In the new music video from OK Go, the band uses a drone with a camera to capture some fantastic footage. Businesses, artists, and hobbyists are using drones for a variety of purposes. But, the rock group didn’t film the music video in the United States. They filmed it in Japan and one possible contributing factor is that filming the video in the U.S. may have been illegal. The laws and regulations governing drones are still being sorted out by authorities. Both state governments and the federal government have started to take notice of the problem. Civil liberties advocates have emerged in support for strong federal oversight of drone surveillance to ensure that privacy is protected. Others argue that states and their preexisting privacy laws are already equipped to deal with nongovernment drone surveillance.

Photo credit: OK Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU

State Privacy Law

Wells C. Bennett’s recent report Civilian Drones, Privacy, and the Federal-State Balance describes how most state privacy laws could be applied to drone operators. Most states offer three general types of privacy protections:

1. Protection against intrusion: Common law that makes it unlawful for a person to trespass on someone else’s property.
2. Protection against aerial surveillance: Laws in this category are either criminal or civil in nature and aim to specifically block aerial surveillance.
3. Anti-Voyeurism: These laws deal with “peeping toms” and other moments when people have an expectation of privacy.

Federal Aviation Rules

Those who believe that drones ought to be heavily regulated argue that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) should introduce strong new rules. In 2012 Congress has called on the FAA to develop new rules for drones by 2015. The FAA has long regulated aircraft of all types but the agency has less experience with privacy issues. In 2013, the agency selected six test sites where it would be legal to fly drones. The operators at these sites were required to abide by privacy rules the FAA created, which over time developed into a set of comprehensive standards. These standards ultimately remained applicable to test sites only as the agency was reticent to enforce privacy regulations for the whole country. However, the standards still serve as the foundation for the FAA’s roadmap to integrating drones into American skies and as a set of recommendations for policymakers.

The FAA’s reticence to regulate privacy creates a policy conundrum. Bennett proposes an approach that involves the states taking the lead with policy. The states already have a broad, legal framework that can be applied to privately owned drones. Where the states lack authority, Bennett suggests the Federal government can fill in the gaps. This mixed approach allows the states to use tested privacy laws and for the federal government to wait until it has the mission-critical data necessary to even begin crafting regulations for nongovernment drone surveillance.

Matt Mariano contributed to this piece.

Businesses, citizens, and law enforcement officials are discovering innovative new uses for drones every day. Drones have a distinctively menacing reputation because TV footage typically depicts them flying over a faraway battlefield launching missiles. In the popular imagination, drones have replaced the black helicopters of the 1990s and the satellite images of the 2000s as the primary surveillance tool. For this reason many perceive the drone as a threat to civil rights and safety in the United States. Privacy advocates have called upon lawmakers to pass legislation that keeps drones out of American skies. Others see a potentially beneficial role from drones if effective regulations are developed. In a recent paper titled Drones and Aerial Surveillance: Considerations For Legislators, Gregory McNeal proposes a model for how Congress should regulate drones.

Event Information

Cutting-edge technology has led to medical breakthroughs, the information age, and space exploration, among many other innovations. The growing ubiquity of advanced technology, however, means that almost anyone can harness its power to threaten national, international, and individual security. In their new book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat (Basic Books, 2015), Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum explore the potential dangers of modern technology when acquired by hostile groups or individuals.

On March 11, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted a book event to discuss the new threats to national security and the developing framework for confronting the technology-enabled threats of the 21^st century. In order to manage the challenges and risks associated with advanced technology, governments, organizations, and citizens must reconsider the intersection of security, privacy, and liberty. What does this mean for domestic and international surveillance? How will the government protect its citizens in an age of technology proliferation?

After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Audio

• Confronting national security threats in the technology age

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20150311_national_security_technology_transcript

Good afternoon Chair Ayotte, Ranking Member Cantwell, and Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today on the important topic of domestic unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

I am a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. I am also a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a professor at UCLA, where I hold appointments in the Electrical Engineering Department and the Department of Public Policy. The views I am expressing here are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of the Brookings Institution, Stanford University or the University of California.

