The Hidden Danger Overhead: Drones and Public Safety

In this episode of the At the Boundary podcast, GNSI’s Senior Director, Jim Cardoso, led a panel discussion on the JSS article, “Detecting Drone Threats at Stadiums and Public Venues: Overview, Operational Considerations, and Technical Implementation.” Joining him were the article’s authors: Nathan Jones, associate professor of security studies in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University; John Sullivan, a retired career police officer and an instructor in the Safe Communities Institute at the University of Southern California; and George Javis Jr., a specialist in geospatial information systems and geospatial intelligence.

The discussion focused on the use of drones as a national security threat, both present and future, to public stadiums and other large venues. The authors detailed the range of drone technologies and its expanding development, and how the United States legal system and law enforcement are not currently prepared to regulate drone usage in the way that is necessary for public safety.

Current and future concerns about the potential for drones to be used maliciously were also explored. The authors cited the 2021 Astroworld tragedy as a case study to examine how similar situations occur under a drone-based terrorist attack.

Main points discussed:

• Emerging drone threats to public events and large venues.
• Legal gaps in drone regulation and how law enforcement agencies and security professionals should respond.
• Current and emerging concerns tied to the evolving capabilities and variety of drone swarm technology and the expanding array of unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Links from the episode:

• “Detecting Drone Threats at Stadiums and Public Venues: Overview, Operational Considerations, and Technical Implementation” JSS article

• “Urban Operations: War, Crime and Conflict” by
John P. Sullivan, Nathan P. Jones, and Daniel Weisz Argomedo

• Register for the Florida Security Forum: Port and Maritime Security

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

A "boundary" is a place, either literal or figurative, where two forces exist in close proximity to each other. Sometimes that boundary is in a state of harmony. More often than not, that boundary has a bit of chaos baked in. The Global and National Security Institute will live on the boundary of security policy and technology and that's where this podcast will focus.

The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

Look for our other publications and products on our website publications page.

Transcript

Jim Cardoso: 0:00

Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of at the boundary, the podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director for genocide, and your host for at the boundary. Many of you may be familiar with. GNSI is academic journal, The Journal of strategic security, or JSs. We publish quarterly in partnership with the University of South Florida Library as an open access journal with global impact, we acquired JSs in January 2024 and with it, over 15 years of national security analysis excellence since last year, JSs has risen to the top 10% of all military journals worldwide. According to Google Scholar, we're proud of the penetrating explorations and inhabit its pages. And for today's episode, we're bringing all three co authors of an article in our most recent issue entitled detecting drone threats at stadiums and public venues. Quick introduction to our authors. Dr Nathan P Jones is an associate professor of security studies in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University. He is also a Senior Fellow with small world journal and a non resident scholar for the drug policy in US Mexico center within Rice University's Baker Institute. Dr John P Sullivan is a retired career police officer with decades of experience with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, serving in multiple leadership roles and overseeing the kinds of situations this article addresses. He's also an instructor in the safe communities Institute at the University of Southern California, a fellow at small worlds journal and contributing editor at Homeland Security today. George W Davis, Jr is a specialist in geospatial information systems and geospatial intelligence. He has worked extensively with the Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, FBI, and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, among many others. Nathan John George, welcome to the program. So this podcast is a more like a virtual panel than an interview, so therefore I have some specific questions for specific people, but I really look forward to the cross talk that'll happen from whoever has a good discussion point to bring up. But I'll start with Nathan. The article spends some time framing the issue of drones as a threat to public stadia. Why was this framing necessary? And what key points would you want the reader to draw out?

Unknown: 2:40

Oh, yeah, so that's a great question. I think this framing is necessary to think about, well, who are the potential adversaries? For example, we're going to be dealing with threats from drug cartels, lone wolf potential actors and potential malevolent state adversary actors So kind of going through, and that's what part of what the framing does is goes through what kinds of issues and what kinds of threats may be present at stadiums. And one of the things that we talk about is the unwittingly malign actor. There are individuals who are going to be flying drones over the I didn't know I couldn't do that guy, but they're actually stopping an emergency life flight, flight, a helicopter flight from landing in an emergency situation because they're blocking the airspace. And then how do we deal with those things? And what are some of the counter drone measures that are available, and things along those lines. And then that dovetails into the discussion of the operational considerations, where John is the one who's really the the man on that line.

Jim Cardoso: 3:55

And definitely we will get them. One other follow up question, you used the Astra World Festival event in November of 2021 in which eight people died during an outside concert by rap artist Travis Scott. Now, drones had no role in causing those deaths, so why did that still serve as a good framing mechanism?

