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Paper: Drones For Fun And Profit: Assessing impact on your IT

September 2013

Inside:
Expect impact on your infrastructure Track changes in technology Stand by for policy debates

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Domestic Drones: Expect Impacts on your IT Infrastructure
Domestic drone use has been in the spotlight lately as pundits, journalists, and politicians debate and discuss the possibility of launching strikes against Americans at home. Much more likely, however, is the productive use of drones without weapons or even surveillance equipment. Although the military and law enforcement are the only authorized users of drones (with businesses barred from using unmanned aerial vehicles domestically), the Federal Aviation Administration hopes to begin issuing private drone licenses by 2015. Though there are still many technical, legal, privacy, and Figure 1 Aeryon Scout in Flight safety issues that need to be resolved before private drones become commonplace, UAVs have the potential to generate more fun and profit than threat for individuals and industry.

Domestic Drone Use Cases

Drones have begun to be featured prominently in cinema, but they can play an even more crucial role in creating it. This is why the Motion Picture Association of America is currently one of the organizations pushing hardest for domestic drone for shooting aerial scenes. Using unmanned aerial vehicles is safer, cheaper, and can be more effective at close range than traditional methods such as cranes or helicopters. Not only could drones film other aircraft with less risk of collision, but they can also follow rapidly moving action on the ground, and have been used in both applications abroad.

Another promising use for private drones is in agriculture. Large agricultural companies such as Monsanto are now championing the use of unmanned systems, whether aerial or on the ground, to collect data on vast fields of crops, thereby reducing personnel costs. Drones can reduce the cost of managing large plots of land in other ways as well by taking over functions such as crop dusting.
Figure 2 An InView UAV for Commercial Use

 Drones are also being explored as a tool for journalism. While professional journalists are currently barred from using unmanned aerial vehicles for their stories, the University of Missouri and University of Nebraska both offer courses on drone reporting in anticipation of changing laws and practices. Drones can fulfill similar functions in journalism as they do in filmography, providing pictures or video of hard to reach or dangerous sites. They can also take measurements and gather data safely, cheaply, and effectively.

Drones For Fun and Profit

Figure 3 Parrot AR Drone has great cameras and can be Not all potential uses of private, domestic drones are controlled by your phone pragmatic, however. Sometimes, drones are simply fun. As robots and unmanned aerial systems grow cheaper, they are finding expanded recreational use. Most drones are, after all, advanced versions of the radio controlled airplanes, helicopters, and cars. This trend has extended into low cost personal quadcopters with novel applications such as the Joggobot, which tracks and follows runners using a symbol on their shirts. Like most personal drones, however, the Joggobot still has a ways to go and is plagued by battery life and airspeed issues. Still, diminishing complexity through simpler controls, autopilot assistance, and greater technical resilience in case of inevitable crashes or botched landings, along with dropping prices as unmanned systems become commodity technology, make recreational drones increasingly feasible toys and gadgets.

Domestic Drone Policy Issues

Technical issues aside, however, private drones still face sizable policy and legal hurdles in the United States. There are a number of safety and privacy issues that need to be resolved before individuals and corporations can operate their own drones or reporters can use UAVs to break a story. From a purely practical perspective, though drones are unmanned they are still vehicles that may require skilled pilots and can do significant damage in a crash, necessitating licensing and safety regulations. Drones with recording Figure 4 Viral videos of Penn State Quadrotors invoke fear of equipment also bring about warranted surveillance coming UAV swarms concerns as they expand private citizens means of spying and challenge reasonable expectations of privacy that determine legal and acceptable behavior. If, for example, it is acceptable to see 3

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over a fence, is it also fair to take pictures of your neighbors backyard from the sky? Such questions need to be resolved before personal drones can be widely accepted.

Laws governing private drones, which forbid businesses and journalists from operating UAVs and contain many gray areas for citizens, are now rapidly evolving. The FAA intends to clarify regulations concerning private drones by the end of the year and begin issuing drone licenses by 2015, though the specifics of that process are not yet available. Still, Figure 5 UAVs Crash. This was a large UAV (Preditor) operated these proposed changes carry tremendous potential. by the US Border Patrol The FAA expects that as many as 30,000 drones may be flying domestically by the end of the decade and that the domestic drone market could be worth $90 billion.

This rapid growth will undoubtedly scare drone skeptics who associate unmanned aerial vehicles with the War on Terrorism, targeted killing, and surveillance. Profitable, productive, and lighthearted uses for private, domestic drones outnumber their military and law enforcement applications, however, especially if we can learn to separate the policy from the platform. As the utility of private remotely piloted systems outweighs diminishing legal and ethical concerns, the only question that remains is how can we use drones most safely, effectively, and enjoyably?

Domestic Drones and the IT Department

IT professionals in enterprises throughout the country should make an important assumption. Assume you are the team that will be responsible for moving data from your organizations drones to the users of that data. Furthermore, assume that you will be the ones called on to store that data, index it, search across it and provide advanced analytical tools to make sense over it. Additionally, there is a very high likelihood that the IT department will be the team called to repair the drone when something goes wrong. IT professionals will also be called on to establish security protocols and procedures for 4
Figure 6 When you hear the word "Ground Station" think "IT" The IT department will need to understand these to fix them

Drones For Fun and Profit

drone data, including ways to ensure the drones are programmed correctly and controlled in secure paths, but also ensuring that the information the drones collect is moved to the users in an encrypted way.

What Should IT Professionals Do About The Coming Wave of Domestic Drones?

Perhaps the most important thing that IT professionals should do regarding domestic drones is to inject yourself into the planning process for your mission area. You will know better than most the questions that need to be asked at an early stage in a new architecture. Your insights into the lifecycle management of secure information will be important inputs that can inform the actions any planner is considering in this space.

Questions IT professionals should ask regarding Drones

Will the communications to and from the drone be encrypted? How? Who will manage the keys? How will we ensure that only authorized users fly and can control the drone? Will data be pre-processed on the drone? Will it be compressed before transmission? What protocols will the data transfer us? Are they optimized for high data rates? Where will the data from the drone be stored? How long will it be stored? What is its value to our mission? How will we prepare the data for further analysis? Will we use automated information extraction tools against the data? What support contracts will we have in place to maintain the IT onboard the drone and in the ground station?

More Reading
For more federal technology and policy issues visit: CTOvision.com- A blog for enterprise technologists with a special focus on Big Data. CTOlabs.com - A reference for research and reporting on all IT issues. FedCyber.com Focused on federal cyber security J.mp/ctonews - Sign up for technology newsletters including the Security Technology Weekly.

About the Authors

Bob Gourley has been active in the cyber defense community since 1998, specializing in intelligence support to cyber operations. He is CTO and founder of Crucial Point LLC and editor and chief of CTOvision.com He is a former federal CTO. His career included service in operational intelligence centers around the globe where his focus was operational all source intelligence analysis. He was the first director of intelligence at DoDs Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense, served as director of technology for a division of Northrop Grumman and spent three years as the CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Bob serves on numerous government and industry advisory boards. Contact Bob at bob@crucialpointllc.com

Alex Olesker is is a technology research analyst focused on disruptive technologies of use to the nations most significant missions. Alex is a graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a degree in Science, Technology and International Affairs. He researches and writes on developments in technology and government best practices for CTOvision.com and CTOlabs.com

For More Information

If you have questions or would like to discuss this report, please contact me. As an advocate for better IT use in enterprises I am committed to keeping this dialogue up open on technologies, processes and best practices that will keep us all continually improving our capabilities and ability to support organizational missions.

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