The article mentions criminal use-cases where direct radio frequency isn't necessary (moving small quantities of high-value drugs across borders) and where jamming isn't an option (surveilling police stations for snitches). Crude military methods aren't always an option, although I'm sure we'll come up with smarter counter-measures, potentially at the cost of everyday privacy.

Not to mention eventually someone is going to figure out how to get a drone to understand sign language. The only way I can think to jam a drone's camera from reading sign language is going to be shining a bunch of lasers at anything that looks like a camera (probably using your own counter drones). Or someone is going to figure out how to take videogame AI and jam it into a drone.

Even if we somehow restrict criminals from getting drone AI (which is on it's face reasonable ... most AI experts probably don't want their work falling into the hands of criminals building kill bots), then I doubt we'll be willing to restrict people from owning half-life because it turns out its AI makes a good autonomous FBI obstructing bot.

How would you "trivially" block LED/light sensor communication? It's not insanely hard to create a drone swarm with zero radio.

Two words: Trained Falcons.

I mean this theoretically works until the gangs decide to start putting small bombs in the drones that detonate on impact. I bet they can build drones faster than people can breed and train the birds.

Well yeah then you have a counter swarm of exploding drones. The government can always afford more than the criminals because they can just squeeze their tax cattle a little harder.

It doesn't just theoretically work.

Trained falcons and eagles are being used by police forces already:

https://www.google.dk/search?q=training+birds+to+attack+dron...

I don't know if any counter-measures are getting popular yet, but it's probably cheaper to poison or shoot them than explode them.

A brighter light to overwhelm the carrier signal

"Lasers." (although, line of sight, point-to-point communication is admittedly less trivial to interfere with)

The point being that, if "criminal gangs" are up to no good, but they're parting their equipment with off-the-shelf Best Buy and Radio Shack products, they probably aren't programming DSP interfaces, aren't encoding and decoding raw bit streams, aren't masking binary objects with base64 blobs, aren't rolling their own encryption.

Or, if they are rolling their own encryption, they're using Excel spreadsheets to do it. [0]

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_s...

Block line of sight, use a smoke grenade.

To be honest, I really don't think laser/LED chanels are being used.

I've never seen a remote control quad copter sold off the shelve with IR LED TV remote style I/O for it's tranceiver control system.

There's a pretty bright light on between sunrise and sunset, doesn't affect free air optical transmission at all unless the sun happens to align with the sender or the receiver.

The biggest limitations are water vapor in the air, precipitation and dust. Also, the distance is rather limited compared to radio.

This doesn't work if the receiver on the drone is directed backwards and you usually are in front of the drone as its target.

Does this work?

I had the impression, you can't out-light shadows for example.

These are early days - I expect an arms race of measures / countermeasures (many of them spilling over from the military ) to develop.

You could do waypoint so the drone isn't being controlled by the controller.