Unknown: 4:16

Okay, so this is an example of the kind. It's a notional case study. IE, this is the kind of situation where drones could potentially play a role. And so by going through this kind of notional case and looking at the type of data, you get a sense of the type of data that drone detection companies will bring in. And we were fortunate through the Institute for Homeland Security, same piece of State University which provided the funding for this research, they built a relationship with 911 security at the time it's now gone through a transition to air site and their Air Guard system, they were not detecting drones over the stadium, specific. Specifically, they were at critical infrastructure all around the stadium. And so what they were able to do is looking at their existing data from multiple different sources, give us a we asked them for kind of a geo fenced area around the stadium where it actually occurred, and they were able to give us that data set. And so it's kind of akin, as John P Sullivan pointed out, it's kind of akin to being able to do an investigation and get the CCTV footage from all the surrounding businesses, and that could solve your homicide investigation. It's kind of like that in the sense that you've got the CCTV footage is not necessarily there looking at that particular store, but it's in all the surrounding areas, and so you can create essentially a picture of what was going on based on that data that was there. And so that's what we were able to do with that. What we did find was that there were drones in the area, and as the situation escalated, more drones started showing up. And in the aftermath, more drones started showing up. And that could be a function of, say, personal injury lawyers who want to get information for potential future lawsuits, they might be hiring drones, professional drone pilots, to get footage, to get a sense of what's going on there. So those are the kinds of issues that come up, and that's one of the primary data sources that we used.

Jim Cardoso: 6:30

Appreciate that. So, John, you've been referenced twice, so let's, let's turn to you. So we've seen a lot of very recent news highlighting current drone threat. You know, beyond open use, the uses in open conflict. In Ukraine, recent news of the Russian drone incursion to Poland, and then just this morning, reading about the Munich Airport getting shut down last night, uh, for seven hours due to wave of drone sightings. So how does your analysis of drone threats to stadia and public venues align with this, this drone continuum you've talked about?

