Are Drone Intrusion Prevention Systems (Drone IPS) systems illegal? A drone intrusion prevention product being advertised at RSA Conference this year has piqued my interest, and I'm trying to determine whether it and other drone IPS systems are illegal. For background, a WIPS is a device which looks for unexpected WiFi access points nearby and purposefully sends de-authentication packets in order to prevent them from working. In August 2015 the FCC ruled that doing this to hotel guests was illegal, citing Section 333 of the Communications Act 1934. This appears to tally with the FCC's guidance. However, it has been pointed out to me that this precedent may not be applicable as the ruling was in relation to internet service being denied. One could potentially also argue that such actions are in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) under the same provisions which make denial-of-service (DoS) attacks illegal. UK law also has provisions under the Communications Act 2003 and the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA), with similar advice given by OFCOM (1, 2, 3) as the FCC gives. Drone Intrusion Prevention Systems are a similar concept, designed as security devices which identify drones in the vicinity and inject commands into the control channel in order to disable them. The advertised use-case is to prevent an attacker from using a drone to spy on people's screens, or gain entry to a secured facility. The apparent functionality is that the system identifies a drone in the area, and an operator can choose to have the system disable or otherwise inhibit that drone's functionality. One could argue that injecting commands into the control stream would constitute a violation of both the CFAA and CMA since it causes a computerised system (the drone) to stop functioning or be taken over without the consent of the drone operator. A key thing to note in both cases is that the denial of service is not indiscriminate in terms of jamming the radio spectrum: devices operating on that band will continue to work unless specifically targeted. 47 U.S.C. § 333 states: No person shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communications of any station licensed or authorized by or under this chapter or operated by the United States Government. It is clear to me that indiscriminately jamming a radio band is illegal under both the US and UK Communications Acts. What is not clear to me is whether interjecting additional commands is illegal, nor whether a drone user operating within the vicinity of such a device counts as "authorized" under this particular facet of law. From what I have read, the term appears to refer to communications which are not themselves in violation of the Communications Act, but I'm not certain whether this matters. Are these devices illegal under US/UK law? Is there any precedent in this matter?
For the USA, the FCC has a few words to say on the subject: “Generally, “jammers” — which are also commonly called signal blockers, GPS jammers, cell phone jammers, text blockers, etc. — are illegal radio frequency transmitters that are designed to block, jam, or otherwise interfere with authorized radio communications.” (https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/jammerenforcement/jamfaq.pdf) In addition, the FCC specifically calls out WiFi blocking devices using deauth attacks as you described, calling them “Willful or malicious interference” in a warning they issued in 2015 This is the closest thing to precedent I could find, related specifically to WiFi . That pretty much sums it up. If the device’s primary purpose involves disabling radio communication, it is illegal. It does not matter to the FCC how targeted or filtered the attack may be, it is still unauthorized. At the core of the issue, you (a private citizen) are not allowed to maliciously or willfully interfere with someone operating their radio, no ifs, ands, or buts. Drone IPS system using such an attack would most likely be illegal. The FCC may change this interpretation in the future, but for now it is illegal.
It is neither legal nor illegal, but would depend on the circumstances. For example, such use of a smart assistant might be perfectly fine if the childcare provider could demonstrate a legitimate interest for using the smart assistant, and gave reasonable notice about audio being recorded. Parental permission is likely not necessary. In practice, doing this right would be far too much effort. For example: Has the necessary information per GDPR Art 13 been provided, taking into account the EDPB guidelines on transparency? Under what legal basis are conversations sent to Amazon, an US-based provider, taking into account the Schrems II ruling? How will data subject rights be satisfied, in particular the right to access to these recordings, the right to erasure, and the right to object to further processing? Having discovered such processing of personal data that isn't necessarily kosher, a parent/guardian might start by objecting (GDPR Art 21) to further processing. This could be satisfied by powering off the Alexa devices in all rooms where the child is expected to be. The childcare should respond within one month. If no satisfactory response has been received, one option would be to lodge a complain with the supervisory authority, which would be the ICO in the UK.
