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Tag: drones

  • We Hunted Hidden Police Signals at the DNC

    We Hunted Hidden Police Signals at the DNC

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    As thousands took to the streets during August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago to protest Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, a massive security operation was already underway. US Capitol Police, Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, sheriff’s deputies from nearby counties, and local officers from across the country had descended on Chicago and were all out in force, working to manage the crowds and ensure the event went off without any major disruptions.

    Amid the headlines and the largely peaceful protests, WIRED was looking for something less visible. We were investigating reports of cell site simulators (CSS), also known as IMSI catchers or Stingrays, the name of one of the technology’s earliest devices, developed by Harris Corporation. These controversial surveillance tools mimic cell towers to trick phones into connecting with them. Activists have long worried that the devices, which can capture sensitive data such as location, call metadata, and app traffic, might be used against political activists and protesters.

    Armed with a waist pack stuffed with two rooted Android phones and three Wi-Fi hot spots running CSS-detection software developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, we conducted a first-of-its-kind wireless survey of the signals around the DNC.

    WIRED attended protests across the city, events at the United Center (where the DNC took place), and social gatherings with lobbyists, political figures, and influencers. We spent time walking the perimeter along march routes and through planned protest sites before, during, and after these events.

    In the process we captured Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular signals. We then analyzed those signals looking for specific hardware identifiers and other suspicious signs that could indicate the presence of a cell-site simulator. Ultimately, we did not find any evidence that cell-site simulators were deployed at the DNC. Nevertheless, when taken together, the hundreds of thousands of data points we accumulated in Chicago reveal how the invisible signals from our devices can create vulnerabilities for activists, police, and everyone in between. Our investigation revealed signals from as many as 297,337 devices, including as many as 2,568 associated with a major police body camera manufacturer, five associated with a law enforcement drone maker, and a massive array of consumer electronics like cameras, hearing aids, internet-of-things devices, and headphones.

    WIRED often observed the same devices appearing in different locations, revealing their operators’ patterns of movement. For example, a Chevrolet Wi-Fi hotspot, initially located in the law-enforcement-only parking lot of the United Center, was later found parked on a side street next to a downtown Chicago demonstration. A Wi-Fi signal from a Skydio police drone that hovered above a massive anti-war protest was detected again the next day above the Israeli consulate. And Axon police body cameras with identical hardware identifiers were detected at various protests occurring days apart.

    “Surveillance technologies leave traces that can be discovered in real time,” says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the EFF. Regardless of the specific technologies WIRED detected, Quintin notes that the ability to identify police technology in real time is significant. “Many of our devices are beaconing in ways that make it possible to track us through wireless signals,” he says. While this makes it possible to track police, Quintin says, “this makes protesters similarly vulnerable to the same types of attacks.”

    The signals we collected are a byproduct of our extremely networked world and demonstrate a pervasive and unsettling reality: Military, law enforcement, and consumer devices constantly emit signals that can be intercepted and tracked by anyone with the right tools. In the context of high-stakes scenarios such as election events, gatherings of high-profile politicians and other officials, and large-scale protests, the findings have implications for law enforcement and protesters alike.

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  • Palmer Luckey’s Defense Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons

    Palmer Luckey’s Defense Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons

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    Palmer Luckey has come a long way from hacking together virtual reality headsets in a garage. Today, the Oculus VR founder’s defense tech startup, Anduril, announced that it has raised $1.5 billion in addition to developing a new manufacturing platform to produce “tens of thousands of autonomous weapons” a year.

    The funding round, led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, could help the seven-year-old Anduril transition from a flashy defense industry upstart to a more serious US defense contractor.

    It also reflects a shift in military thinking, as policymakers adapt to the prospect of battlefields ruled not only by tanks and fighter jets, but also by drones and artificial intelligence, and they search for ways to ramp up America’s capacity to produce military hardware to match that of a prospective adversary such as China.

    In addition, Anduril is betting that it can parlay a lean and efficient tech industry approach to manufacturing into a new way of producing weapons systems at scale. The company says it has developed an AI-powered manufacturing platform, called Arsenal, to speed up the production of its growing armory of drones and other hardware.

    Greg Allen, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the Pentagon is getting more serious about working with nontraditional defense contractors and investing in small, cheap, autonomous systems. “The stars are aligning in terms of the [Department of Defense] changing its approach, new companies coming with a different approach, and the venture capital community finally willing to put big money at risk to make things change,” he says.