Unknown: 6:58

Well, I think it's right dead in the center. Let me tell you why. One of the reasons we wrote this paper is we saw that drone threats were growing in a number of the sectors, and I'll talk about those in a second. But along with the fact that the threat is growing, the awareness that that threat is there is growing. Now, I will point out that when we talk about drones here, we're talking about primarily small unmanned aerial systems. And these are not the only drones that exist. We also have unmanned or uncrewed maritime systems on the surface of the subsurface. We're also unmanned ground vehicles that could come to play. And there are some amphibious various you can buy off the shelf, a Chinese device that swims underwater, can swim on the surface, can walk on the ground and fly in the air, and, oh yes, you could probably weaponize it. So USS or unmanned systems of all types are growing. We see them start to grow in most people's mind in the Ukrainian conflict and the battle space in the Ukraine and Ukraine has been punctuated by drones used by both parties and evolutions of drone technology. You know, first persons view drones are coming to play. You have fiber optic cable drones coming. You have drones that have their own internal guidance systems, that don't rely upon GPS and use AI to synchronize their interactivity. We see the very early stages of swarms occurring there. And swarms are, I think, an emerging threat beyond the present, emerging threat of drones, or what we're talking about weaponized aerial drones. Now, my first time I even encountered weaponized aerial drone is nearly 20 years ago. I hate to say it's that long ago, working in a Los Angeles County Emergency Operations Center. I'm the tactical planning Lieutenant for LA County. I'm handling mutual aid for the Sheriff of LA County, as well as the Sheriff of Orange County. And we hear a report that there's a fire on the border between LA and Orange County. And some I don't know what the right term to use is, some individual decides who's going to fly a drone and interferes with the firefighting in that operation? Obviously, there have been dozens of incidents past that where drones have interfered with rescue operations. We'll talk about that in this specific case study, but in others, you know. So we saw that, and the answer to that is what the first thing people come to mind is, I'll get my old athaka shotgun for a rifle slogan, or shoot that thing down. Now there's problematic in a lot of ways. One is it's not lawful in the United States. There perhaps are some exceptions. I say perhaps, because that's a really contested area of the law. But even if there is the the exception that over over comes that statutory barrier, what goes up must come down, right? And there's a background, so I shoot at it and I miss, and I'm going to crowd an area, same at a stadium, right? What's in stadiums? Well, teams, fields, you know, people, people. I was gonna say, hopefully, good, good, good, hot dogs on people. So you need to be very careful. So the that that led us to start saying, hey, what comes from that? Now, I was flying drones, small us for counterterrorism purposes in the 90s, and larger drones into early 2000s these smaller UAS, smaller unmanned aerial systems, are now really ubiquitous, and they're inexpensive and they are, you know, obviously the DJI drone, which we'll see, was The biggest drone here, is used a lot. Another beyond the Ukraine example, a lot of people think of that and say, well, that's going to cause things to occur here. That's actually not true. Criminal armed groups in Mexico, the cartel, who is going to have Sina Hua cartel and others, have been using drones for a couple decades now, and they start using them, initially for smuggling across the border. They use them for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, then they start to weaponize their drones. And I've actually published, together with Dr Robert Bunker, a book called criminal drone evolution, and we look at that entire self weaponization process that the cartels have gone through, and that's continuing to this day, and as a continuing to this day, not only in Mexico, but in Peru and in Ecuador and gangs of Brazil are using drones. There was one assassination attempt on President Maduro Venezuela several years ago, which, in my mind, alarm bells go off. So nothing has happened here with these violent, non state actors, criminal armed groups or terrorists. In the United States, there have been lots of drone attacks in the Middle East, you know, in Yemen and you know in that, you know theater, and obviously Ukraine. And now you mentioned, we're starting to see stuff occur in Europe against Denmark, Germany, Poland has drone incursions. Can be a real challenge. I mean, NATO's like, activated article, you know, four, which means they're being, like, super aware. And next step is Article Five gets hot, right? And what that means to Europe and the world is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it shows how profound these issues can be. Now, when you talk about this threat proliferation, drones are a lot of the drones flown in Ukraine conflict are commercial off the shelf. The drones used by Mexican cartels and Brazilian GNSI are commercial off the shelf, adapted. So there's this threat proliferation. Now we don't unmanned ground vehicles are using in armed combat, you know, and particularly state state on state combat. But you know, I wasn't Dublin a few weeks ago, and I'm watching this little robot running around. It was delivering Brazilian food, right? Well, if you could throw a little robot around to deliver Brazilian food, you could probably pack it with a bomb. I'm not saying it's desirable, but that's a possibility. And when we talk about drones, people get their single threat and in complex areas, I'd say you need to be concerned with multiple types of drones, or drones we were talking offline earlier, swarms. How do they come together? And that really demands a separate discussion, but we have all these issues coming together. So threat proliferation is growing, and it's growing unevenly and but the awareness is there. We will. I think we're right at the point with the evolution of drones in the civil space, and now in historical analogy, going back to the 19th century, after Dr noble creates dynamite and the attic, the terrorists of the day, whom they called anarchists, were starting to throw bombs. And think socco and vazetti in the US and other things like that. We're at that point. We're not at the point where, like, explosive terrorism is like the top of the hit parade. We're not at the point where that's there, but this could be there because it's the blend. It's making terrorism three dimensional. Yeah, right, and that's why criminals use them, because you see the Mexican cartels engaging other cartels in combined arms fashion with, you know, their own artisanal armored vehicles. They're using maneuver. They have the drone above for cover. You see bank robberies like that in Brazil. So attack like that would be very, very complicated. High profile public gatherings are always at a premium for terrorists because they're what you call soft targets, and they bring the. People together and see terrorism that just blows up buildings. People forget that in a minute, terrorism, as my colleague Brian Jenkins had mentioned, terrorism is theater in one aspect. Yeah, tension. You need to be able to see it. People have to have a visceral response. That's one of the reasons, I think, we don't see a lot of biological terrorism, and why people prefer explosions, because it's visceral. Biological terrorism is slow. It's insidious. Think of how the covid epidemic played out. Half the world didn't believe it was real. They still don't want to believe it's real. Certainly was.

