Reuters and Le Monde have just reported that ISIS allies in Iraq have killed two Peshmerga fighters and critically wounded two French special forces soldiers by using a commercial drone loaded with explosives.

The soldiers intercepted the device on 2 October, and it exploded shortly after it was brought down, although it’s unclear whether or not the explosives were triggered by remote control or by a timer. Several other French troops nearby were also injured, and the two soldiers closest to the explosion were brought back to France for treatment.

While the US Army has been using Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to strike targets in the Middle East for years, this case is significantly different as its the first notable incident where a commercially available quadcopter drone has been strapped with explosives and used as a bomb.

This incident comes also at a crucial time for drone users, especially since the legal guidelines for drone usage are still relatively unspecified in many places around the world. A few months earlier we had written about the possibility of photography drones as weapons.

In this article by The Guardian, their editors used a stock image of what appears to be a DJI Phantom 2, and while there’s no clear indication which type of drone was used in the attack, the point still stands that any drone from any brand that photographers use today can be modified to use as a weapon.

That much was obvious even before fighters began strapping explosives onto the machines, and most regulation currently revolves around keeping drones away from densely populated areas lest they fall on a crowd.

But when if a terrorist were to use a drone as an explosive, rules and regulations wouldn’t exactly matter, which brings up the difficult question – how do authorities around the world handle drone usage?

If they were to impose a blanket ban, photographers and videographers would suddenly lose a wonderful tool, just when drones are becoming popular. DJI just launched their smallest drone yet, the Mavic, and GoPro have created an innovative modular system around the Karma drone.

Policemen around the world have so far used anything from birds of prey to even bigger drones armed with nets to capture and control commercial UAVs, but in the case of a planned bombing, they simply wouldn’t be able to respond fast enough.

And while DJI do have built-in ‘No Fly Zones’ programmed into their drones, it would be so detrimental to a drone’s use if huge swathes of land were simply blocked off.

It would be a huge shame if similar attacks become more commonplace and authorities decide to clamp down on drone flights, because it’s hard to predict how draconian those laws might get. Judging from how photographers are already suffering from often absurd consequences of the war on terror, it doesn’t look promising for drone enthusiasts in the near future. Let’s hope governments and manufacturers can work together to create a safe compromise, since the more these commercial drones get used as weapons, the less we’ll be able to use them for photography.

2016-10-12 03:00