    Anduril says that Arsenal will follow the kind of approach used in high-tech manufacturing by companies like Apple and Tesla. This means designing products with manufacturing in mind and using software to monitor and optimize manufacturing operations. The company says it will also rely on a supply chain that is more resilient because it will source components primarily from the US or allied nations.

    The company says it will spend several hundred million dollars to build the first factory of this kind, the sleek Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already ramped up its manufacturing capabilities in recent years, with a factory in Mississippi for building solid rocket motors and another in Rhode Island for producing drones.

    Image may contain Outdoors and Aerial View

    Rendering of Anduril’s planned Arsenal-1 factory.Anduril

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  • Russia is building ground-based kamikaze robots out of old hoverboards

    Russia is building ground-based kamikaze robots out of old hoverboards

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    Hoverboards, or self-balancing scooters, are already used by hobbyists as a basis for robots, but now a group in Russia is putting them to use on the battlefields of Ukraine

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  • Let Slip the Robot Dogs of War

    Let Slip the Robot Dogs of War

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    “These dogs will be an extra set of eyes and ears while computing large amounts of data at strategic locations throughout Tyndall Air Force Base,” Major Jordan Criss, 325th Security Forces Squadron commander, said of the systems during initial testing in late 2020. “They will be a huge enhancement for our defenders and allow flexibility in the posting and response of our personnel.”

    In the intervening years, robot dogs have become an increasingly common fixture across the US military, beyond patrolling sensitive installations. In July 2023, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota introduced robot dogs to enable airmen to respond to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats “without risking the safety of themselves or others.” In August, Patrick Space Force Base in Florida added robot dogs to its perimeter security rotation for an “additional detection and alert capability.” That same month, the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division, announced the employment of robot dogs to “build 3-D ship models aboard the ‘mothballed’ fleet of decommissioned ships at the Philadelphia Navy Yard,” while the Coast Guard unveiled four-legged “droid” dogs in Hawaii to “combat weapons of mass destruction.” Finally, in November, airmen at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana debuted robot dogs for explosive ordnance disposal.

    Despite these practical noncombat applications, some robotics companies have had an eye on weaponization. In October 2021, Ghost Robotics showed off a so-called “Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle,” or SPUR, quadrupedal robot with an 6.5-mm Creedmoor assault rifle developed by SWORD International mounted on its back during an annual Army weapons expo in Washington, DC, in the first public example of a robot dog armed with a firearm. The following year, a video of a robot dog outfitted with a PP-19 Vityaz submachine gun by Russian entrepreneur Alexander Atamov quickly went viral on YouTube and Twitter. By 2023, an American company had debuted a robot dog with a flamethrower strapped to its back, albeit not explicitly for military use (no longer fielded to US soldiers, using flamethrowers against enemy combatants is technically not prohibited). Like the Predator drone, you can’t build a new robot without someone slapping a weapon on it.

    Cry Havoc

    The public reception to weaponized robot dogs is overwhelmingly defined by concern mixed with discomfort, especially given the rise of autonomous or semiautonomous weapon systems that can independently track and identify targets. Even beyond the conventional invocation of Terminator-inspired techno-anxiety, the robot dogs appear eerily reminiscent of the menacing mechanized canines of Black Mirror.

    Part of the creep factor stems from the “uncanny valley,” says Singer, invoking the psychological phenomenon in which robots that look and act almost-but-not-quite natural end up unnerving their human observers. “On the engineering side, these robots take inspiration from nature, since real dogs are, through evolution, designed to operate really well in the field,” Singer says. “As a result, we layer our beliefs about these types of creatures on top of ‘bioinspired’ robots, and the more something acts lifelike but not likelike, the more we react with fear or disgust.”

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  • Apple Is Coming for Your Password Manager

    Apple Is Coming for Your Password Manager

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    That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next week, the company will reportedly announce its own stand-alone password manager that will compete with apps like 1Password and LastPass. Dubbed simply Passwords, according to Bloomberg News, the app will reportedly have features that go well beyond the iCloud or Mac Keychain tools Apple already offers, allowing users to save passwords for Wi-Fi networks, store passkeys, and organize login credentials into categories. Passwords will also reportedly work on Windows machines, but it’s unclear whether people who use Android devices can get in on the security tool.