Jim Cardoso: 15:35

Yeah, you don't get the psychological impact. You know,

Unknown: 15:41

that's a component, and drones bring that to you. They also bring you all out of those operational advantages that you would like on both sides of conflict. But the good news is, it's not all bad. There's a lot of good, and we can talk about drones for good later, but high profile public gatherings now, we know sports venues have been attacked. The first sports venue being attacked that is really poignant in my mind, is the 1972 Olympics, right? And from that we see the modern understanding of terrorism in a lot of ways. We see the early stages of jihadi terrorism. And yes, by the way, jihadists are using drones in the Middle East, we see the development of counter terrorism forces like the GNSI Nine that developed, and then you know, which later on sees instantiation throughout the world, like, you know, FBI hostage rescue team and other places. So you start to see terrorism change when sports venues are attacked. We haven't seen a drone attack. Thank god to this point, against a stadium or against, you know, the you know, against stadia in general. But we've seen like terrorists against against stadia, yeah, but stab the France, they had a multiple simultaneous, you know, suicide attack. Luckily, the French police and military were very proficient at counter terrorism. Were able to minimize, you know, the impact of that attack, but certainly high profile public gatherings become important for us. We have a couple really big ones coming in the United States, you have the FIFA, FIFA World Cup coming up, which is the largest sporting event in the planet. And you know that's going to be involving the US, Mexico and in the United and Canada, yeah. And you have to have multilateral intelligence sharing to understand how that goes. And we know how to do that, because the 1994 finals for the World Cup. Were in LA. I was on the intel team for that, for that operation, and we, we reached out, you know, to all the football violence of cops in Europe, at least, to understand who was calling, how they came. And we coordinated rather well. And there are drone special response capabilities in the US. There are task forces that exist. There's the ability to designate it as a national special security event. But that tells me we need to be concerned about stadia and other public venues. And I think Nate Dr Jones laid out, importantly, why we did this, not that the astral world attack was a drone or not that asteroid event was a drone attack. It was an event that we could use as a proxy, since this hasn't happened yet, and it's better to figure out how to deal with it before it happens than to wait for it to happen. And, you know, become overcome by events and have tragic consequences. So we're able to take good data and say, how do we detect this? How far can we see this coming when we detect it, what do we see? You know, how fast we have it. Are there ways to mitigate and we can talk about that a bit later. But stadia, sports events important, and that becomes important to the stadium itself, to the teams playing there, because they have to have security for themselves. And to the leagues, because the leagues have to protect people. They often protect not only the people there, but they have to protect the brand of each individual player, you know, the of the sport itself. And the final thing I'll talk about, we'll probably come back to this later, is, what does this all mean? Why is a threat? How is the threat amplified? Why? How do you look at that as a risk? There's a bunch of legal and operational issues that we don't understand how to deal with yet, what I call the legal operational lacuna, and right now, there is the existing drone legislation in the US expired. It had been operating under continuing resolution for a number of years, and Congress hadn't been able to get together for whatever reason. For many reasons, there's a great political divide and a lot. Of cases on these types of issues, and they were not able to reach resolution. Well, just the other day when we have the government shutdown, well, what's that due to continuing resolution? There ain't one right now, really, really murky. What is the legal foundation for dealing with drones in the perfect case, there's only four government agencies that have a legitimate role in counter drone stuff, Department of Justice, Department of Energy, because, obviously they own the national nuclear infrastructure to include weapon systems. Department of the defense, because, of course, they have, you know, a defensive capability and Department of Homeland

Jim Cardoso: 20:42

Security. Let me, let me real quick interrupt. And I do, I do want to talk about those authorities, because that is a big deal. But I want to go ahead and hear from here. I got a question for George, because I'm curious about this part, as we you know, towards the end of the article, a key aspect of counter drone activity is to capture and map the activity. It enables an informed, coordinated response, you know, and look and in this area, it's I strongly emphasize to our listeners, download the article, go on there, look at the maps, look at the figures that are on there, and that'll really enable you to understand this. But George, can you give our listeners a bit of an overview, maybe a bit of a teaser trailer to inform their research.

Unknown: 21:25

Okay, so just so happens at November 5 is the four year anniversary. The actual event that happened, 10 people passed away, multiple people were injured. One of the takeaways that we took from it was that we had heard about the fact that helicopters couldn't land because of drones being in the airspace. So what we did was to take data from like November 3 through November six, so before the event, during the event and after the event, and tracked all the drones. That was the data that was supplied to us, how it was supplied to us was just in a common delimited Excel spreadsheet, but then I turned that into mapping, not only on a map, but also with aerial photography, and that's critical in a situation like this, if you need to land a helicopter Where's enough space to land that helicopter, you can't tell that from a map, but you can tell that from the aerial Photo underlay. You'll see the examples in the paper of some of the mapping capabilities. What I also did was a temporal analysis to see how many drones are in the air each day, what time of day, what altitude they were flying at. That's another thing too, is that any drone flying over 400 feet is against FAA rules. So the pictures tell a lot of stories. I'll leave it at that, but yeah, take a look at them. If there's any questions, anybody wants to follow up me. Follow up with me in the future. Feel free to do so.

