What's cellular about a cellphone?

Daniel Bliss, Arizona State University

Editor’s note: Daniel Bliss is a professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University and the director of the Center for Wireless Information Systems and Computational Architecture. In this interview, he explains the ideas behind the original cellular networks and how they evolved over the years into today’s 5G (fifth generation) and even 6G (sixth generation) networks.

Daniel Bliss provides a brief history of cellular networks.

How did wireless phones work before cellular technology?

The idea of wireless communications is quite old. Famously, the Marconi system could talk all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It would have one system, which was the size of a building, talking to another system, which was the size of a building. But in essence, it just made a radio link between the two. Eventually people realized that’s a really useful capability. So they put up a radio system, say at a high point in the city, and then everybody – well, those few who had the right kind of radio system – talked to that high point. So if you like, there was only one cell – it wasn’t cellular in any sense. But because the amount of data you can send over time is a function of how far away you are, you want to get these things closer together. And so that’s the the invention of the cellular system.

The CenturyLink building in Minneapolis has a microwave antenna on the top which was used in early wireless phone networks. Mulad via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

How are cellular systems different?

The farther your phone and the base station are from each other, the harder it is to send a signal across. If you just have one base station and you’re too far away from it, it just doesn’t work. So you want to have many base stations and talk to the one that’s closest to you.

If you draw a boundary between those base stations and look down on it on a map, you see these different little cell towers which your phone is supposed to talk to. That’s where the technology gets its name. The amazing thing that happened during the development of cellular systems is that it automatically switched which base station the phone talks to as its location changed, such as while driving. It’s really remarkable that this system works as well as it does, because it’s pretty complicated and you don’t even notice.

Cellular technology gets its name from the diagrams of the networks which are divided into cells. This diagram shows cellular phone towers at corners of each haxagon cell. Greensburger via Wikimedia Commons

What are the major improvements to cellular networks that have enabled faster data rates?

If you go back to the first-generation cellular systems, those were primarily analog systems. It was just a way of converting your voice to an analog signal.

The second-generation systems focused on taking your voice, digitizing it and then sending it as a data link to improve stability and security. As an accident, it could also send data across. People found that it’s really useful to send a photo or send some other information as well. So they started using the same link to send data, but then complained that it’s not fast enough.

Subsequent generations of cellular networks allocated increasingly wider bandwidths using different techniques and were powered by a denser network of base stations. We tend to notice the big tall towers. But if you start looking around, particularly in a city, you’ll notice these boxes sitting on the sides of buildings all over the place. They are actually cellular base stations that are much lower down. They’re intended to reach people within just a kilometer or a half-kilometer.

The easiest way to achieve much higher data rates is for your phone to be close to a signal source. The other way is to have antenna systems that are pointing radio waves at your phone, which is one of the things that’s happening in 5G.

5G networks are still being rolled out around the country, but work on 6G technologies is already underway. What can we expect from that?

We don’t really know which technologies that are being developed right now will be used in 6G networks, but I can talk about what I think what’s going to happen.

6G networks will allow a much broader set of user types. What do I mean by that? Cellular systems, from the very start, were designed for humans to communicate. So it had certain constraints on what you needed. But now, humans are now a minority of users, because we have so many machines talking to each other too, such as smart appliances, for example. These machines have varying needs. Some want to send lots of data, and some need to send almost no data and maybe send nothing for months at a time. So 6G technologies need to work well for humans as well as a broad range of devices.

Another piece of this is that we often think about communication systems as being the only users of the radio frequency spectrum, but it’s very much not true. Radars use spectrum too, and pretty soon you won’t be able to buy a car that doesn’t have a suite of radars on it for safety or autonomous driving. There’s also position navigation and timing, which are necessary for, say, cars to know the distance between each other. So with 6G, you’ll have these multi-function systems.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

And then there is a push to go to yet higher frequencies. These frequencies work for only very, very short links. But a lot of our problems are over very short links. You can potentially send really huge amounts of data over short distances. If we can get the prices down, then it can potentially replace your Wi-Fi.