    US prosecutors on Monday charged an executive at The Epoch Times newspaper with carrying out a massive money-laundering scheme. According to the US Department of Justice, Epoch Times chief financial officer Weidong “Bill” Guan engaged in “a transnational scheme to launder at least approximately $67 million of illegally obtained funds to benefit himself and the media company.”

    The scheme, according to the indictment against Guan, largely involved using cryptocurrency to purchase prepaid debit cards “loaded with US dollars that had been obtained through various frauds”—including funds obtained through unemployment benefits fraud—for less than the funds on the prepaid debit cards. The purchase of the cards was carried out by members of The Epoch Times’ “Make Money Online” team, which Guan managed, according to the DOJ. The so-called MMO team would allegedly then use “stolen personal identification information” to open various accounts, which were used to transfer money from the prepaid debit cards to bank accounts associated with The Epoch Times and its employees. Guan faces one count of conspiring to commit money laundering, two counts of bank fraud, and could face decades in prison if convicted.

    Google’s former CEO, billionaire Eric Schmidt, is quietly building a military drone company, reports Forbes. The company, called White Stork, has been testing devices at both its Hillspire office complex in Menlo Park, California, and in Ukraine. Relatively little has been publicly revealed about the company or the specifics of its technology. According to Forbes, however, “individuals flying small drones” have been spotted near the Hillspire property, and Schmidt has reportedly hired alumni from Google, SpaceX, and Apple to carry out his secretive project, providing some clues about its ambitions.

    A cyberattack against an organization that facilitates blood transfusions and other sensitive medical care disrupted hospitals and other health care entities across London this week. The attack targeted Synnovis, which manages a partnership between King’s College Hospitals trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital trust, and Synlab, a European medical testing firm. In a statement published on Tuesday, Synnovis said the attack “has affected all Synnovis IT systems, resulting in interruptions to many of our pathology services.” This forced hospitals to cancel surgeries involving blood transfusions and other procedures. Ciaran Martin, a former top UK cybersecurity official, blamed the attack on Qilin, a cybercriminal gang believed to have ties to Russia.

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  • The Lords of Silicon Valley Are Thrilled to Present a ‘Handheld Iron Dome’

    The Lords of Silicon Valley Are Thrilled to Present a ‘Handheld Iron Dome’

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    Drones have changed war. Small, cheap, and deadly robots buzz in the skies high above the world’s battlefields, taking pictures and dropping explosives. They’re hard to counter. ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks it has a solution. It wants to turn the rifles of frontline soldiers into “handheld Iron Domes.”

    The idea is simple: Make it easier to shoot a drone out of the sky with a bullet. The problem is that drones are fast and maneuverable, making them hard for even a skilled marksman to hit. ZeroMark’s system would add aim assistance to existing rifles, ostensibly helping soldiers put a bullet in just the right place.

    “We’re mostly a software company,” ZeroMark CEO Joel Anderson tells WIRED. He says that the way it works is by placing a sensor on the rail mount at the front of a rifle, the same place you might put a scope. The sensor interacts with an actuator either in the stock or the foregrip of the rifle that makes adjustments to the soldier’s aim while they’re pointing the rifle at a target.

    A soldier beset by a drone would point their rifle at the target, turn on the system, and let the actuators solidify their aim before pulling the trigger. “So there’s a machine perception, computer vision component. We use lidar and electro-optical sensors to detect drones, classify them, and determine what they’re doing,” Anderson says. “The part that is ballistics is actually quite trivial … It’s numerical regression, it’s ballistic physics.”

    According to Anderson, ZeroMarks’ system is able to do things a human can’t. “For them to be able to calculate things like the bullet drop and trajectory and windage … It’s a very difficult thing to do for a person, but for a computer, it’s pretty easy,” he says. “And so we predetermined where the shot needs to land so that when they pull the trigger, it’s going to have a high likelihood of intersecting the path of the drone.”

    ZeroMark makes a tantalizing pitch—one so attractive that venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz invested $7 million in the project. The reasons why are obvious for anyone paying attention to modern war. Cheap and deadly flying robots define the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Every month, both sides send thousands of small drones to drop explosives, take pictures, and generate propaganda.

    With the world’s militaries looking for a way to fight back, counter-drone systems are a growth industry. There are hundreds of solutions, many of them not worth the PowerPoint slide they’re pitched from.

    Can a machine-learning aim-assist system like what ZeroMark is pitching work? It remains to be seen. According to Anderson, ZeroMark isn’t on the battlefield anywhere, but the company has “partners in Ukraine that are doing evaluations. We’re hoping to change that by the end of the summer.”

