Gatwick drones pair 'no longer suspects'
bbc.co.ukSerious question - is there any actual evidence that there was ever a real drone? There are no available pictures of the supposed drone, which seems odd if it was 'buzzing the tower'. It also seems odd that it kept 'popping up' in random places, yet nobody managed to follow it with their own drone, or track it on radar. And now the police are arresting people with no connection to the incident and clearly still have no idea what was going on. The most parsimonious explanation would appear to me to be that somebody reported a drone once, possibly mistakenly, and once the extremely costly call had been made to shut down Gatwick, it snowballed into a mass hysteria / UFO sighting scenario, with everyone seeing 'drones' all over the place.
Of course, it's possible there is in fact ironclad evidence for the official story that we're not being told. But it seems to me there's lots of incentive for the police to share all they know, and huge incentives not to admit that it was all a cock-up.
You are not the only one questioning the existence of the drones: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/23/police-admit-may...
That article is paywalled but what about this bit of the parent article?
> "We are [..] carrying out a forensic examination of a damaged drone found near the perimeter of the airport.
Sounds like some evidence of at least one drone. But regardless this is still likely a culmination of panic over a potentially one-off sighting.
With the lack of evidence, the media attention, and the nature of the incident, I have been wondering the same thing.
The cynic in me suspects that the result of this will be zero convictions, but legislation taking all but the smallest drones out of consumers hands.
The police claim to have recovered a drone well correlated to where the army thinks the drone they dealt with crashed, yes.
We'll see what it amounts to.
> is there any actual evidence that there was ever a real drone?
Yes: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1828378/Video-D...
I was wondering the same thing. Given the amount of press this generated, I still haven’t seen a photo of one of the drones which seems odd. Has anyone seen a photo?
The official story makes no sense at all. Why announce that you have arrested a couple of people if you have no hard evidence against them?
Either this is all monumental incompetence, or the real story isn't being released.
Coincidentally, Birmingham airport was shut for a couple of hours today after an air traffic control failure.
If that's the end of the story, it's fair to assume there's no connection.
If there's a spate of air traffic control and/or other failures over the next few days, it's going to be hard not to wonder if something else is going on.
> The official story makes no sense at all. Why announce that you have arrested a couple of people if you have no hard evidence against them?
For lots of reasons. To make it seem like they are making progress, to make it seem like it is safe to travelers, to assuage their bosses, pick one.
The "hard" evidence was that their neighbors saw them some month ago operating a drone in their backyard. So they called police. Who notified the press.
As suspected eco terrorist you would hardly operate from your backyard near the airport. But the brits do have surveillance cameras all over so they will find something sooner or later.
Looks like few phone calls and twitter posts shut down an airport about as well as a drone. And the former strategy gets free amplification in the form of people misidentifying birds as drones
Same account a little later https://twitter.com/TomPugh212/status/1076939198043746305
67 independent reports and a damaged drone near last sighting.
I'm sure the two of them are enjoying having their faces plastered over the sunday news (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers) and sorting through all the lovely messages they've received over the last day or so.
Whilst a free press is important, I would argue that 'a man and a woman have been held in connection with the Gatwick Airport drone incident' would suffice. Kudos to the BBC for recognising this.
It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. Publishing their names and pictures before _even being charged_ does nothing but open potentially innocent people up to danger.
Whoever caused the Gatwick chaos needs to be brought to justice, but this is beyond reckless
> It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime.
The press always say that naming people who've been arrested is an important measure against authoritarian regimes. It allows the public to know whether police powers of arrest are being misused or not.
They appear to have lost this argument, because this is in tension with people's right to privacy and rights to a fair trial by the courts not by the media.
There's some interesting info here about different approaches: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/100634...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/21/press-intrusio...
There is a simple way to have both. Give people the right to anonymity and also give them personally the right to wave that right. This protects people both ways.
This plan isn't thought through to its conclusion. If a government is willing to illegally detail political dissidents, etc. they will certainly not mind lying about that dissident's decision for anonymity.
