Maybe you’ve read the statistics on how many drones are filling our skies: The FAA anticipates 7 million by 2020. Perhaps you’ve heard about how drones are revolutionizing commercial operations. It’s possible you know someone who has a drone of their own, or seen a quadcopter hovering over your local park. The reality is there's no shortage of drones filling our homes, stores, skies, and seas. It should come as no surprise that the technology is steadily making its way into our media.
What’s very likely is that you’ve seen a drone on TV, in a movie, or in your favorite video game, even if you know nothing about drones in the real world. Our media is now inundated with portrayals of drones, ranging from the mundane to the incredible.
Think I’m exaggerating? Anne Hathaway’s off-Broadway stint as a tortured drone pilot was so well received that she’s signed up for the movie adaptation. Then there’s ABC’s hit series Modern Family, where a bikini-clad Sofia Vergara is spied on by a DJI Phantom in peeping-tom mode. And in electronic-pop musician Anohni’s hit music video, an anguished Naomi Campbell lip syncs the words to “Drone Bomb Me” — a song about a young girl pleading for death by drone strike. Not to mention Eric Cartman's drone escapades in South Park.
To be sure, these pop-culture portrayals of drones play a big role in how the technology is perceived by the public — but are they accurate? Here’s a not-so-serious sweep of some of the most common pop culture drones and an assessment of how close they are to reality
Much of the fear-mongering around drones stems from how insecure people feel about their data; in an age where Sony hacks and CIA leaks have become commonplace, the conceit is that no-one is safe — and an aerial assault may be imminent. This trope is echoed in pop culture coverage of drone hacks; in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 video game, there’s a storyline where protagonist Marcus Holloway uses a drone to infiltrate his enemies penthouse and used network hacking to access its security cameras and monitor phone calls.
Hacking with Drones:
Watch Dogs 2 Drone Hacking
Fiction: Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs video game series not only features hacking, it’s an integral part of the gameplay. In Watch Dogs 2, protagonist Marcus Holloway owns a 3D-printed drone as a part of his hacking arsenal. The drone allows Holloway to access difficult-to-reach places, drop weapons, and capture photographs. There’s also a point in the plot where Holloway uses a drone to infiltrate his enemies’ penthouse. The drone is able to hack the penthouse network to access its security cameras and monitor phone calls.
Fact: We’re not that far from this being a reality. In February, researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University demonstrated how a quadcopter could receive encoded information from a compromised network. In their tests, the drone hovered by an office window and recorded blinking LED lights on the system’s hard drive. According to Wired’s coverage of the test, malware installed on a hard drive can communicate data through on-and-off LED flashes “as fast as 4,000 bits a second, or close to a megabyte every half hour.” All you need is a drone to observe and intercept that coded data. So while it may be more than a little far-fetched, it’s definitely possible to hack into a system using a drone — and some other high-tech equipment.
Black Mirror: Drone Swarms and Hacking
Fiction: In the Netflix original series Black Mirror, each episode explores a near-future dystopia, with many scenarios hinging on technologies such as virtual reality, memory augmentation, and, of course, drones.
In the finale of the show’s third season, the government funded the creation of Autonomous Drone Insects, known as ADIs, to solve the world’s bee-population crisis. All appears to be going well with the ADIs, until the inevitable dystopian twist: Not only does a hacker hijack the ADI’s control system for nefarious means, but the government’s use of the ADI’s was actually a cover for a nationwide surveillance project. Double whammy.
Fact: If you caught Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl show, you’ve seen a drone swarm in action, with 300 of Intel’s Shooting Star drones providing a sparkling night sky backdrop.Military wise, the government’s been investigating potential uses for years; in 2016 the Department of Defense showcased 103 bird-sized Perdix drones — the swarm flies autonomously but shares a distributed brain. That means that they obey operator commands indirectly; tell them to converge on a location and they’ll assess and choose their flight route there — the operator has no say on their flightpath.
So turning a Phantom into a flying menace might not be that simple. But worryingly, reverse engineering a drone's flight software to take control is. That’s because most drones use basic Wi-Fi encryption for telemetry, which would be an easy challenge for a basic coder. Alternatively, drone hackers can opt for open-source SkyJack software, using a $40 drone-mounted Raspberry Pi to disrupt drone signals — effectively creating aerial zombies. Here, real life is every bit as invasive as fiction. If people with the know-how come after you, they’ll likely get your precious information. But the only difference is that this attack is aerial — you were never secure to begin with.
Good Kill: Drone Strikes
Fiction: The 2014 blockbuster The Good Kill follows drone pilot Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) as he struggles with the ethics of his assignment. “This ain't f**king PlayStation, even though our operation was modeled on XBox,” barks Lt. Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood) in The Good Kill. “War is now a first-person shooter.”