    There’s good reason to be skeptical. “I’d love a demonstration. If it works, show us. Till that happens, there are a lot of question marks around a technology like this,” Arthur Holland Michel, a counter-drone expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, tells WIRED. “There’s the question of the inherent unpredictability and brittleness of machine-learning-based systems that are trained on data that is, at best, only a small slice of what the system is likely to encounter in the field.”

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  • The Age of the Drone Police Is Here

    The Age of the Drone Police Is Here

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    Both individuals asked not to be named, citing privacy concerns.

    The west side, on the other hand, is densely populated, and residents tend to be poorer and tend to be born outside the United States. According to US Census data, nearly half of households on the west side earn approximately $55,000 a year or less—making many of them eligible for free or reduced-price meals at California schools—compared to 19 percent of households on the east side.

    Norell Martínez, a 60-year-old professor of English and Chicana/o Studies, has lived on the west side of Chula Vista her entire life. A first-generation immigrant, her parents migrated from Tijuana, Mexico, to Chula Vista when she was a year old. “A lot of people on the west side share a similar background as me; it’s a diverse community,” Martinez says.

    Some of the blocks in Chula Vista with the highest exposure to drones are located near launch sites, which happens to be where Martínez lives: a block and a half from police headquarters on a street that is among the safest on the west side. Since July 2021, however, drones have flown overhead at least 959 times, amassing nearly five hours of footage from the sky above her block.

    Before the drone program started, she says, her neighborhood was quiet. Now the sound of the rotors keeps her up at night. “We pay a lot of money and make a lot of sacrifices to have a little tiny piece of property that’s ours,” she says. “It feels like our home is not ours anymore. It’s like it belongs to the Chula Vista Police Department.”

    In September 2016, police in El Cajon, a small city northeast of Chula Vista, fatally shot an unarmed man named Alfred Olango. His sister had called the police because Olango, who had a history of mental illness, was acting erratically. “I called you guys for help, not to come kill him,” she cries in a Facebook Live video filmed in the parking lot of the strip mall where the officers minutes earlier had shot her brother. “Why couldn’t you tase him? I told you he was sick.”

    The incident—which sparked widespread protests—would become central to the CVPD’s story of how its Drone as First Responder program spun to life. “Would the ability to have eyes on this incident before uniformed officers arrived have prevented this?” retired Captain William “Fritz” Reber, the architect of Chula Vista’s drone program, wrote in an October 2019 blog post about the DFR program for the law enforcement publication Police1.

    It appears that the city was considering deploying drones well before police killed Olango, however. Public records and statements made by the CVPD show that police formed an Unmanned Aerial Systems Committee to “study the use of the technology in its public safety operations” in December 2015—nearly a year before Olango’s death.

    The UAS Committee’s meeting minutes, obtained through a public records request, show that it met three times starting in September 2016 to discuss the logistics and plan the rollout of the DFR program. From the outset, community engagement and a press strategy were central to its approach. “We need to include the media and community more,” a note from a November 2016 meeting reads. “This should be done to prevent any appearance of deception or secrecy.” At a September 14 meeting, the committee scheduled its first public forum for a date nearly two weeks later: September 27—the day police killed Olango.

    City officials say that prior to launching the program, the CVPD received “strong support from the community” during public forums where it detailed plans for the DFR program. The CVPD did not respond to detailed questions about its community outreach prior to launching the program and has yet to fully respond to WIRED’s request for records from these forums.

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  • The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer

    The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer

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    The United States Department of Justice is quietly prosecuting a novel Espionage Act case involving a drone, a Chinese national, and classified nuclear submarines.

    The case is such a rarity that it appears to be the first known prosecution under a World War II–era law that bans photographing vital military installations using aircraft, showing how new technologies are leading to fresh national security and First Amendment issues.

    “This is definitely not something that the law has addressed to any significant degree,” Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in national security, tells WIRED. “There’s definitely no reported cases.”

    On January 5, 2024, Fengyun Shi flew to Virginia while on leave from his graduate studies at the University of Minnesota and rented a Tesla at the airport. His research focused on using AI to detect signs of crop disease in photos. Shi’s subject that week wasn’t plants, however, but allegedly the local shipyards—the only ones manufacturing the latest generation of Navy carrier ships in the country, and nuclear submarines as well.