Not like the KGB of old would tell a reporter the truth when they ask if the nameless detained man in a gulag somewhere requested his name be reported and let them blow open the fact that the government is arresting non-criminals for political purposes. I mean in that situation, Soviets already knew--it's not a perfect analogy. They'll just say he exercised his right to privacy.
It only works if the announcement of identity is public by default, unfortunately. Neither option is great at all, but I don't think I'm qualified to come up with a better plan.
>This protects people both ways.
Not really. If the cops want to drag you off and detain you secretly for indefinite amount of time (what the law is trying to prevent), then all they have to do is charge you with some embarrassing crime like "sex with underage minor", to force you to waive that right.
This doesn't work in systems which punish trumped-up charges, which any reasonable system clearly should.
There is an obvious difference between protecting people by tracking their identities in captivity vs harming people by publicly shaming them by immediately parroting the authority'sallegations.
You're missing his point.
Your distinction still places the trust in the discretion of the police/press. If they don't disclose the name, then it's harder for character witnesses to come forward (e.g. the couple's neighbors in this case).
I don't think it works like that. Character witnesses are organised in private by a defence lawyer, who - of course - knows the identities of the accused. Not by a public announcement in the press.
Front page headlines along the lines of "The police believe these people are criminals who caused huge inconvenience and suffering to hundreds of thousands of people - would someone like to say a good work about them?" probably aren't the best way to guarantee a fair trial.
> Front page headlines [...] probably aren't the best way to guarantee a fair trial.
Again, this sub-thread's premise is that "naming people who've been arrested is an important measure against authoritarian regimes."
The point is, you wouldn't get a "fair trial" in an authoritarian society. Knowing whether you're in one is tough (It could be as low-level as local law enforcement.) Given these two points, it's a values-based argument that more information is better. That's all.
Of course, it's horrible when someone gets wrongfully accused. I don't know where the sweet spot is. I'm outsourcing much of my trust to other citizens.
I would argue that publishing the names at all isn't particularly news-worthy. The right to privacy exists, too.
In the justice system it's the judge which rules a sentence. Years – or even decades – of public shaming doesn't seem fair to me. Committing a crime doesn't mean you're no longer dealing with a person with real feelings. Publishing names and photos strikes me as "2 minutes of hate", and not "news".
Also note that it doesn't just affect the person(s). Family members or even completely unrelated people with similar names can get threatened.
Even just being in a crime reconstruction video as an actor is apparently risky. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-342183...
That's horrid. The BBC producers admitted they knew they were putting him in harm's way by republishit the video, and they intentionally went ahead anyway instead of taking a few minutes to fix the video.
> Det Insp Helen Evans, of Lincolnshire Police, said it would be "remiss not to thoroughly investigate every solid piece of information" and he will be given an update "in due course".
I will never seize to be amazed at the capacity of some people to not think for themselves.
That's one very effective way to get people to no longer want to act in reconstruction videos.
The facts entering public record are what distinguishes "arrested" from "disappeared."
Do you want to live in a world where people are yanked off the street and not heard of for months or years, with no ability for the press/friends/family to find out about the situation, "out of respect for their privacy?"
If the police refuse to disclose whether they've grabbed someone, I'm going to assume I'm in Soviet Russia.
But, the police can disclose that information without expecting newspapers to slap it on the front page.
The court of public opinion is utterly unforgiving compared to the legal system these people could be sent through. We're not talking about neighbours reading an outrage piece in their daily paper; we're talking about nutjobs on the internet finding their Facebook profiles, their Twitter accounts, their emails, their physical addresses, and then doing their best to make those people's lives hell. Because that's what happens and the mob operates on a hair trigger.
The number of people being truly disappeared in our Western societies is vanishingly small, compared to all of the people who have their mugshots and criminal records indexed on Google, and all of the people who were indicted by newspaper editors before a jury even got a chance. That's before the internet keyboard warriors start shipping out their death threats or fabricating hostage situations for SWAT teams.
