Couple years ago we showed you the sniper’s nests that police set up at each year’s Super Bowl.
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Well, the game has changed a bit. At this Sunday’s contest at Allegiant Stadium, sniper’s nests will undoubtedly be set up, but there’s an additional potential threat that is also being accounted for. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has designated Las Vegas a “No Drone Zone” on game day, due to recent events. Last November, an unauthorized drone flew over the Ravens vs. Bengals game in Baltimore, triggering the NFL’s new safety protocol of pausing the game.
“That’s a first,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said of the event. But it wasn’t, nor was it the last; later the Baltimore Sun reported that no less than eight drones had flown over Ravens games that month, including five at the Bengals game.
“Outdoor mass gatherings, like open-air sports stadiums, are particularly vulnerable to drone attacks,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann told the Senate in 2022.
In addition to local law enforcement, the FBI is also involved with anti-drone countermeasures at the Super Bowl. At first I imagined we’d see some personnel carrying these, or something similar:
That’s the DroneGun Tactical, made by Australian/U.S. company DroneShield and reportedly used by the French military. Devices like this offer “non-kinetic disruption” of unauthorized drones. They jam the signal and can trigger the drone to drop straight down in a controlled landing (so that the drone can be collected for forensic examination), or to automatically “return to its remote controller or starting point.”
However, both of those scenarios present problems. If a terrorist had armed a drone with explosives and succeeded in getting it over people, you don’t want the thing dropping straight down. And if they launched it from a crowded area—say, a nearby hotel room window, or the parking lot of a Starbucks—you don’t want it going back to its source.
A better option might be to take control of the drone and fly it to a designated safe area, like an empty parking lot. But if that kind of takeover technology exists, unsurprisingly the FBI isn’t boasting about it.
If whatever anti-drone technology they’ll be using at the game is publicly visible, my guess is we’ll see social media posts about it on Sunday.
Source: core77