Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Factoid of the day (be afraid..be very afraid)

From StrategyPage:


Brazil chose RBS-70 (anti aircraft system) as part of the security it was required to provide for the football (soccer) World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. 

hmmm.... someone in Brazil must have been watching oldies on TV:



(you can tell it's an old film: They use Arabs as terrorists. Nowaday you need to use only white supremicists, and even Jackie Chan films have to use the old fashioned IRA as the bad guys).

 but are US sports stadiums similarly protected from aircraft attacks?

Of course, the dirty little secret is that Brazil is behind the times: nowadays, all you need is drones.

and that has some folks worried.

but why does this make me uncomfortable?


With reports of increased drone activity around the host hotel and primary venue areas, Bertsch and his team made the decision to ban drones over the immediate airspace — the lone exception was NBC's authorized unmanned aerial vehicle. Eight hours into the race, the first male finisher was approaching when Bertsch got a call.
fine. That will prevent accidental injuries. But I hate to tell them, like guns, laws won't stop bad guys who ignore the law.

and the threat is international:

Indeed, drones have become a global phenomenon. A 2016 European Championship qualifying soccer match between Serbia and Albania ended abruptly last fall when a drone flying the Albanian flag started a fight between fans on the pitch, requiring action from hundreds of riot police. But cameras and banners aren't the biggest concerns now facing public safety professionals.

Wired has an article here on how to stop drone terrorism...

They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep you safe, yet they know that none of it can stop a 3-pound off-the-shelf drone from flying in and dropping something on the crowd. Maybe it’s a toxic mist. Maybe it’s a bomb. Whatever it is, you’ll never see it coming, and because there is currently no legal way to bring down a drone with any accuracy or reliability, there’s nothing anyone can do but wait for it....
except there is a way: but it's illegal.
Like almost every drone-­interdiction technology in development, frequency jammers run afoul of several US laws, most of which were passed when people hadn’t dreamed of owning their own unmanned aircraft. Romero and Lamm’s solution to the mock terror in the stadium—a solution that they have shown can reliably counter the threats drones pose to targets as varied as prisons, airports, and ­arenas—is illegal here.

You know,  I have seen drones sold as toys here in the rural Philippines (at the mall).

And it's not just sports events: here, religious meetings like the InC rallies, or the Black Nazarene procession have hundreds of thousands.

Hopefully, the local terrorists won't know how to use them, but with the foreign ISIS bomb makers (and the local Tagalogs who converted to Islam being recruited when working in Saudi) I am not optimistic.

On the other hand, I stay at home: My main threat here is being kidnapped for money (lower now that the EJK have decimated the gangs),  dying when a druggie decides to rob my home (again, fewer druggies now), or being shot in the crossfire when the mayor visits one of our family parties and is being targeted (again) by his political rival.

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