Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The Anti-Drone

The potential onslaught of drones has created a market for counter-drone technology.

A student sends this story about such a company:


"We understand the nature of the equipment drone manufacturers are using and understand how to counter their sensors," Faucett says. "We're not going to be countering Predator drones that are shooting cruise missiles, but we're talking about local law enforcement drones and commercial ones that people might be using for spying."

For now, Faucett admits the technology is "expensive," but the company is already ready to design custom anti-drone boxes for customers.


"We envision it could be cheap enough for residential use very soon," he says. "It's quite possible to deploy it if you were shooting a movie and wanted to protect your set, or if you had a house in Malibu and wanted to protect that, we could deploy it there. If a huge company like Google wanted to protect its server farms, it can be scaled up for a larger, fixed installation."


As drones become more commonplace, Faucett says more people will begin searching for a way to protect their privacy.

"The thing that brought it home for me was Senator [Rand] Paul doing the filibuster, there's a lot of unanswered questions," he says. "We think there might be as much business for this counter drone stuff as there is for the drones themselves."