Jim Cardoso: 22:52

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that. And obviously go to the article or have their contact information for all three authors, so you can follow up with them and even follow you know, you can follow them, find them online as well, and find different ways to get, you know, access and just get insight into what they're doing. But, but yeah. I mean the importance of turning that into, you know, graphical data, not just as you said, Excel databases, but a graphical data then really creates an overall common operating pictures, is incredibly important to understand the environment that you're working in. We started to walk down this road. I want to walk back to it now, talking about authorities and coordination challenges across authorities. I mean, you know, anytime you know any aggressive counter drone activity within US borders, it's going to bring up very challenging questions of who has authority, who's in charge? Who can do what can I'll just throw that open to whoever wants to take it. Can we discuss some of the highlights of those themes we've

Unknown: 23:51

talked about the four federal departments that had, or at least had, at one point, those the counter drone authorizations. But one of the things that we discussed kind of toward the end of the paper, is, should state and local have it? And we don't really say necessarily, whether or not state and local should have some of those authorizations, but we do say that, hey, the government really should be reviewing these authorizations and considering whether or not state and local should, and what would be the model for how to do that. So I'll defer to John on that one, because he knows far more about the law related to this. Yeah, thanks, Nate. I think you hit an important issue there. I mean, there's a gap in law authorities and operational practice that legal operational lacuna I talked about to correct that there's the Preventing, you know, there's a need to reauthorize the Preventing emerging threats act of 2018 which was set to expire on 30 September 2025, and since the at. Continuing appropriations and extensions did not occur at the moment. That's a gap of, is that going to change things? That's an unknown question. Hopefully not. It's really problematic, right? Because you didn't have a lot of authority for, you know, really none for state and locals, you have some authority in federal agencies and appropriately, and this needs to be restricted. I mean, we don't need the Wild West. We don't need people shooting down aircraft, and, you know, disabling aircraft, like, think of the a bad case. Say it's a weaponized with a chemical, biological agent, or, you know, radiologically, I'm not sure you can get a lot of up there to be cause a real problem, but it'd be irritant. But, you know, say it's chemical, biological. You shoot the thing down. What's going to happen? Are you going to distribute that agent yourself? You know? I mean, those are things you have to think through in the amount of time you have, there's not much. So we need to ask ourselves, well, we need authority. We need to extend the mitigation authority. And mitigation isn't just throw, you know, shoot down. Shoot down is a bad is a bad operational approach. What? What is it? What is the authority that comes with mitigation, the ability to detect, identify and monitor and track the aircraft now you don't need the federal authority to do that. A private entity could do that, but you have to choose the right technology to do that, and you have, for example, you'll notice, if you read our report, many of those drones were DJI drones. Why? Because they're the most common drone in the market. They're inexpensive, they're out there. They're also a drone that gives a, you know, you know, identity, friend or flow. They Friend or Foe signal. It tells you I'm DJI drone. This is me. The ones that we in a report that we say we don't know what it was, they were probably either disabled that, you know, signaling capability, or they're another type of drone that didn't have that. So you need to, you know, be able to detect, identify. And that says we need multiple types of detection. And some of that's visual, some of that's acoustic, some of that's an electromagnetic, electromagnetic spectrum, you know, some Lidar and rainbow and all those. Then you need to warn the operator of the unwanted system. Get out of here, right? And there were ways you could maybe automatically do that, coming flying into a stadium that you know, depending upon where you are, when you see it, how it comes that's you're constrained by time, then you have to disrupt the control of the aircraft. Well, disrupting it could cause it to crash too, right? So you need to have the ability to understand how to problem solve that you need to seize or exercise control that aircraft. So if I can't crash it, maybe I can take over control and fly it and land it safely. That's nice. Can we actually have the technological capability to do that? Now that's another question that's going to require more research, more more capability, but that's there. Can you? Can you confiscate the material on the thing? That's another part of it. And then the last piece of mitigation, the one that people don't like to talk about, that's the use of reasonable false force to disable damage or destroy the aircraft. And that would be really in only viable under in extremis conditions. Now, in the legislation, it does mention that it doesn't tell you what to tactically do very you know, very little legislation does because that constrains, you know, but it's what I would like to the kind of decision you have if you're armed police officer and you're at this stadium and you see somebody who appears to be a suicide bomber, and they're approaching and advancing, or somebody with a knife, an edged weapon, and you have the option to shoot or don't shoot, use lethal force, Do you or don't you? And you have, that's a very hard decision.

Jim Cardoso: 28:57

Yeah, it's incredibly hard decision for an individual, and it's even harder for a process, you know, I talked, you know, I talked to Stacy Pettyjohn from CNAs a few weeks ago. From a defense perspective, defending against drone or drone swarms, the time allotted to make it to understand the threat and to act against the threat is just getting very, very short. So, I mean, is there? I mean, are we getting to a point that there's going to be we're going to be supremely challenged in having enough time to make a good decision.