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President Obama's announcement last month that earlier this year a “U.S. counterterrorism operation” had killed two hostages, including an American citizen, has become a fresh occasion for questioning the rationales for continuing attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles aimed at presumed, suspected, or even confirmed terrorists. This questioning is desirable, although not mainly for hostage-related reasons connected to this incident. Sometimes an incident has a sufficient element of controversy to stoke debate even though what most needs to be debated is not an issue specific to the incident itself. More fundamental issues about the entire drone program need more attention than they are getting.

The plight of hostages held by terrorists has a long and sometimes tragic history, almost all of which has had nothing to do with drones. Hostage-taking has been an attractive terrorist tool for so long partly because of the inherent advantages that the hostage-holders always will have over counterterrorist forces. Those advantages include not only the ability to conceal the location of hostages—evidently a successful concealment in the case of the hostages mentioned in the president's announcement—but also the ability of terrorists to kill the hostages themselves and to do so quickly enough to make any rescue operation extraordinarily difficult. Even states highly skilled at such operations, most notably Israel, have for this reason suffered failed rescue attempts.

It is not obvious what the net effect of operations with armed drones is likely to be on the fate of other current or future hostages. The incident in Pakistan demonstrates one of the direct negative possibilities. Possibly an offsetting consideration is that fearing aerial attack and being kept on the run may make, for some terrorists, the taking of hostages less attractive and the management of their custody more difficult. But a hostage known to be in the same location as a terrorist may have the attraction to the latter of serving as a human shield.

The drone program overall has had both pluses and minuses, as anyone who is either a confirmed supporter or opponent of the program should admit. There is no question that a significant number of certified bad guys have been removed as a direct and immediate consequence of the attacks. But offsetting, and probably more than offsetting, that result are the anger and resentment from collateral casualties and damage and the stimulus to radicalization that the anger and resentment provide. There is a good chance that the aerial strikes have created more new terrorists bent on exacting revenge on the United States than the number of old terrorists the strikes have killed.

This possibility is all the more disturbing in light of what appears to be a significant discrepancy between the official U.S. posture regarding collateral casualties and the picture that comes from nonofficial sources of reporting and expertise. The public is at a disadvantage in trying to judge this subject and to assess who is right and who is wrong, but what has been pointed out by respected specialists such as Micah Zenko is enough to raise serious doubt about official versions both of the efforts made to avoid casualties among innocents and of how many innocents have become victims of the strikes.

The geographic areas in which the drone strikes are most feasible and most common are not necessarily the same places from which future terrorist attacks against the United States are most likely to originate. The core Al-Qaeda group, which has been the primary target and concern in northwest Pakistan, is but a shadow of its former self and not the threat it once was. Defenders of the drone strikes are entitled to claim that this development is in large part due to the strikes. But that leaves the question: why keep doing it now?

The principal explanation, as recognized in the relevant government circles, for the drone program has been that it is the only way to reach terrorists who cannot be reached by other tools or methods. It has been seen as the only counterterrorist game that could be played in some places. That still leaves more fundamental questions about the motivations for playing the game.

Policy-makers do not use a counterterrorist tool just because the tool is nifty—although that may be a contributing factor regarding the drones—but rather because they feel obligated to use every available tool to strike at terrorists as long as there are any terrorists against whom to strike. In the back of their minds is the thought of the next Big One, or maybe even a not so big terrorist attack on U.S. soil, occurring on their watch after not having done everything they could to prevent it, or doing what would later be seen in hindsight as having had the chance to prevent it.

The principal driver of such thoughts is the American public's zero tolerance attitude toward terrorism, in which every terrorist attack is seen as a preventable tragedy that should have been prevented, without fully factoring in the costs and risks of prevention or of attempted prevention. Presidents and the people who work for them will continue to fire missiles from drones and to do some other risky, costly, or even counterproductive things in the cause of counterterrorism because of the prospect of getting politically pilloried for not being seen to make the maximum effort on behalf of that cause.

