Jeremy Bogaisky
On the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s online shopping platform, with a couple of clicks, Americans and Europeans can order one of the latest deadly innovations from the battlefields of Ukraine: fiber-optic control equipment that makes drones impervious to electronic jamming or remote takeover.
That’s a worrying development for domestic law enforcement agencies, which rely on those methods to deal with rogue drones that fly near airports or stadiums.
For under $300, an armchair shopper on Aliexpress can buy all the gear needed for a pilot to control a drone using a spiderweb-thin fiber-optic wire rather than radio signals. The main element: a cylinder that will pay out as much as 18 miles of cable as the drone flies. Suitable fiber-optic cabling can also be bought in bulk on Amazon, without the necessary spool to load it on a drone.
“If you want to start your own air force, you can order everything you need off of Amazon and Alibaba,” said Troy Smothers, cofounder of a U.S. volunteer group called Drone Reaper that’s developed an affordable fiber-optic control system for Ukrainian drones. “It's right there — we did it.”
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