Unknown: 29:31

We are challenged. But there's ways. See, but with every challenge, there's there are countermeasures, right? So one of the ways that you deal with that time, closing thing is, you extend your perimeter, right? You have a rings of defense you sense earlier. You monitor areas where they're going to take off from. You can't shoot it down because all the reasons we talked about, it's not lawful, it's not practical. It could, could exacerbate the situation. Yeah, you actually, actually have to hit it, you know? But you can start to sense. You can say what's the most likely trajectory for somebody to fly a drone. Now, some of the more newer drones can fly beyond visual control, but that's a small number of people, right? And to do that's going to take more mission planning, but you can better the odds so you can survey the surrounding area. So that's where the geospatial analysis comes in. What are the most likely vectors? What are the ones that when they come in, are going to create the most damage when they do come in? Can we defend against those in some other ways, like, think of like a baseball stadium. If you go behind home plate, there's a net to make sure people don't get hit. The same thing, if you go to a hockey game when I was a kid, there was no, like, nothing. They didn't

Jim Cardoso: 30:53

have nets then, yeah, and then too many people got hit by pucks that went over the glass,

Unknown: 30:58

you know. So, so now you start to think of, how do we do that in the military situation. You see, cope cages they put on top of vehicle. You know, of military vehicles to limit the drone threat. Cartels do that too, because they weren't so you have to ask yourself, it's not, it's difficult, but that doesn't mean there aren't solutions.

Jim Cardoso: 31:14

That's a layer of defense. You're talking about, basically layer defense.

Unknown: 31:17

You give yourself defense in depth, then you say, if we can't interdict, how do we contain, right? What are our rapid response procedures? How do we safely evacuate people from the area? How do we give people advice without scaring them beforehand? Now, keep in mind, you can go to a stadium like go to a basketball game, and they're flying drones around and dropping, you know,

Jim Cardoso: 31:43

goodies, T shirts and stuff like that. Yeah,

Unknown: 31:46

keep in mind that you know uses and good uses, and there are delivery drones that you know are in use now. I think just last week, there were two that crashed by one big, I don't want to say to vendor, but one big vendor that delivers to my house or tries to and always delivers it to the wrong place, but they want their books are cheap.

Jim Cardoso: 32:07

No names, please. No names, trying to avoid any litigation here and at the boundary.

Unknown: 32:14

I didn't say their names, but it doesn't matter that ubiquitous is going to be there. So what do you do? How do you get the thing right now, if there's an event, you create a national special security event, and you'll have a task force capability. The task force will have different and all of these big, large like Super Bowl and, you know, Final Four, all these things like the Academy Awards, things like that. They're not going to attack a drone inside, necessarily, but you have the, you know, outside, when people park and come in. So wherever you're going to go, you can have a task gonna have a task force. The task force is going to look at a whole range of things. You know, bomb squad guys. You're gonna have people, you know, doing chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear survey. You're gonna do protective intelligence for people all that. You're gonna have a drone coordinator, probably from the FBI, together with their WMD coordinator, whatever homeland security elements are engaged, they may well have, like a secret service plays a role in some of these events and etc, etc, the Coast Guard, if it's a coastal thing, do you have a task force with the local police? They're always going to be at the tip of the spear. The question is, how do you devolve some of this mitigation authority to local agencies. And that's a hard question, because you can't have every local agency having a hostage rescue team with the quality of the FBI, right? You know that costs a lot of money. You would be training people there. The budget's Not there. Not everyone could have it. So you have to look at regional coalitions, task forces among agencies, often local, state, federal task forces are good for intelligence. You're probably going to need to scale it so like a large agency, something like NYPD or Chicago PD or Houston PD, or large Sheriff's Department of LA county may have some organic capability, and maybe it would be invested in a Task Force officer who has some federal authority, state authority that's up to the legislature at the national level in each individual state to kind of synchronize that. So there's going to be legislative, legislative synchronization for, you know, that intergovernmental relationship. So you have to pull that together. You also have to think we're talking about authority to mitigate you also have to have the authority to prosecute people who use these in a malicious way, like early on, when people were doing laser threats against aircraft. There was no authority to do that in California, we crafted legislation. In fact, I was one of the people that help draft, draft that legislation for the legislature, for, you know, laser strikes against commercial aircraft and law enforcement aircraft. So you have to develop the authorities. You have to make them scalable and appropriate, but you also have to develop an understanding of the civil law ramification. Situations of improper mitigation or failing to mitigate, because everybody who's in that stadium is going to say, I bought a ticket and I have an expectation of enhance of security, and therefore I'm suing you because your contractual obligation, then your potential become a tortfeasor Right? So you have to figure out how to do all that and synchronize all those together, and that's going to take a ton of training. Yeah? So yeah, you have to diagnose the problem, come up with the answers. Use technology. Technology is going to be a great aid. You talk about the time to close. I'll end here because we could go forever and ever, ever. Yeah, they learn illegal stuff because that's varies by jurisdiction and issue, but one of the ways to close that that gap in a time reaction time may well be AI Artificial Intelligence that allows you sense and run through very quick courses of action and synchronize. That's one of the things we can do. But then you have decisions on the lethal use of autonomous weapon systems, and those are ethical, and you have to develop those. I think there's an emerging look at cyber jurisprudence. What is the law in cyberspace? There's a talk about lethal autonomous weapon systems for at the battlefield level? Yeah, I think that Russian at the civil level becomes important. And then mixing those, when you have hybrid warfare situations, like you mentioned, what's happening in, you know, Munich right now? Is that hybrid warfare? I don't know for sure, but yeah, we don't