Initially, Egan has reservations about the position, which only worsens as his targets become increasingly morally ambiguous. Egan witnesses — and performs — attacks that kill not only terrorists, but also targets that are clearly innocents. The stress of his marathon 12-hour shifts takes a toll on his home life: He begins drinking and becomes violent with his wife. No spoilers, but there’s a pretty good twist ending thrown in for good measure.
Fact: In 2014, The Guardian reported that 1,147 innocents were killed in pursuit of 41 targets. These deaths affect more than the victims — due to the strain, MQ-1 Reaper and MQ-9 Predator pilots regularly suffer from insomnia, depression and burnout, at a rate that’s twice as high as National Guard operators. Active operators work under severe emotional stress, many viewing incredibly gruesome footage; it’s reported that one in five analysts have witnessed a rape, some viewing more than 100 incidents a year. Soldier's main coping mechanism — it was him or me — is missing for operators, hence the sense of disconnect and why PTSD amongst operators doubled from 2015 and 2016.
Eye in the Sky: Surveillance
Fiction: Hollywood is partly to blame for the privacy paranoia surrounding drones. Blockbusters such as Eye in the Sky lead cinemagoers to imagine their privacy invaded at the whim of an operator in full HD. Two micro-drones appear in Eye in the Sky, a fingernail-sized insectoid and a hummingbird robot, used for covert ops.
Fact: In theory, many of the real-life versions of military movie spy drones, the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper, could be fitted with DARPA’s Argus-IS system, a 1.8 gigapixel camera that can see objects as small as six inches from 20,000 feet. So theoretically ‘they’ could be watching you, but they probably aren't ― the FBI and CIA combined reportedly have less than 200 of these in America. And those tiny drones we mentioned? Harvard techies have spent the last decade working on robotic insects. In 2011, California company AeroVironment showed off its Nano Hummingbird, a 19-gram drone with a camera and a comm system. Full-scale aerial surveillance is still a way away, so enjoy the movies, and don’t fear the horizon ... yet.
Back to the Future Part II: Drone Journalism
Fiction: In Back to the Future Part II, Biff Tannen gets arrested outside the courthouse during a hoverboard rampage, and his furious response is recorded by a hovering USA Today drone. The drone’s facial recognition system captures a close up of Biff’s face, and documents his furious “I was framed!” cry – which becomes the front-page story of next day’s paper.
Fact: Neither the drone or its tech would be available for a decade, but the movie firmly ensconced the notion of a roving reporting drone into the public’s consciousness. Today, media outlets like ABC News and CNN have dedicated drone teams, equipping reporters with quadcopters to capture live footage of protests and natural disasters. But even as dronalism’s popularity grows — you can now take college courses on the topic — we’re far from realizing the potential that Back to the Future envisioned. That’s because while today’s tech has solved image and video issues, there’s still no solution for audio capture. No matter what mics you use, the buzzing rotors would drown out external audio. Then there are pesky FAA regulations, which would make Marty McFly’s courthouse scene a no-go area for dronalism. But real-life dronalism has made some advances: At the 2016 U.S. golf open, FOX Sports’ drone team‘s footage was spliced live into a public broadcast. We may not be at Marty McFly levels just yet, but it’s clearly just a matter of time.
Final thoughts:
Today, pretty much any person, whether they’re from Afghanistan or Austin, believes they know what a drone strike looks like (insert ominous music here). They imagine hovering silent assassins, unmanned aircrafts loaded with weapons that predatorily survey locations before locking onto a target and firing. Cue screams, tears, and bodies blasted and broken — babies and villains alike. Pop culture is why we have this sense of familiarity, a picture we see over and over again; in Showtime’s Homeland, CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) deploys a drone to kill a 40-person wedding-party and in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, high-tech Helicarriers can kill 1000 hostiles at a time. And while that might star superheroes, drone kills are far from fiction -- with 'collateral damage' -- a.k.a innocents regularly injured in the process.
To quote former CIA director John Brennan’s Atlantic interview, ”Sometimes you have to take a life to save even more lives.” Hence the current deluge of drones as political plot devices, whether it’s shooting outliers in The Giver, culling citizens in the 2014 RoboCop remake, or blowing up Jason Bourne’s cabin in The Bourne Legacy — overall, demonstrating the import of this rising genre, minus the reality of drones flying in poor weather.
The best pop culture isn’t about escapism; it’s creating metaphors for the economic and political crises of the day and inciting discussion around them. “This ain't f**king Playstation even though our operation was modeled on XBox,” barks Lt. Colonel Jack Johns, (Bruce Greenwood) in The Good Kill. “War is now a first person shooter.” In the same way that vampire show True Blood provoked discourse about homophobia and segregation, today’s spate of drone movies reflect the current cultural anxieties and concerns about just who’s in control of that red button. Which is worth thinking about.