We can also expect a refinement of the technologies currently used in 5G – such as improving the pointing of the antenna to your phone, as I mentioned earlier.

Daniel Bliss, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nuclear threats are increasing – here's how the US should prepare for a nuclear event

A visitor to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum views a photo of the aftermath of the 1945 bombing. Carl Court/Getty Images

Cham Dallas, University of Georgia

On the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some may like to think the threat from nuclear weapons has receded. But there are clear signs of a growing nuclear arms race and that the U.S. is not very well-prepared for nuclear and radiological events.

I’ve been studying the effects of nuclear events – from detonations to accidents – for over 30 years. This has included my direct involvement in research, teaching and humanitarian efforts in multiple expeditions to Chernobyl- and Fukushima-contaminated areas. Now I am involved in the proposal for the formation of a Nuclear Global Health Workforce, which I proposed in 2017.

Such a group could bring together nuclear and nonnuclear technical and health professionals for education and training, and help to meet the preparedness, coordination, collaboration and staffing requirements necessary to respond to a large-scale nuclear crisis.

What would this workforce need to be prepared to manage? For that we can look back at the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall after the blast. Maarten Heerlien/Flickr, CC BY-SA

What happens when a nuclear device is detonated over a city?

Approximately 135,000 and 64,000 people died, respectively, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The great majority of deaths happened in the first days after the bombings, mainly from thermal burns, severe physical injuries and radiation.

The great majority of doctors and nurses in Hiroshima were killed and injured, and therefore unable to assist in the response. This was largely due to the concentration of medical personnel and facilities in inner urban areas. This exact concentration exists today in the majority of American cities, and is a chilling reminder of the difficulty in medically responding to nuclear events.

What if a nuclear device were detonated in an urban area today? I explored this issue in a 2007 study modeling a nuclear weapon attack on four American cities. As in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the majority of deaths would happen soon after the detonation, and the local health care response capability would be largely eradicated.

Models show that such an event in an urban area in particular will not only destroy the existing public health protections but will, most likely, make it extremely difficult to respond, recover and rehabilitate them.

Very few medical personnel today have the skills or knowledge to treat the kind and the quantity of injuries a nuclear blast can cause. Health care workers would have little to no familiarity with the treatment of radiation victims. Thermal burns would require enormous resources to treat even a single patient, and a large number of patients with these injuries will overwhelm any existing medical system. There would also be a massive number of laceration injuries from the breakage of virtually all glass in a wide area.

Officials in protective gear check for signs of radiation on children who are from the evacuation area near the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant in Koriyama in this March 13, 2011 photo. Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon/Files

Getting people out of the blast and radiation contamination zones

A major nuclear event would create widespread panic, as large populations would fear the spread of radioactive materials, so evacuation or sheltering in place must be considered.

For instance, within a few weeks after the Chernobyl accident, more than 116,000 people were evacuated from the most contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus. Another 220,000 people were relocated in subsequent years.

The day after the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, over 200,000 people were evacuated from areas within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the nuclear plant because of the fear of the potential for radiation exposure.

The evacuation process in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Japan was plagued by misinformation, inadequate and confusing orders and delays in releasing information. There was also trouble evacuating everyone from the affected areas. Elderly and infirm residents were left in areas near radioactive contamination, and many others moved unnecessarily from uncontaminated areas (resulting in many deaths from winter conditions). All of these troubles lead to a loss of public trust in the government.

However, an encouraging fact about nuclear fallout (and not generally known) is that the actual area that will receive dangerous levels of radioactive fallout is actually only a fraction of the total area in a circle around the detonation zone. For instance, in a hypothetical low-yield (10 kiloton) nuclear bomb over Washington, D.C., only limited evacuations are planned. Despite projections of 100,000 fatalities and about 150,000 casualties, the casualty-producing radiation plume would actually be expected to be confined to a relatively small area. (Using a clock-face analogy, the danger area would typically take up only a two-hour slot on the circle around the detonation, dictated by wind: for example, 2-4 o'clock.)