While it's not clear, the NYT seems to be saying that the local MP (politician) accidentally named them thinking the police had made them public, while the police would not confirm them and never named them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/world/europe/gatwick-airp...
I think it's a very British whoopsie, they're plastered over the papers and they didn't do anything.
I think the right to privacy vs. printing public info about the actions of our police is always going to be in tension. Of course, there's no argument that innocent people should have their privacy invaded, but ideally, innocent people shouldn't have been arrested at all. The flip side is when famous/powerful people are arrested but not charged, and the public not being able to know whether they got off because strings were pulled. And there's the overarching problem of people being disappeared with the public/press having no idea whether they were arrested, and for what reason. Which has led to some absurd situations in China recently:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/asia/china-fan-bing...
Public information about ongoing investigations and arrests wouldn't be problematic if our society didn't have such hilariously broken views on criminal investigations and trials.
Get arrested in connection with some well talked-about crime, but were released or found innocent at trial? Doesn't matter, you're still guilty in the eyes of the public. Hell, look at jury boxes in the US - you as a defendant are assumed guilty against the spirit of our constitution, because people suck.
Either we as a society need to fix our fucked up perceptions, or we need to have a serious discussion about the right to privacy up until the point that a verdict is delivered. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that we are going to fix the former in a timely manner.
> ... It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. ...
On the contrary, the commonly-acknowledged right of habeas corpus essentially requires the government to make the fact that someone is being detained public, at least if the prisoner himself so chooses. Privacy is a red herring here - habeas corpus is about preserving basic freedoms.
It's risible to claim that the press published the names because they were concerned about habeas corpus.
What do you mean when you say habeas corpus essentially requires a detention to be made public? Habeas corpus provides for a review of the legality of a detention for the requester. How & when is any information given publicly under habeas corpus laws? What makes you think habeas corpus and privacy can’t co-exist?
Without public knowledge and pressure, there is no check on authoritarian abuse and the law has no teeth.
Maybe, but that's not what I asked. Don't habeas corpus laws provide public access to a (perhaps private) legal review? When do laws require sharing results with the public, as the GP comment claimed? Can there be checks on authoritarian abuse that don't require public dissemination? Is the threat of publicity exactly the same thing as a requirement for publicity?
Imagine a country where the police arrest people and they vanish in the middle of the night, with no way to determine what their status is.
There is no need to imagine a country where mugshots are freely available, even is that person is later released without charge, that already exists, and we know what the practice does.
How does your question relate to publicity at all? Habeas corpus covers that situation, assuming the country you're imagining complies with habeas corpus standards.
Isn't this standard procedure in most western democracies?
> at least if the prisoner himself so chooses
is the missing part in most cases.
> at least if the prisoner himself so chooses
This is the key.
>Whoever caused the Gatwick chaos needs to be brought to justice
Absolutely, along with all of these clowns who are perpetuating the chaos.
The retraction never spreads as much as the accusation. Her Majesty's Christmas gift to these two appears to be Scotland Yard routing thousands of bits of hate mail their way.
Being accused is the same as 100% guilty, and being guilty is always reason for pubic shaming and unlimited amounts of vitriol.
Good ol' British press logic. I wonder where they get their journalists from. Is there an education to be a heartless bastard with no sense of ethics? Or do they train them in-house?
Well it depends on which part of the British press you read - it's not a homogeneous entity. The BBC (original article) and the Guardian [0] didn't name them at any point. Some of the tabloid press did, including names and photos of their friends, families and employer. (I won't link to the naming articles because that would of course name them!). At least one of the major online papers that did name them has at least said that they have been released without charge (in the process calling them 'the accused'), but still with a mass of personal details.
Really sad - I'm guessing that as drone users they will now receive the inevitable nut-job drone hatred.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/23/gatwick-dron...
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to."
-- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humbert_Wolfe , 1930
The lack of ethics is definitely imposed from the top, by people like Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan.
Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-American?
The owner of News International, Fox etc? Yes.
The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling have already labelled any culprits as 'eco-warriors' and that was even before these two were arrested and then released. https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/12/21/comment-why-it-s-too-soo...
