption across its drone fleet, and many of the feeds grabbed by the Troodos analysts were encrypted or scrambled, showing up like the black-and-white snow on a TV screen.

According to GCHQ Anarchist training manuals from 2008, analysts took snapshots of live signals and would process them for "poor quality signals, or for scrambled video."

The manuals stated that video feeds were scrambled using a method similar to that used to protect the signals of subscriber-only TV channels. Analysts decoded the images using open-source code "freely available on the internet" — a program known as AntiSky. The attack reconstructed the image by brute force, allowing intelligence agents to crack the encryption without knowing the algorithm that had been used to scramble the video.

Even when fully decoded, the images are of varying quality, often grainy, and often showing nothing but the sky or sun or the drone's own landing gear nearing the runway.

The aim of the snapshots seemed to be simply to identify which signals belonged with which aircraft, weapon, or radar, and to demonstrate that the intelligence agencies had the capability to grab such snapshots if needed. "The computing power needed to descramble the images in near real time is considerable," the Anarchist manual notes, but "it is still possible to descramble individual frames to determine the image content without too much effort."

The GCHQ documents describe the mission against Israeli drones in broad terms. An "outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas" occasioned the intelligence agency's interest, and so did tension with Tehran. In reporting on flights of an armed Heron TP, a Troodos employee noted that "our ability to collect and track and report this activity is important for the initial detection and tip-off for any potential pre-emptive or retaliatory strike against Iran."

A 2008 Anarchist memo also notes that "interest by the weapons community in Israeli UAV's [sic] remains high," because Israel "provides many countries with their UAV's" and is "developing large UAV's capable of being deployed for a variety of purposes." Another, also from 2008, describes the hunt to confirm whether a specific type of radar "has been mounted on any UAV platforms." A GCHQ presentation listing "successes in 2009" at Troodos includes "UAV development Israel/India."

Israel leads the world in drone exports, and capabilities Israel developed would soon be passed to other countries. Its companies aggressively market the potential attack capabilities of their aircraft. In September, India made arrangements to buy 10 armed Heron TPs. This month, Germany's defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that the country would lease several TPs, citing the aircraft's attack capabilities.

"This will be the standard in the future," von der Leyen said.

By most accounts, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan are the only countries known to have used drones for deadly attacks. But dozens of countries are believed to be developing armed drones, so that club likely won't stay small for long.

Documents published with this article:
•JSSU (Cyp) 6 Month Overview
•MHS FISINT Successfully Collects Israeli F-16 Heads-Up Display
•S455N – Israeli UAV Digital Video
•ISUAV Video Descrambling


ok I don't know why I am getting lines thur the text

more photos and embedded links in the article

[zorgon]

ok I don't know why I am getting lines thur the text

Because one word in your copy/paste  had an s in square brackets  the word was provide{s}   The sq brackets are uses when the person adds a correction not in the original quote

However the sq brackets in a forum generate codes

[space otter]

thank you for the info and the fix
I looked but couldn't figure out the trigger..