People upwind would not need to take any action, and most of those downwind, in areas receiving relatively small radiation levels (from the point of view of being sufficient to cause radiation-related health issues), would need to seek only “moderate shelter.” That means basically staying indoors for a day or so or until emergency authorities give further instructions.

The long-term effects of radiation exposure

The Radiation Effects Research Foundation, which was established to study the effects of radiation on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been tracking the health effects of radiation for decades.

According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, about 1,900 excess cancer deaths can be attributed to the atomic bombs, with about 200 cases of leukemia and 1,700 solid cancers. Japan has constructed very detailed cancer screenings after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.

But the data on many potential health effects from radiation exposure, such as birth defects, are actually quite different from the prevailing public perception, which has been derived not from validated science education but from entertainment outlets (I teach a university course on the impact of media and popular culture on disaster knowledge).

While it has been shown that intense medical X-ray exposure has accidentally produced birth defects in humans, there is doubt about whether there were birth defects in the descendants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors. Most respected long-term investigations have concluded there are no statistically significant increases in birth defects resulting in atomic bomb survivors.

Looking at data from Chernobyl, where the release of airborne radiation was 100 times as much as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, there is a lack of definitive data for radiation-induced birth defects.

A wide-ranging WHO study concluded that there were no differences in rates of mental retardation and emotional problems in Chernobyl radiation-exposed children compared to children in control groups. A Harvard review on Chernobyl concluded that there was no substantive proof regarding radiation-induced effects on embryos or fetuses from the accident. Another study looked at the congenital abnormality registers for 16 European regions that received fallout from Chernobyl and concluded that the widespread fear in the population about the possible effects of radiation exposure on the unborn fetus was not justified.

Indeed, the most definitive Chernobyl health impact in terms of numbers was the dramatic increase of elective abortions near and at significant distances from the accident site.

In addition to rapid response and evacuation plans, a Nuclear Global Health Workforce could help health care practitioners, policymakers, administrators and others understand myths and realities of radiation. In the critical time just after a nuclear crisis, this would help officials make evidence-based policy decisions and help people understand the actual risks they face.

What’s the risk of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Today, the risk of a nuclear exchange – and its devastating impact on medicine and public health worldwide – has only escalated compared to previous decades. Nine countries are known to have nuclear weapons, and international relations are increasingly volatile. The U.S. and Russia are heavily investing in the modernization of their nuclear stockpiles, and China, India and Pakistan are rapidly expanding the size and sophistication of their nuclear weapon capabilities. The developing technological sophistication among terrorist groups and the growing global availability and distribution of radioactive materials are also especially worrying.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

In recent years, a number of government and private organizations have held meetings (all of which I attended) to devise large-scale medical responses to a nuclear weapon detonation in the U.S. and worldwide. They include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Alliance for Radiation Readiness, National Disaster Life Support Foundation, Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, and the Radiation Injury Treatment Network, which includes 74 hospitals nationwide actively preparing to receive radiation-exposed patients.

Despite the gloomy prospects of health outcomes of any large-scale nuclear event common in the minds of many, there are a number of concrete steps the U.S. and other countries can take to prepare. It’s our obligation to respond.

This article is an update to an article originally published in 2015 that includes links to more recent research and updated information on the threat of nuclear incidents.

Cham Dallas, University Professor Department of Health Policy & Management, University of Georgia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The US has lots to lose and little to gain by banning TikTok and WeChat

Banning TikTok and WeChat would cut off many Americans from popular social media. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Jeremy Straub, North Dakota State University

The Trump administration’s recently announced bans on Chinese-owned social media platforms TikTok and WeChat could have unintended consequences. The orders bar the apps from doing business in the U.S. or with U.S. persons or businesses after Sept. 20 and require divestiture of TikTok by Nov. 12.