Complete speculation, but I think most likely is local residents who oppose expansion of the airport.
Ah, the perfect protest. Where no one knows what you're protesting!
What is the aim of any protest? Is it to get publicity or to make an actual impact? Might environmental activists be fed up with the limited effect getting in the news brings, and like the yellow vests over the channel, prefer actual effects? "The revolution will not be televised" for the 21st century.
Id like that to be the case as it's more interesting, but in this case I suspect a couple of pranksters having a laugh amongst themselves.
They recruit them from the alumni of the same boarding schools they went to.
I wish I was joking.
This satirist wrote a scathing lookback of 2018, and British journalists didn't get a free pass either. Writing about Khashoggi, he says:
Perhaps the saddest part of this whole business is knowing that there are so few British journalists committed enough to get murdered: you could silence most just by breaking the fingers they use to do select all, copy, paste. Nobody’s going to flay you to death just for barking offers of money through the letterboxes of recently bereaved parents, or trawling for offensive tweets with your free hand. Of course, there are a lot of good journalists. Perhaps journalist is now just too broad a term, in much the way the word actor encompasses everyone from Meryl Streep to Sooty.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/22/frankie-boy...
It's why there's so much outrage in America when differences between the verdict of public opinion and the verdict of the court happen.
This is not a uniquely British phenomenon.
A lot of them death threats, others suggesting life prison and torture. Side note, this shows, in the lowest common denominator, the true nature of people on the internet.
Difficult to imagine a jury would have been found which hadn't seen their faces in order to give them a fair trial.
The press could have been responsible for the two of them walking free even if there were evidence they had done it.
What happened to the UK law or practice of not naming suspects? That's the way it was a decade ago (or more?), right?
The police and CPS don't name them, but MPs do for political reasons. Even if everyone couldn't, MPs can say things in Parliament more freely than outside.
Is there a chance that their suffering will be compensated by big libel wins?
I assumed they were the wrong suspects as soon as I found out they were hard core hobbyists. Pulling a stunt like this would be social death and would kill the hobby for them. No-one would want to hang out or work with them again.
Except she didn't use drones at all, and he wasn't really interested anymore.
So, does that now make them perfect suspects?
For me a "perfect suspects" is a hard core hobbyist or someone who does it for a living.
What's the next step after perfecting a hobby or being bored because it's a forced job other than taking it to the next level?
Given the limited info it wasn't just a kid popping a drone over given how hard it seemed to be to catch them so that leaves someone who knows what they are doing.
Who cares about "social death" over prison time? If anything it makes them heroes to many/most people, a good FU to the system.
There must have been some motive for whoever did this. AFAIK, no environmental or terrorist groups have claimed responsibility.
Is it possible that this has been done by someone within the police or intelligence community in order to create a pretext for pushing through drone licensing laws?
Could just be some immature troublemaker, like people who shine lasers at planes. There doesn't need to be some real motive.
Not an expert, but this really seems like something a teenager that recently acquired a drone and was showing off to his friends would do.
Is it possible? Maybe.
But it could also just be some random asshole. There are a lot of random assholes all over the place.
I believe it is more likely to be a foreign nation proving a capability. They've just shown that with a team of a dozen people or so and some moderately sophisticated drones, they could shut down every major airport in the country more or less indefinitely.
I doubt it. That would be like burning a zero-day exploit. I think the airports have been absolutely asleep at the wheel because OF COURSE this was a risk. OF COURSE I would have set up TDoA equipment and had a company with anti-drone tech on speed dial (at the very least) if I were responsible for an airport bigger than a hobbyist field.
I bet you could get cover for Gatwick with TDoA equipment for less than $10k easy, say another $10k to have it installed.
Hell, you could probably get some amateur radio people to install it for free, but paying $10k is more CYA.
Anyway, my point is that now they sure as hell will prepare, so next time (well... give it a year for them to get their thumbs out of their asses) it will not work as well.