The U.S. could pass a law directing Apple to create software for fair compensation. Similar statutes have been passed in wartime compelling companies to do all sorts of things and companies don't have all of the rights of individuals. If it can be done (not obvious in the case of existing products in the market place), it might be possible for the government to compel it to do so; if it can't be done, it can't be compelled and not all things are possible retroactively. There would also be a constitutional contracts clause issues with such a law impairing contracts between Apple and its customers when applied to existing phones retroactively. Whether it could require Apple to create a law enforcement back door depends upon whether 4th Amendment privacy rights trump the creation of a means to do so. There is an expectation of privacy in electronic records, but it is not absolute. But, there is no law on the books requiring this from Apple. It does not flow naturally from existing powers of law enforcement under existing statutes. It goes beyond what a subpoena would ordinarily require someone to do, and a subpoena is the main means by which governments compel people to provide information. In my opinion, a court faced with that question would rule that a statute requiring Apple to do this prospectively would be constitutional, but no such statute exists. However, this is currently an open legal question because there is no statute of the kind that have been litigated in a manner that produced a binding precedent.
Yes, it's illegal. 18 USC 1030 (a) (5) (A) [Whoever] knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer [shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section]. &quot;Damage&quot; is defined at (e)(8) to mean &quot;any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information&quot;. Your proposed attack would certainly cause impairment to the availability of the Stack Exchange system and the data and information which it hosts. Whatever else you may think about the Stack Exchange terms of service, they certainly do not authorize any user or moderator to &quot;destroy the site&quot; in any sense such as you describe. It's not necessary for the TOS to explicitly say &quot;you may not do X&quot;; it's enough that they don't say that you may do it. To use a firewall analogy, it's &quot;default deny&quot;. &quot;Protected computer&quot; is defined in (e)(2) to mean, essentially, any computer that is used in or affects interstate commerce. Which means practically every computer that has ever accessed the Internet, and certainly includes Stack Exchange servers. So your proposed attack would include all the elements of a violation of this section. Such a violation is punishable by up to five years' imprisonment if it causes a loss of more than $5000 (see (4)(A)(i)(I)), which if such an attack were successful, it certainly would. Greater penalties are possible in certain circumstances. Even if the loss does not exceed $5000, or if the attack is merely attempted but without success, it is still punishable by one year imprisonment or a fine ((4)(G)(i)). There is nothing in the terms of service saying you will go to federal jail for destroying stack exchange. Irrelevant. It is not up to Stack Exchange Inc. or its TOS to determine who does or doesn't go to federal prison. Rather, it is up to Congress to determine what conduct deserves such punishment (as they did in 1984 by enacting this law), up to federal law enforcement and prosecutors to investigate and make a case against an alleged violator, and up to the federal courts to determine if the accused is guilty and how they should be punished.
Probably The US, like all other nations, has absolute sovereignty over its airspace. There is no clear line between airspace and space but 60,000 feet is clearly in the former. The US, like all other nations except Lichtenstein for some reason, is a signatory to the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation which, among other things, makes it an act of war to use force against a civilian aircraft. Now, acts of war are not, per see, illegal - there are international laws about armed conflict and there are philosophical arguments about just and unjust wars but war itself is a political rather than a legal construct. Article 5 of the convention gives the right to all other states the right to operate civil aircraft within US airspace (and vice-versa) without prior permission (apart from regularly scheduled flights which do require permission) subject to compliance with the convention. Relevantly, unmanned balloons are dealt with in Annex 4 - it states that permission is not needed for light meteorological balloons but is needed for any other balloon which might enter foreign airspace. The Chinese claim that the balloon was “mainly” meteorological but the convention requires it to be “exclusively” meteorological. It also requires it to be “light” meaning having a payload weighing less than 4kg - unless the payload of this ballon was made of unobtainum, it weighed more than 4kg. They also argue that it drifted off course and entered US airspace inadvertently. This would be a legitimate claim if the entry of US airspace was unlikely at the planning and launch stages of the operation. We simply do not have the information to assess this claim. The US claim that this was a surveillance aircraft. If this is so, then the aircraft is not a civil aircraft and the Chicago Convention does not apply which brings us back to pure sovereignty - the US can do what it likes with things in its own airspace. There is a treaty between NATO members and former Warsaw Pact members dating from the 1990s that allow surveillance overflights of each other’s territories. However, there are two problems with this: China was never a signatory, and the US withdrew during the Trump Presidency. So, if this wasn’t a balloon that inadvertently and unexpectedly drifted off course, the US was allowed to shoot it down.