The executive orders are based on national security grounds, though the threats cited are to citizens rather than the government. Foreign policy analysts see the move as part of the administration’s ongoing wrestling match with the Chinese government for leverage in the global economy.

Whatever the motivation, as someone who researches both cybersecurity and technology policy, I am not convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs. The bans threaten Americans’ freedom of speech, and may harm foreign investment in the U.S. and American companies’ ability to sell software abroad, while delivering minimal privacy and cybersecurity benefits.

National security threat?

The threats posed by TikTok and WeChat, according to the executive orders, include the potential for the platforms to be used for disinformation campaigns by the Chinese government and to give the Chinese government access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.

TikTok is an immensely popular social media platform that allows people to share short video clips. Aaron Yoo/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The U.S. is not the only country concerned about Chinese apps. The Australian military accused WeChat, a messaging, social media and mobile payment app, of acting as spyware, saying the app was caught sending data to Chinese Intelligence servers.

Disinformation campaigns may be of particular concern, due to the upcoming election and the impact of the alleged “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The potential for espionage is less pronounced, given that the apps access basic contact information and details about the videos Americans watch and the topics they search on, and not more sensitive data.

But banning the apps and requiring Chinese divestiture also has a national security downside. It damages the U.S.‘s moral authority to push for free speech and democracy abroad. Critics have frequently contended that America’s moral authority has been severely damaged during the Trump administration and this action could arguably add to the decline.

Protecting personal information

The administration’s principal argument against TikTok is that it collects Americans’ personal data and could provide it to the Chinese government. The executive order states that this could allow China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.

Skeptics have argued that the government hasn’t presented clear evidence of privacy issues and that the service’s practices are standard in the industry. TikTok’s terms of service do say that it can share information with its China-based corporate parent, ByteDance.

WeChat is a messaging, social media and mobile payment app that is nearly ubiquitous in China. Albert Hsieh/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The order against WeChat is similar. It also mentions that the app captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States. However, some of these visiting Chinese nationals have expressed concern that banning WeChat may limit their ability to communicate with friends and family in China.

While TikTok and WeChat do raise cybersecurity concerns, they are not significantly different from those raised by other smart phone apps. In my view, these concerns could be better addressed by enacting national privacy legislation, similar to Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, to dictate how data is collected and used and where it is stored. Another remedy is to have Google, Apple and others review the apps for cybersecurity concerns before allowing new versions to be made available in their app stores.

Freedom of speech

Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the bans are their impact on people’s ability to communicate, and whether they violate the First Amendment. Both TikTok and WeChat are communications channels and TikTok publishes and hosts content.

While the courts have allowed some regulation of speech, to withstand a legal challenge the restrictions must advance a legitimate government interest and be “narrowly tailored” to do so. National security is a legitimate governmental interest. However, in my opinion it’s questionable whether a real national security concern exists with these specific apps.

In the case of TikTok, banning an app that is being used for political commentary and activism would raise pronounced constitutional claims and likely be overturned by the courts.

Whether the bans hold up in court, the executive orders instituting them put the U.S. in uncomfortable territory: the list of countries that have banned social media platforms. These include Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Russia and China.

Though the U.S. bans may not be aimed at curtailing dissent, they echo actions that harm free speech and democracy globally. Social media gives freedom fighters, protesters and dissidents all over the world a voice. It enables citizens to voice concerns and organize protests about monarchies, sexual and other human rights abuses, discriminatory laws and civil rights violations. When authoritarian governments clamp down on dissent, they frequently target social media.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Risk of retaliation

The bans could also harm the U.S. economy because other countries could ban U.S. companies in retaliation. China and the U.S. have already gone through a cycle of reciprocal company banning, in addition to reciprocal consulate closures.