    According to an affidavit filed by FBI special agent Sara Shalowitz in February, a shipyard security officer alerted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to Shi’s actions. The affidavit alleges that on January 6, Shi was flying a drone in “inclement weather” before it got stuck in a neighbor’s tree. When Shi, who is a Chinese citizen, approached the neighbor for help, he was questioned about his nationality and purpose for being in the area. The unnamed resident took photos of Shi, his license plate, and his ID, and called the police. The affidavit alleges that Shi was “very nervous” when questioned by police and “did not have any real reasons” for flying a drone in bad weather. The police gave Shi the number for the fire department and said he would need to stay on the scene. Instead, he returned the rental car an hour later and left Hampton Roads, Virginia, abandoning the drone.

    When the FBI seized the drone and pulled the photos off its memory card, they discovered images that special agent Shalowitz said she recognized as being taken at Newport News Shipyard and BAE Systems, which is a 45-minute drive away. The affidavit states that on the day Shi took the photos, the Newport News Shipyard was “actively manufacturing” aircraft carriers and Virginia class nuclear submarines.

    “Naval aircraft carriers have classified and sensitive systems throughout the carriers,” the affidavit states. “The nuclear submarines present on that date also have highly classified and sensitive Navy Nuclear Propulsion Information (‘NNPI’) and those submarines even in the design and construction phase are sensitive and classified.”

    The DOJ is charging Shi with six Espionage Act misdemeanors under two statutes: one banning photographing a vital military installation and one banning the use of an aircraft to do so. Each misdemeanor can result in up to a year in prison upon conviction. While he awaits trial, Shi is restricted to living in Virginia under probation. He was forced to surrender his passport. According to court filings, he appears to require a translator.

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  • Welcome to the Laser Wars

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    The age of the laser weapon is finally upon us.

    The United States Army has officially sent a pair of high-energy laser weapons overseas to defend American troops and US allies against enemy drones, the service recently revealed, marking the first publicly known deployment of a directed-energy system for air defense in military history. And, according to a top official, those weapons are actively blasting threats out of the sky.

    The weapon, known as the Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) and developed by the American defense contractor BlueHalo based on the company’s 20-kilowatt Locust Laser Weapon System, first arrived in an unspecified location overseas and “commenced operational employment” in November 2022, according to an April press release from the company. A second system arrived overseas “earlier this year.”

    While the Army initially declined to indicate where the P-HEL systems were sent and whether they had achieved a “kill” against an adversary drone, citing operational security concerns, the service’s top acquisition official recently confirmed that the new laser weapons had in fact succeeded in neutralizing incoming threats in the Middle East.

    “They’ve worked in some cases,” Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics, and technology, told Forbes this month. “In the right conditions, they’re highly effective against certain threats.”

    News of the P-HEL’s deployment comes as the US military seeks to aggressively bolster its air defense capabilities amid a dramatic increase in drone and missile attacks against US troops by Iran-backed militias in the Middle East, as well as against US Navy warships operating in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels in Yemen following the October 7 attack in Israel by Hamas.

    Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the US Defense Department has been slowly but surely hinting at the use of laser weapons downrange. But the arrival of the P-HEL in the Middle East for operational use is a technological victory for the US military, which has actively pursued research related to directed-energy weapons since the 1970s. Even more significantly, it may also represent a tipping point for the development and use of laser weapons more broadly by militaries around the world.

    BlueHalos LOCUST Laser Weapon System

    BlueHalo’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System (LWS) combines precision optical and laser hardware with advanced software, artificial intelligence (AI), and processing to enable and enhance the directed energy “kill chain”.Photograph: BlueHalo

    Light at the End of the Tunnel

    Following its creation in 1960 by American engineer and physicist Theodore Maiman, the laser—technically an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”—almost immediately became a futuristic weapon of choice among both science fiction writers and military planners. This wasn’t surprising: While Maiman touted the potential scientific applications of his discovery when he first unveiled it to the country later that year, the laser immediately conjured up visions in the public consciousness of the Martian “heat ray” from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, so much so that many of the contemporary headlines from its debut were variations of the Los Angeles Herald’s “L.A. Man Discovers Science Fiction Death Ray,” according to Jeff Hecht’s book Beam: The Race to Make the Laser. “In reality, the laser was more of a Life Ray than a Death Ray,” Maiman would later recall thinking of his invention’s medical applications, according to his memoir.