No It's your device, you can do what you like with it (subject to the law - you can't hit people with it. Unless they want to be hit: whatever turns you on, turns you on). However, if you do operate it outside their instructions then they would not be legally liable if it failed and injured you or someone else or set fire to the cat or whatever. The "prohibition" would limit their legal liability.
No, it's not illegal... Ads are shown as a contract between the site that hosts it and the advertising company. The contract does not stipulate that customers need to buy something, in fact, the contract can't force the customer to buy anything! At best, the contract can pay the hosting site based on the ad being shown, clicked, or any sale made after it. ...but you will do exactly the opposite Advertizement is made to put your own brand into the head of people. In fact, most ads don't have any effect on people. As I am writing this, ads for a kid TV, travels to Turkey and the primetime films for the weekend on the TV-station I have on are shown. I have no intention of consuming any of these advertised products. Impact of a campaign is measured by two metrics: people reached, and people responding. People reached is measured in clicks. People responding is measured in changes in earnings or sales. Clicking the ad increases the reached rating. If the rating is bad, the ad campaign is just ineffective... which leads to the most paradoxical thing: Bad advertisement and good advertisement both lead to more advertisement - bad to level out the missing response, good to maximize the response. By clicking on the ad you just funnel more money to the ad industry. When does it get illegal? [DDOS] The only way it would become illegal is if John Doe sets up a computer - or rather a botnet - and has that network click the ads thousands of times per second. Google can handle easily 83,000 searches per second, twitter gets more than 9000 tweets that are distributed to millions of people, Tumbler and Instagram handle together about 2500 posts per second. In fact, every second, more than 100000 Gigabytes of traffic run through the net. To have an impact on one site, you need to be truly a large number of calls... and then it is called a DDOS. DDOS is illegal under the CFAA, in this case 18 UC 1030: (a)Whoever— (5) (A)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; (b)Whoever conspires to commit or attempts to commit an offense under subsection (a) of this section shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section. In the UK, you'd break the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 section 3, because denying someone else service via DDOS is unauthorized, clearly unauthorized, and prevents access to any data (the website) on any computer (the server): (1)A person is guilty of an offence if— (a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer; (b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and (c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies. (2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act— (b)to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer But can a DDOS be protest? [NO!] Anonymous attempted to petition to make DDOS a legal form of protest in 2013. The petition got 6,048 of the 25000 signatures needed to warrant an answer by the white house - unlike people in 2016 asking for a Death Star. At least it prompted Joshua I. James to write a research paper about the proposal in March. He too points to the CFAA and Section 5A, especially the sentence I quoted above. Among a lot of stipulations, he points out that internet protest in the shape of a DDOS would need to follow the same rules as a legal protest on the streets - which for example demands that entrance to businesses can't be blocked, and one is not allowed to harass employees and customers. According to the general rules for legal protest as given, there are still a number of challenges. First and foremost, entrances to businesses should not be blocked. In terms of DDoS, if sustained denial of service takes place, then access (entrance) to the server (business)is eﬀectively blocked. This means that, at a minimum, sustained denial of service should be considered as a non-legal approach to protesting. Thus, he concludes sustained DDOS is per se can't be a legal protest, and even a non-sustained DDOS would impact people using the site in a way they will deem harassing - which means that even a non-permanent DDOS can't be a legal protest. And then comes the final blow: DDOS, unlike a real protest on the streets, can't, by its very nature, inform people of why there is protest, even if it were a form of protest! This means that nobody knows it is meant to be a protest and not a normal DDOS, and as it can't convey what the action is about, it can't be a proper protest.
&quot;Botnet&quot; refers to an illicit collection of remotely-controlled computers taking commands from a C2 (Command and Control server) and is thus by definition always illegal. However, there is no law against releasing or using software which accepts commands of various types from a central server, and this is quite common for remote access tools, as long as the user consents. It is only called a botnet if the users do not consent to its presence. If they do consent, it's not a botnet. One example is DarkComet, which includes features such as remote file editing, screen viewing, and keylogging. All of these features have legitimate uses, and a network of computers controlled with this software would not be considered a botnet unless it was created illegally in the first place. It's like the term &quot;battery&quot;. Battery is never legal, but that doesn't mean that boxers are breaking the law by participating in that sport and punching each other. If you consent to being punched, then it's not battery. Likewise if you consent to running a remote access tool, it's not a botnet.