The U.S. has placed Chinese telecom firm Huawei on the Bureau of Industry Security Entity List, preventing U.S. firms from conducting business with it. While this has prevented Huawei from selling wireless hardware in the U.S., it has also prevented U.S. software sales to the telecom giant and caused it to use its own chips instead of buying them from U.S. firms.

Over a dozen U.S. companies urged the White House not to ban WeChat because it would hurt their business in China.

Other countries might use the U.S. bans of Chinese firms as justification for banning U.S. companies, even though the U.S. has not taken action against them or their companies directly. These trade restrictions harm the U.S.‘s moral authority, harm the global economy and stifle innovation. They also cut U.S. firms off from the high-growth Chinese market.

TikTok is in negotiations with Microsoft and Walmart and an Oracle-led consortium about a possible acquisition that would leave the company with American ownership and negate the ban.

Oversight, not banishment

Though the TikTok and WeChat apps do raise some concerns, it is not apparent that cause exists to ban them. The issues could be solved through better oversight and the enactment of privacy laws that could otherwise benefit Americans.

Of course, the government could have other causes for concern that it hasn’t yet made public. Given the consequences of banning an avenue of expression, if other concerns exist the government should share them with the American public. If not, I’d argue less drastic action would be more appropriate and better serve the American people.

Jeremy Straub, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

TikTok is a unique blend of social media platforms – here's why kids love it

Young people creating a TikTok video in Lithuania. Photo by Alfredas Pliadis/Xinhua via Getty Images

Kevin Munger, Pennsylvania State University

TikTok, a social media platform targeted at young mobile phone users, was the second-most downloaded app in the world in 2019. It was the most downloaded app in July 2020.

It’s also become a geopolitical football. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok has been banned by India along with 58 other Chinese-owned apps in July in response to escalating border tensions between the two countries. The Trump administration issued an executive order banning TikTok and Chinese-owned messaging platform WeChat from engaging in transactions in the United States beginning on Sept. 15. The company sued the Trump administration in August in response to the ban.

As a political scientist who studies social media, I’ve looked at what makes TikTok unique and why young people have flocked to it. In short, the phone-only app lets users record themselves dancing or goofing around to a music or spoken-word clip and then alter the videos using a wide array of effects. Despite its superficially frivolous nature, young people have been using the platform to send political messages, coordinate political actions and hang out in an online space largely free of adults.

How it works

Each tiktok is a 3- to 60-second-long video that loops when finished. The majority of the screen is taken up by the video uploaded by the user. The app offers a wide range of options for customizing and combining these videos, including video taken with the user’s smartphone, photos uploaded from the web, emojis and other text superimposed on the video, and special effects. The app’s library of filters and video-distorting effects is like Instagram filters but for video.

The bottom of the screen contains information about the “sound”: the audio file that accompanies the video. These “sounds” can either be user-uploaded or chosen from a library of popular sounds. This library contains both snippets of songs by professional musicians and silly recordings of people talking. “Sounds” have had a huge impact on the music industry: “Old Town Road,” one of the most popular songs of all time, first gained popularity as a TikTok “sound” with an associated dance.

When you open the app, you encounter a tiktok that starts playing. This is the “For You Page,” which plays tiktoks that TikTok’s algorithm recommends for you. To go to the next tiktok, you swipe up. To see the account that uploaded the current tiktok, swipe right.

Comedian Sarah Cooper’s TikTok page shows thumbnails of her videos, or tiktoks, on the social media platform. Photo Illustration by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

How it compares

Comparing TikTok with other digital media platforms shows what makes it unique. Like YouTube, TikTok consists entirely of videos. Like Facebook and Twitter the primary mode of consuming tiktoks is by navigating through a “feed” of short, digestible posts.

Like Netflix, the default mode of encountering content is through the recommendation algorithm, not through the construction of “friend” or “follower” networks. And like Snapchat and Instagram, TikTok can only be produced on mobile phones, favoring younger users who are more fluent with smartphones than computers.

