Terrorists and criminals can access drone technology just as easily as anyone else Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty
A top UN official has warned that last year’s drone chaos at Gatwick Airport could be just the start of what criminals, terrorists and assassins could do with the technology.
Irakli Beridze, head of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) at the UN agency devoted to researching crime prevention, told the Telegraph that governments need to take the threat of drones “extremely seriously”.
Airborne or ground-based drones, he said, could be used for a range of purposes such as assassinations, terrorist attacks, simple theft or deliberate economic disruption.
“What happened at Gatwick is just a glimpse of what could happen worldwide, on a massive scale,” Mr Beridze said, speaking to the Telegraph at the Applied AI Conference in San Francisco.
“In Gatwick it was a remotely controlled drone, but this could happen in multiple locations simultaneously. And if we apply autonomous technology to the drones, it might be even harder to find, even harder to fight and harder to find solutions to it.
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“I don’t think we are there yet, but I think that technology is getting close to it. We should be taking this threat extremely seriously, and we should be finding solutions to it sooner rather than later – as soon as possible.”
Asked to consider a theoretical scenario in which terrorists program multiple drones with image recognition software to seek out and attack members of a specific ethnic group or gender, Mr Beridze said: “I think the scenario is plausible.
He also said he could not rule out the use of drones by protest groups to cause disruption, such as the Extinction Rebellion protest against climate change which has occupied Parliament Square, Oxford Circus and Waterloo Bridge in London and led to more than 500 arrests.
Mr Beridze is the head of the Centre for AI and Robotics at Unicri, a UN agency which researches emerging criminal methods and advises member states on how to fight them. He was speaking at the Applied AI Conference in San Francisco.
The reported sighting of a drone at Gatwick Airport shut down all air traffic for 33 hours last December, delaying or cancelling around 1,000 flights and trapping thousands of people in the airport just days before Christmas.
Chris Woodroofe, Gatwick’s chief operating officer, has said he suspects that the drone operator was an insider who knew how to cause maximum disruption by playing a cat and mouse game with police.
That case involved no direct attacks, but drones have also been used by terrorist groups such as Isil and Hizbollah in Syria as well as, allegedly, by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Last year two drones carrying explosives were used in an attempt to assassinate the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.
A Telegraph investigation found in January that just one of Britain’s major outdoor sports facilities had fully adopted technology to track and shut down hostile drones in their airspace.