    The Pentagon began exploring the military applications of lasers almost immediately, from relatively practical uses like designators for laser-guided bombs to more far-fetched concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, also known as “Star Wars.” But only in the past few decades has the underlying technology advanced to the point where laser weapons are effective against their intended targets.

    In the mid-2000s, the Air Force successfully used its Boeing 747-based YAL-1 airborne laser to defeat ballistic missiles in flight during tests, while the Army’s Humvee-mounted Zeus-HMMWV Laser Ordnance Neutralization System system deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq to zap landmines, improvised explosive devices, and unexploded ordnance. By 2014, the Navy’s AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was successfully disabling drones and small boats during testing from the bow of the Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Ponce in what the service billed at the time as the world’s first “active laser weapon.” (When the Ponce was decommissioned in 2017, the LaWS’s successor system, the Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator, was installed on the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Portland, which successfully tested it in 2020 and 2021).

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  • Amazon’s Delivery Drones Won’t Fly in Arizona’s Summer Heat

    Amazon’s Delivery Drones Won’t Fly in Arizona’s Summer Heat

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    How Amazon’s service fares in the desert could end up underscoring the natural barriers to making a solid business out of drone deliveries, at least absent technological advances. “We won’t take orders when the temperature gets above 104 degrees,” Calsee Hendrickson, a director of product and program management for Amazon Prime Air, told Phoenix’s 12News in a broadcast interview late last month. “We realize that is going to limit some of our operations in the afternoon hours in the summertime, but you’ll still be able to get your packages in the morning.”

    Asked for comment for this story, Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson told WIRED that the company’s “plans for Tolleson include regular deliveries during the summer months so customers can shop with drone delivery year-round. Any claim to the contrary is wrong.” Stephenson did not dispute that Arizona’s summer climate would limit delivery periods.

    Unique Climate

    Amazon met virtually with Tolleson officials a year ago to begin the process of vetting the city as a potential drone site. Tolleson’s economic development director signed a nondisclosure agreement last March barring the city from talking about the discussions, according to a copy WIRED obtained through a public records request.

    At a city council meeting last month after Amazon unveiled its plans, Tolleson Mayor Juan Rodriguez said the company chose the West Valley city out of 1,000 options, according to the city’s transcript of the session. Amazon representatives at the meeting donated $12,500 to a local nonprofit that helps fund education and basic aid initiatives and posed for a photo with an oversize check, Rodriguez, and other local leaders .

    Drone delivery proponents such as Rodriguez tout its potential to take vehicles—and the emissions and accidents that come with them—off the road. For consumers, under an hour from order to delivery can be an attractive proposition for items that are suddenly needed at home ASAP, or to fulfill whimsical desires.

    No organized opposition to the drone plans in Arizona has emerged so far. But in other communities where Amazon and other drone delivery programs have tested, local residents have worried about noise pollution from the buzzing machines, along with the potential for them to become surveillance tools—though leading operators say that’s not their intention.

    As one Tolleson city council member asked at last month’s meeting, the potential loss of driving jobs to the flying bots can also be concerning. For now, Amazon’s project will see the company add to its staff of 750 full- or part-time employees in Tolleson, hiring personnel to watch over the four drones that could be flying at once, a company representative told the council. But as the technology matures and regulations ease, so could manual oversight.

    The MK30 drone that Amazon is seeking permission for is smaller and lighter than its predecessors, with more sensors and software to navigate around obstructions and into denser areas on the preplanned routes it would fly. It can venture out up to about 7.5 miles from its home base, hit a maximum speed of around 65 miles per hour, and soar as high as 400 feet in the air. Light rain shouldn’t be a problem.

    Other cities with drone deliveries have been more temperate. Weather data compiled by Time and Date show summertime daily highs tend to average under 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 degrees Celsius, in College Station, Texas, where Amazon has ongoing drone operations, and Lockeford, where Amazon last month said it is giving up on drones. Alphabet’s Wing locations in Australia and Texas have similar climates.

    Amazon has said it is eyeing expansion to Italy, as well as a return to the UK this year after abruptly winding down large parts of its project there in 2021. Scorching temperatures also shouldn’t be a season-long issue in those countries.

    Rodriguez, Tolleson’s mayor, couldn’t be more excited about the drones and the boost in sales tax revenue if they increase shipments out of his city. “They’re pretty awesome, to be honest with you,” he told fellow council members about the drones, citing his deep dive into the technology on YouTube. It seems Amazon could have at least one eager customer—weather permitting.



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