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Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV a.k.a. drone) is a remotely controlled aircraft. It is capable of capturing images and video sequences of a targeted region and transferring them to a remote server for storage and further processing. The server can be co-located with the Ground Control Station (GCS) or it can be housed in a secured cloud environment. A drone is usually controlled by a handheld device such as a radio controller, a mobile phone or a tablet (Singh, 2015).
The past few years have witnessed a steady proliferation of drones across a wide spectrum of applications including recreational, commercial, educational, law enforcement, and national security uses. Business Insider (BI) Intelligence expects sales of drones to surpass $12 billion in the U.S. by 2021 (Camhi, 2016). Today, drone technology is no longer confined to high-end military and meteorological uses. In fact, small UAV toys, which are capable of capturing live videos and images, can be purchased today for few hundred dollars from various toy retailers (Hyde, 2014). In the consumer market, major players like 3D Robotics, Parrot and DJI are constantly expanding the usefulness of their UAV product lines with new features, better performance and energy efficiency, as well as smaller size, reduced weight and enhanced usability.
Recent advances in embedded systems, nanotechnologies, sensor technologies, image processing and navigation systems have given rise to a new breed of affordable UAVs with powerful information collection, storage and processing capabilities. The UAV hobby community is also booming and various online blogs and forums have been established to support customized usage of drones.
The Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) features of UAVs have enabled a myriad of new applications and uses of these devices that go beyond the recreational uses (Ravich, 2015). In fact, when equipped with sophisticated algorithms for information acquisition and processing, UAVs can retrieve a rich set of information footages including high resolution images and videos, thermal images, and accurate 3D topographical maps, among many others. Accordingly, UAVs have been used in various tasks such as film making, ecosystem monitoring, precision irrigation, parcel delivery, border patrolling, crowd monitoring in major events and identification of hazardous material. Added to this, they have been implemented in search-and-rescue operations, damage assessment and cetera (Singh, 2015).
Unfortunately, UAVs can as well be used to launch illegal actions, including voyeurism, invasion of the privacy of citizens and sensitive places, smuggling of contraband items, spying on individuals or other nation states. This usage may include also espionage on companies and government entities, and the unauthorized launching of aerial missile attacks. In the recent past, drones have also been caught in unintended violation of no-fly zones. Today, there is a growing fear that they might be used by terrorists to perpetrate panic or cause other damages (Elands et.al, 2016).
The past few months have witnessed an increasing number of reported “illegal” usages of drones, including commercial usages that violate FAA regulations, unlawful surveillance and drug smuggling, among many others. Thiobane (2015) argued that drones are targeted by criminals for their payload value, and their capabilities to launch data breach and cyber-attacks. For instance, on October 2015, a Tulsa man was accused of using a drone to smuggle contraband items to an Oklahoma State Penitentiary inmate with Tulsa gang ties (Pickard, 2016). On July 2015, the Pakistan army claimed that digital forensic tests on a Quadcopter it downed along the line of control (LoC) revealed that the device originated from India. TV media have also reported drones’ violation of restricted airspace around nuclear submarine site and air navigation orders at major sporting events, and the catching of abandoned UAVs at the White House lawn (Kovar, 2015). Many other drone-related incidents have been reported in the press, including the usage of drones to smuggle drugs over the US/Mexico border, and the flying of drones over restricted and controlled airspaces such as the airports. The potential criminal usage of drones will be further amplified as these devices continue to evolve with a new breed of embedded devices and capabilities.