I see your point. However, if they were some kind of activists, we would have heard their manifesto by now. If they were simply trouble makers, I would have expected them to get bored (and maybe scared) a lot sooner. The list of reasonable candidates is a bit short. I wouldn't put it past the Russians (for example, I don't mean to point fingers) to cause trouble just for the sake of causing trouble. Also, even if this particular tactic becomes harder in the future, it shows just how pitiful the response has been. Whoever it was tested us, and we failed.
I haven’t even seen video of the drones, I think that would be released before the government provides free advertising.
No company in their right mind would sell anything like that for less than $10k. Try £100+ as a starting price for one unit. It's aerospace and defense equipment and the airport is losing a truckload of money.
One of the article was giving a £16M figure for a 6 pack of the Israel Dome system.
I'll admit to not knowing what CAA rules a receive-only system would need, but this is not knowledge that is that specialized.
I'm saying the hardware is yes about $10k for sufficient coverage, COTS, and maybe you're right that a proven company would charge 100k and up. But you could hire someone competent for $300k/y to just implement it, and then deploy everywhere. (300k would get you someone competent enough)
But yes of course with aerospace certification needed it's... bad
I don't think that is receive only, there is an active radar. The iron drone system seems catered to detect mortar/missile/UAV rather than consumer drones so it's certainly overkill and could be done for less.
Drones and UAV can cost more than $10k in hardware alone. I'm not familiar enough with the sensors and the technology on the detection side but wouldn't assume that anything comes cheap.
There are no product selling in the $10k price range. You will need to go through procurement with numerous sales meeting and demonstrations to make a sale, which automatically push the price to $100k and above.
It's low volume, meaning few units to recoup the development costs. Let's keep in mind that it takes a lot more than a guy in a year to develop a product.
> I don't think that is receive only, there is an active radar
I said TDoA, not radar.
> I'm not familiar enough with the sensors and the technology on the detection side but wouldn't assume that anything comes cheap
I'm not assuming.
The airports and pilots actually raised the problem with the UK government for years, to the point where in 2017 a law was passed that forbids to fly drones in the vicinity of airports and other sensitive areas. Aviation activism is similarly the reason for newer drones shipping with geolocking capabilities enabled by default. The problem is that the mainstream political scene saw these changes as resolutive (which they are not, as we’ve just seen) and just dropped the subject. This goes double for the UK, where Brexit has basically frozen any political and governmental activity that is not absolutely essential.
It could have been done for the sake of lulz
Is there already word from the land of lulz? I bet they are celebrating the situation no matter if there is any relation.
Didn't the drone disappear to recharge/replace batteries and return multiple times? I thought this meant it must be intentional and not accidental.
Though, the accidental explanation is arguably more ominous/terrifying. It reminds of the episode "Autofac" from the "Electric Dreams" series.
Hah, that's the first time I've heard "disappeared/reappeared". It's plausable, but are there multiple witnesses/reliable video?
I work with small drones, sUAS, and back in the day some of the guys were too lazy to go to the airfield to fly them and would just go to a beach park instead but it was close to an airforce base and an medium size airport. Anyways they were flying pumas and had the entire police force of the city show up. Luckily the drones they had were fixed wing and designed to just fall out of the sky so they brought them down really quick and got away. I'm sure no one ever figured out who was flying drones in their airspace.
The front page of the Daily Mail was "Are these the Morons who shut Gatwick with a Drone?"
I await the out of court settlement with interest
Considering how well organized the attack seems to have been, I assume those behind it know a lot about airports/drones.
I wonder if it could be a government researcher worried about a lack of funding/preparation for this kind of attack (similar to the FBI's conclusion regarding the anthrax attacks)?
It doesn't seem like a protest, so unless it's economic terrorism or a state-backed attack, what else is it likely to be? A former pilot with a grudge?
Or a potential government contractor selling anti-drone technology.
Has this story been updated? There's now a "may not have been a drone at all" in the middle?
Daily Mail have this video: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1828378/Video-D...
Although I have no idea if it is real.
What if the while thing was a product demo? A group showing off their DDDOS (distributed drone denial of service) services?
Also, the drones may never have existed.