Jim Cardoso: 36:35

know what it is. Yeah, it certainly had an impact, though, that's for sure. I mean, that's and that's what you see, it has that impact.

Unknown: 36:41

Yeah, hypothesis to look there, so you can think of that. The last thing there is, as we do, that it's like, almost like spy versus spy, see, because right now, Mexican drug cartels and other criminal enterprises, Brazilian GNSI, are starting to use AI and agentic operation, agentic AI to conduct criminal activity, they will integrate that into their drones, perhaps faster than we will, because they're not bound by the ethical constraints that we are. We can't just take a new technology and bring it to the battlefield or use it in the street, right? Because we have to test it. They don't have those concerns. They don't have those concerns. We have to, we have to. We should. We should. Yeah, I'm not saying we don't have restraint and constraints on our operations ethically. We need to, but we also have to balance that with operational necessity. And I think we haven't had one of these yet, but the time to work on this is before we do. Because when we don't have a crisis, we tend to overreact or misdiagnose and react to the wrong thing, like giving every cop on the street the authority to shoot out a drone is insane. Giving no cops in a large metropolitan area the ability to have mitigation authorities when appropriate, or trained with the appropriate tools, I would say it's equally insane. Yeah, where? Where is that balance? And that's the balance that the legislature, or the various legislatures that come to play, has to make.

Jim Cardoso: 38:15

Yeah, as you alluded to, regrettably, a lot of times in the in America, we sometimes wait for a crisis, wait for a catastrophe to then take action. Hopefully, that's not the case this time, but it it does seem to be our, in our in our national methodology. It seems so we're actually at, or maybe even slightly beyond our normal times. I would do want to start wrapping this up, but I do want to, since this was kind of like a lesson interview, more of a panel, I want to give you, all three of you, one final opportunity to just, kind of, you know, inform the audience of any key points, anything from the article that you really want to make sure they they they tie into. I mean, the whole point of this is so the audience does understand a little bit about this issue. But also says, Hmm, this is interesting. I want to go to that article, or I want to see some other types of research that you three gentlemen have done, and they can dig into that. So kind of we go backwards from the way introduced all three of you, George, if you have any any final thoughts or any things that we didn't cover, that you just want to hit up on before we before we end the podcast, I

Unknown: 39:18

think the first thing I'll say is that, you know, drones move at the speed of technology. And the policy to, you know, mitigate all these problems, moves at the speed of government. And again, the technology also moves quickly. Because we're talking this was back in 2021 when we did this, the capabilities now with different types of sensor integration and cameras and AI is changing the drone detection capabilities way beyond what it was just four years ago. So it's a constantly changing, constantly moving, you know, set of circumstances here. One point I'd make is that there are. Millions of DJI drones in the United States. A lot of them are in public safety, and the US are making efforts to basically ground them all right now, and that, that's one of the policy issues I think that needs to be worked out sooner than later. I'll leave it at that.