TikTok is the first social media platform to combine these characteristics. The result is a unique way of conveying and consuming information.

Information density

The combination of video media and the “feed” makes TikTok especially information dense. There’s a lot going on with each tiktok, and there is a never-ending stream of tiktoks.

Unlike text, video media operates on two parallel pathways, conveying explicit information (the kind found in speech or writing) and implicit information (social cues like the TikToker’s clothes and hairstyle, or emotional affect from music) at the same time.

The “feed” enables a social media consumer to scan through several pieces of bite-sized content per minute, extracting information in a much more efficient fashion than from a television broadcast. In combination, these trends make scrolling through the “For You Page” a whirlwind experience, a significant advance in information density.

If you spend a few hours on TikTok, you’ll see how this works. Other media begins to feel “slow,” even formerly compelling products like a YouTube video or Twitter feed. Younger people tend to love intensity – loud music, bright lights – and its no surprise they find TikTok compelling.

Different costs and benefits

TikTok also shifts the costs and benefits of posting. On the costs side, because TikTok is designed for smartphones it’s easier for some people to use, and harder for others. As a general rule, the more years of your life you spend using a technology – and the earlier in the life cycle those years are – the more skilled you become at using that technology.

TikTok also encourages videos filmed in the vertical orientation inherent to smartphones, so they can be created wherever the user goes, whenever they have a spare moment.

In terms of benefits, the importance of the recommendation algorithm over “friend” networks means that everyone is guaranteed to get at least a few views, even on their first tiktok. On Twitter, say, you might log on and tweet dozens of times before you get any “likes” due to the importance of “follower” networks in determining what people see.

TikTok’s “For You Page” varies between showing the user extremely popular tiktoks and tiktoks with only a handful of views, thus promoting greater equality than on traditional social networks. Overall, TikTok offers an online platform for young people that feels unusually disconnected from the adult world, one in which they are sure to get some amount of attention.

Common sounds, unique moves

Finally, the “sounds” that users combine with their personalized videos represent a novel way to categorize and navigate a social media platform, a feature unique to TikTok. If you click on the “sound” at the bottom of a tiktok, you can see all of the other tiktoks that use that sound file.

The most common example involves a specific dance routine paired with the accompanying “sound.” The audio is constant across this group of tiktoks, but each user provides a unique video of themselves performing the dance.

These dances are examples of TikTok memes. “Memes” on more text- or image-focused platforms involve some fixed “meme format” that is then remixed by users who edit the image or text to create a given “meme.” On TikTok, however, the raw material being remixed is the user’s body, as the user performs the behavior associated with the meme format, what I call “embodied memes.”

This makes the body much more prominent on TikTok than other platforms. Whereas clever wordplay goes a long way on Twitter, TikTok rewards conventionally attractive or otherwise striking bodies to an even greater extent than Instagram.

This also means that the identity categories that are increasingly central to politics play a major role on TikTok. Embodied memes often play with the race, gender, appearance or physical location of the TikToker.

More conventional image memes can seem anonymous or disembodied as they are shared around the web. With TikTok, it’s impossible to separate the individual from the meme.

Kevin Munger, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of 'ghosting' in the age of surveillance

The federal government has used military-grade border patrol drones like this one to monitor protests in US cities. _ Jonathan Cutrer/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, University of San Diego

Drones of all sizes are being used by environmental advocates to monitor deforestation, by conservationists to track poachers, and by journalists and activists to document large protests. As a political sociologist who studies social movements and drones, I document a wide range of nonviolent and pro-social drone uses in my new book, “The Good Drone.” I show that these efforts have the potential to democratize surveillance.

But when the Department of Homeland Security redirects large, fixed-wing drones from the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor protests, and when towns experiment with using drones to test people for fevers, it’s time to think about how many eyes are in the sky and how to avoid unwanted aerial surveillance. One way that’s within reach of nearly everyone is learning how to simply disappear from view.

