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Quadcopter drone group held in London airport on suspicion of terrorism

34 points| th0ma5 | 13 years ago |siliconrepublic.com | reply

21 comments

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[+] cpswan|13 years ago|reply
Here's what happens next:

1. Drones become more and more popular as kids/hackers toys

2. Eventually a drone is used in a real terrorist plot

3. Our politicians over react and ban drones

4. We all write tweets and blogs about what clueless morons our politicians are because the whole thing has been widely understood since (before?) Scott Adams wrote 'The Religion War'

5. Drones don't get unbanned for use outside of police/law enforcement because of whining from the hacker community

[+] gouranga|13 years ago|reply
All while our unwanted persistent state of war rages and our supposedly but not appointed military counterparts fly armed drones to kill and name people under our name.

Fuck this planet sucks. actually no, humans suck as a race.

[+] MaysonL|13 years ago|reply
since (before?) Scott Adams wrote 'The Religion War'

David's Sling by Marc Stiegler(1988) comes to mind as a precursor.

[+] MrEnigma|13 years ago|reply
It looks like they were only held for a couple of hours and released. Not that I think this is right, but they are flying with lots of wires/electronics/batteries.
[+] cpswan|13 years ago|reply
It's crazy how the whole movie plot driven security industry has been able to associate naked electronics with bomb making. A friend was commenting last night that the bare PCB of the Raspberry Pi could be seen as dangerous/threatening, and I was speculating about how much trouble I'd get in if I tried to take Arduino based home made toys on a flight.
[+] planetguy|13 years ago|reply
Honestly, there are people at the border whose entire job is to look for suspicious items. (It's not like the threat of a bomb attack in London is a purely hypothetical one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_... ). If you're gonna carry a suitcase full of weird-looking homemade electronics across the border, then yeah, you're probably gonna wind up answering some questions about 'em. In the end, they were correctly determined to be no threat and free to go with their drones.
[+] RedwoodCity|13 years ago|reply
Glad to see that european airport secuirty is just as incompetent as american TSA officers.

In the future have your robots sent by post in advance of your arrival and terrorism officials will be none the wiser.

[+] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
They were questioned by customs because they had a lot of weird stuff in their luggage, and then were allowed through after two hours. Why is this news?
[+] cpswan|13 years ago|reply
Customs don't normally call the special branch, and whilst being detained for hours is now normal practice in the US it's still (thankfully) pretty unusual in the UK.