Government Playing a Dangerous Game With Drone Cybersecurity Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter Or get immediate notifications of new posts via Substack Free Future home Earlier this month I wrote about how police have been seizing hundreds of drones around the country for alleged violations of no-fly rules. The counter-drone business is hopping today, with law enforcement around the country highly focused on gaining the ability to deal with drones flying places they’re not supposed to be, as well as the so-far-nonexistent but probably eventually inevitable prospect of a violent attack via drone. Often called counter-UAS (for “uncrewed aerial system,” a bureaucratic term for drone), the field is dedicated to the difficult problem of how to ground, capture, destroy, or otherwise “mitigate” a rogue drone. Within the counter-UAS field lurks a significant public policy issue that has not been discussed enough: the hacking of drones. It’s not easy to defend against drones. Techniques for mitigating them include shooting at them with projectiles, lasers, or microwaves, jamming GPS or other radio signals, and sending up defensive drones with big nets. US law enforcement officers don’t operate on a battlefield, however (despite how many of them dress and sometimes behave). In a civilian environment, massive interference with the radio spectrum, shooting dangerous lasers into our crowded skies, and aerial shoot-outs that send wreckage crashing down on civilians’ heads just won’t do. There is another counter-drone technique that supposedly avoids all these problems: hacking into a drone to take it over and steer it safely away. But that raises one of the longest-running issues in cybersecurity: the creation or hoarding of software vulnerabilities that can be used by the authorities to break into software, but which also leave the door open for malevolent hackers to do so as well. Those vulnerabilities can