Crowded skies

Over the past decade there’s been an explosion in the public’s use of drones – everyday people with everyday tech doing interesting things. As drones enter already-crowded airspace, the Federal Aviation Administration is struggling to respond. The near future is likely to see even more of these devices in the sky, flown by an ever-growing cast of social, political and economic actors.

A law enforcement drone flew over demonstrators, Friday, June 5, 2020, in Atlanta. AP Photo/Mike Stewart

Public opinion about the use and spread of drones is still up in the air, but burgeoning drone use has sparked numerous efforts to curtail drones. These responses range from public policies exerting community control over local airspace, to the development of sophisticated jamming equipment and tactics for knocking drones out of the sky.

From startups to major defense contractors, there is a scramble to deny airspace to drones, to hijack drones digitally, to control drones physically and to shoot drones down. Anti-drone measures range from simple blunt force, 10-gauge shotguns, to the poetic: well-trained hawks.

Many of these anti-drone measures are expensive and complicated. Some are illegal. The most affordable – and legal – way to avoid drone technology is hiding.

How to disappear

The first thing you can do to hide from a drone is to take advantage of the natural and built environment. It’s possible to wait for bad weather, since smaller devices like those used by local police have a hard time flying in high winds, dense fogs and heavy rains.

Trees, walls, alcoves and tunnels are more reliable than the weather, and they offer shelter from the high-flying drones used by the Department of Homeland Security.

In some parts of the world, hiding from drones is a matter of life and death. Drone Survival Guide, CC BY-NC

The second thing you can do is minimize your digital footprints. It’s smart to avoid using wireless devices like mobile phones or GPS systems, since they have digital signatures that can reveal your location. This is useful for evading drones, but is also important for avoiding other privacy-invading technologies.

The third thing you can do is confuse a drone. Placing mirrors on the ground, standing over broken glass, and wearing elaborate headgear, machine-readable blankets or sensor-jamming jackets can break up and distort the image a drone sees.

Mannequins and other forms of mimicry can confuse both on-board sensors and the analysts charged with monitoring the drone’s video and sensor feeds.

Drones equipped with infrared sensors will see right through the mannequin trick, but are confused by tactics that mask the body’s temperature. For example, a space blanket will mask significant amounts of the body’s heat, as will simply hiding in an area that matches the body’s temperature, like a building or sidewalk exhaust vent.

The fourth, and most practical, thing you can do to protect yourself from drone surveillance is to get a disguise. The growth of mass surveillance has led to an explosion in creative experiments meant to mask one’s identity. But some of the smartest ideas are decidedly old-school and low-tech. Clothing is the first choice, because hats, glasses, masks and scarves go a long way toward scrambling drone-based facial-recognition software.

Clever use of makeup can thwart facial recognition systems. John C Bullas BSc MSc PhD MCIHT MIAT/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Your gait is as unique as your fingerprint. As gait-recognition software evolves, it will be important to also mask the key pivot points used in identifying the walker. It may be that the best response is affecting a limp, using a minor leg brace or wearing extremely loose clothing.

Artists and scientists have taken these approaches a step further, developing a hoodie wrap that’s intended to shield the owner’s heat signature and to scramble facial recognition software, and glasses intended to foil facial recognition systems.

Keep an umbrella handy

These innovations are alluring, but umbrellas may prove to be the most ubiquitous and robust tactic in this list. They’re affordable, easy to carry, hard to see around and can be disposed of in a hurry. Plus you can build a high-tech one, if you want.

Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

It would be nice to live in a world with fewer impositions on privacy, one in which law enforcement did not use small quadcopters and the Department of Homeland Security did not redeploy large Predator drones to surveil protesters. And, for people in some parts of the world, it would be nice not to associate the sound of a drone with impending missile fire. But given that those eyes are in the sky, it’s good to know how to hide.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is the author of:

The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance

MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, University of San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.