Drone Dogfight Illuminates Potential Threats

As the cost of electronics has continued to drop, consumers have gained greater access to technology that would otherwise have remained exclusively in the hands of government or research institutions. Earlier this month, one man and his friends explored what people with a limited budget could do with drones and computers during a drone dogfight competition, which they called the Lawfare Drone Smackdown.

The event was created by Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution and co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, who wrote that “it is only a matter of time before we have security issues associated with the individual use and development of this sort of technology.”

In a video, viewers can watch Wittes and his friends fight their Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 drones against each other. In a Brookings blog post, Wittes wrote that he won the competition with the help of his two children, who were able to ground his opponents’ drones by hacking into them.