For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results. The only thing a drone can better do is look down at your roof, or over your fence if your fence is higher than nearby buildings.

For assassination, traditional tools are clearly more practical in nearly every case. A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.

I don't really know how arsonists generally do their thing, but I can't imagine that dropping something flammable is more practical than just driving by and throwing it.

I'm sure there are very specific cases where sophisticated drone usage could be useful for committing these crimes, but I don't think it's a major concern, and not even one of the biggest concerns of drones.

And the idea that shooting a gun brings down some hailstorm of official response is myth. Fire a gun in most places and ... nothing will happen. Folks will rush to the scene of any murder, but will only find the sniper's location after hours or days of investigation. It won't be like the NCIS show where the investigator glances around and says 'must have come from that rooftop; its the only secure sniper post in a half-mile!' You can shoot from nearly anywhere with line-of-sight, from the partly-open door of a parked delivery van, without much risk of discovery.

If you had a drone with a weapon, I would think you'd want to fire on someone using some variation of Tracking Point style hardware [1], except partially self aimed. Basically see the target, paint the target, drone uses internal sensors to detect a brief instant of random stability and fires the weapon

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gun-linux-on-the-rang...

Again, doing a crime and getting away with a crime are two enormously different things. The truth is that the majority of humanity can commit terrible crimes with utter ease. There is absolutely no question about that.

Most of us don't, however, because of morality and our nature. The rest don't because they don't want to spend the rest of their life in jail, and for major crimes the probability of getting caught is enormously high. Things that reduce that probability (and a device that means you don't have to be on or even near the site, and can extract 100% of evidence with a very high degree of success, does that) open up opportunities for people to do such crimes.

As a parallel, someone mentioned bitcoins, and bitcoins absolutely opened up the world of casual extortion, because suddenly you don't have to go to a mailbox or meet in a park.

I'm not a detective, but I suspect having the large, complex piece of electronic equipment that was used as the weapon would be a godsend compared to the evidence available in a normal murder or assassination investigation.

I'm not sure I agree with this at all. Drones allow you to access viewpoints that are otherwise impossible using telescopes at a fraction of the overall cost.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLB66lge6oA&list=UUZfBMqj1pN...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98

Perhaps, but you've still got to pay the guy holding the rifle. A drone could self-terminate. Most parts can be 3D-printed & assembled in a clean tent, untraceable. The most expensive part is possibly the infrared camera ($1~2k).

Well, say I set up a drone for remote control over the internet, then rent it out to people that are located half around the globe. I act as a cut out, and whomever is spying will (may[1]) be hard to track.

[1] If I'm getting paid, there's the issue of anonymous transactions, and as for control, latency might be too high to use Tor -- but the main point is that drones already facilitate something new, if not revolutionary new.

For example, instructing a drone to assassinate is potentially closer to hiring a hitman, than murdering someone firsthand with a shotgun. Closer in the sense that the puportrator feels a sense of detachment.

A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.

Aside from the difficulty of a few hundred meter shot in urban settings, shooting a weapon from a location announces where you are, exactly when you are there. Aside from the immediate and overwhelming response likely, the human traces would be enormous and unavailable. A drone, in contrast, comes from some unknown place off in some unknown direction, can with ease get anywhere near the target (on a nearby roof for instance), and then when the task is complete it can go low and fast and get back to a drop-off. For arson and peeping, the same premise holds -- a drone can go to exactly where is needed, do what is necessary, and get away with, currently, essentially zero risk of capture.

Will we eventually have drone registrations and tracking systems, comprehensive urban radio tracking and announcement, police overrides, etc? Yeah, probably, which was what I was getting at -- events will inevitably happen, and regulations will adjust.

Could a professional band of assassins pull off an assassination with a drone? Certainly. Would it be far easier to just use a rifle? I'd say absolutely.

I could imagine license tags being one outcome of this process: If a drone goes spying outside your window or damages your property, you now have a fairly simple recourse of reporting that tag number. The existence of this recourse would also go a long way toward making civil drone use less scary and more socially acceptable.

There may need to be something more than that; a "drone lobby" perhaps?

The Silicon Valley chapter of the AUVSI is more progressive with regard to small business drone advocacy, but it's hard to tell if that is having an impact nationally.

The ability to anonymously open fire on virtually any target one chooses is a scary reality, but it's almost here. With no risk of prosecution, murders will happen that never would have happened before. Be nice to your neighbors :) .

Your rights probably are limited to calling the police, like pretty much any other non-immediate danger legal situation that involve applying the use of force.

Is it "use of force" when targeting a piece of equipment? If you park your car in my driveway, I can move it.

I may have liability, but I think I can destroy it if it is "invading" my property.

Do I not have some "height rights" at home?

Lots of "ransomware" malware out there is already using this tactic, and law enforcement have no money to follow.

Then, while you still won't be able to stop assassinations and such, just like you can't stop them now anyway, you can at least know who did it, and punish them afterwards.

That's what came up with after thinking about it for a bit. There's probably a better solution out there.

I don't want my drone to be seen at the moment of crime anyway.

Don't like drone in front of you? Accidentally throw a piece of string on it.

Even if you get criminals to comply as far as only operating drones with proper IDs, so that you can trace the legal purchase history of a drone, that doesn't mean you know who used the drone. Drones and their supporting control equipment can be stolen (and the owners prevented by force from reporting the theft) and people willing to commit assassination by drone certainly wouldn't be unwilling to commit theft, kidnapping, and/or murder of drone owners to acheive that.

Probably we're just going to have to get used to drones being around. Like we got used to cities and crowds on public streets and horseless carriages. This paranoia about drones will be seen by future historians as quaint.

Here's a movie plot attack: A week/month/etc beforehand, plant 4-8 drones a half-mile downrange of the airport a VIP is scheduled to fly out of. When their plane takes off, trigger the drones to fly into the the plane's turbines. A fully-loaded plane with no working engines would quickly stall and turn into a fireball on the ground. You might not even need explosive payloads for this to work.

A passenger plane taking off is going to have a hard time seeing (let alone avoiding) such small, maneuverable craft.

Of course, this is a movie plot threat. Really, nobody is going to spend the time and resources to program drones like that.

Also you'd go the opposite way (toward the plane) so the speed dont matter much...

Now, good luck to aim for the turbine - for all turbines, at once.

And then the plane just lands. They can fly with an engine out.

Also, it would be hard to pilot multiple RC planes or helicopters simultaneously. Any attack that requires people cooperating is much less likely.

I wish you were right.