Jim Cardoso: 40:14

That's a great point in the DJI that's when, you know, I know the state of Florida, where, where I live, there's a they did put out some regulation against using DJI drones, and that basically took this capability that a lot of smaller law enforcement agencies, and there's no other option out there right now, so they said, You can't use them. But okay, what do we use? I will get back to you on that. So it's a challenge when they're so ubiquitous and they're even becoming more So John, over to you, John, I'll go to you, and then Nathan to cap this off. So any final thoughts on anything we may have missed as we had our discussion today,

Unknown: 40:49

I'm gonna do this real quick, real real high points. We need to be aware not only the current threat, but we need to look at future concerns, and the ones that I think are really important are swarms and swarming attacks, the integration of AI and agentic targeting, the potential for watering musicians and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear integration into the drones and the big ticket one and one, I think we really do poorly any US inter agency And the Intergovernmental Relations in general is dealing with converging threats. We get tunnel vision. We work one at a time, and our adversaries don't do that. To solve that, however, I think we need to close that legal operational lacuna. And one thing that I call attention to there's Executive Order restoring American airspace sovereignty, which was done in came put in effect in June of this year, 2025 and they created a task force to look at these threats. They talk about restricting drone threats, flights in certain areas over certain times, and we already do, can do that for designated national special security events, but we might want to look at more of that. We might want to look at accessible notices to Airmen for geo fencing of drones. And we, I think, the one that, I think is the most important is that enhanced enforcement efforts through task forces to bring leverage capabilities from different parts of government. But this is going to take some work, and I think we should start now. Yeah, pass it back.

Jim Cardoso: 42:24

I agree. Yeah, no, thank you. That's, that's a great, that's a great summary from you. And you know, this is why we're trying to do these podcasts. We're hitting up in eight at the boundary, doing drone discussions quite a bit, because there's so much out there that we're accounting. Kind of people feel like we're a bit behind. We need to accelerate a bit and understand the threat and move towards solving or finding solutions. Nate over to you for any final comments.

Unknown: 42:46

Yeah, so I'm a big sci fi fan, so I'll pull out a quote from William Gibson, or at least it's been attributed to him. The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And I know kind of people like smile and kind of laugh about sci fi, but sci fi becomes science science fiction becomes science backed. We have seen that over and over again. So what I would say is just a final thought is, don't be afraid to put on your your science fiction hat and really think through what future technologies will be. I mean, if we're going to have drone swarms attacking. Could we have counter drone swarms defending things like that? And what would that look like, and all those guys playing around on that TV show battle box? Is that stuff going to be adapted into aerial drones, so that we can defend against drones and have AI and doing that? And this is just an example of like, kind of how to Red Hat this and put on the science fiction hat, really think about what the future is. I hope everybody does that. And I know I'm going to be doing that. We're going to be doing that in future papers. And, yeah, I think you know that that's a good place for me to end

Jim Cardoso: 43:51

on. Yeah, I'm smiling as you say this. But I mean, you're absolutely right. Some of the things you're talking about absolutely I mean, especially what I've learned recently in terms of, you know, drone development and the rapid rise of technology and where the threats could be, all these things you talk about that seems eminently realistic and not even that far out there either. I mean, in our lifetime, easily. So this is stuff we got to be thinking about as you guys continue to do this research. We're going to be, I'm going to be tracking that research, and maybe we'll have you back when you write other things and put out some other research and some other insight. We're going to have you back to talk more about it as these things develop. But for today, we're going to we're going to go ahead and call it, I really appreciate your time. Nathan John George, appreciate it. Thanks for stopping by. Special thanks to our guest today. Dr Nathan P Jones, Associate Professor of security studies in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University. Dr John P Sullivan, retired career police officer and law enforcement leader, as well as an instructor in the safe communities Institute at USC and George W Davis Jr, a specialist in geospatial information systems and geospatial intelligence with experience supporting multiple federal. State and local law enforcement organizations. We really enjoyed talking to them today about their new article detecting drone threats at stadiums and public venues. This article is freely available in the latest issue of GNSI, Journal of strategic security. I strongly recommend you download the article for deeper insight and to access the maps and graphics that accompany today's talk. We'll post a link to JSs in the show notes next week on at the boundary, our guest will be Fabio s Van Loon. He's a graduate of Texas A and M's Bush School of Government, has worked in the foreign policy space in Washington for seven years, and is currently the Congressional Affairs aide at the Embassy of Italy. We'll talk about his recent GNSI article, trickle down coordination, the National Security advisor's role as the strategic and operational planner of the DOD, dos inter agency relationship. It's a fascinating look at how that role has evolved over the years with different presidents and national security advisors, and unquestionably continues to evolve today. Be sure to download and listen in. Thanks for listening today. While you're here, give us a like and hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any of our episodes and continue to follow along with GNSI on our LinkedIn and X accounts at USF, underscore, GNSI, check out our website as well at usf.edu/gnsi, at and while you're there, subscribe to our monthly newsletter to keep up with everything we're doing here. That's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we've found to be insightful, intriguing, maybe controversial, but overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Cardoso, and we'll see you at the boundary. You.