This piece was originally published by The National Interest.

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

The killing of Nasir al-Wuhayshi, reportedly via U.S. drone strike, is not just another notch in the belt of America’s long campaign against al-Qaida and its allies. Wuhayshi was one of al-Qaida’s top remaining leaders, and he is the highest-level death the organization has suffered since Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. Wuhayshi headed al-Qaida’s most active affiliate, the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and was the designated successor of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. His killing adds one more element of uncertainty to the turbulence in Yemen and may set AQAP on a new path. Which path, however, remains an open question.

Wuhayshi helped transform AQAP from a fractious organization on the edge of defeat to one that menaces both Yemen and the United States. A decade ago, Yemen’s jihadi movement seemed near defeat. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Yemeni government rounded up jihadis and imprisoned Wuhayshi, and it was Saudi Arabia, not Yemen, that was the focus of jihadis in the Arabian Peninsula. In 2003, al-Qaida sponsored the original AQAP’s uprising against the Saudi government. Several years later, most of AQAP’s Saudi members were dead or in jail, and its remnants had fled to Yemen. There, they mixed with Yemeni jihadis, including important figures like Wuhayshi, who had escaped from Yemen’s jails in 2006. In 2009, two regional Islamist groups merged and formally anointed themselves AQAP, basing their operations in Yemen and trying to unseat the government. As Osama bin Laden’s former secretary, Wuhayshi became the group’s leader and embraced al-Qaida’s emphasis on attacking Western targets.

The group made fitful progress, at times taking territory but often losing it quickly after alienating locals and proving vulnerable to government counterattacks. But when the government of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh fell in 2012 during the Arab Spring, AQAP tried to step into the void. Saleh’s successor, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, pursued AQAP vigorously, but his weak government was unable to score any lasting successes.

In addition to its prowess in Yemen, AQAP has long been al-Qaida’s most active affiliate when it comes to taking on the West. The organization was behind the 2009 Christmas Day attempt to down a U.S. airliner over Detroit, a near-miss only foiled by the bomber’s incompetence and the quick thinking of the plane’s passengers. AQAP tried again in 2010, this time attempting to down U.S. cargo planes. The organization also attacked Western targets in Yemen, and puts out Inspire, a stylish English-language online publication that is one of al-Qaida’s more effective attempts to influence Western jihadis.

These AQAP efforts to attack the United States and the West, in general, led to a greater U.S. focus on Yemen and more drone attacks there. In 2011, the United States killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and AQAP member who helped lead the terrorist group’s campaign against targets in the United States and Europe. Awlaki has continued to inspire terrorists after his death, with Boston Marathon plotters downloading his sermons before their attack. Awlaki also inspired the Fort Hood shooter in 2009 and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office in 2015.

Wuhayshi’s death, however, comes as Yemen is falling apart. Earlier this year, Hadi’s government fell to the Houthi rebels, Yemeni Shiites who oppose both Yemen’s traditional order and the Sunni fanatics of AQAP who see Shiites as apostates. Alarmed by Houthi ties to Iran, Saudi Arabia has led an intervention in Yemen on Hadi’s behalf, bombing the Houthis and trying to reverse their gains. AQAP seems to be flourishing amid the chaos, as its enemies turn on one another.

But with Wuhayshi’s death, AQAP may find it difficult to further exploit the Yemeni civil war. Personal connections, reputation, and charisma play a bigger role in leadership in the jihadi cause than do formal rank, and it is not clear if Qasim al-Raimi, the designated new leader, can retain the support of the AQAP rank and file. There is always a chance, of course, that Raimi proves an even more effective leader than Wuhayshi, and some observers see him as “more dangerous and aggressive.” (Lest we forget: In 1992, the Israelis killed Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi, one of the group’s most competent leaders. Musawi was replaced by Hassan Nasrallah, who has proven one of the most effective terrorist and guerrilla leaders in modern times.)

The bad news is that Raimi and AQAP may seek revenge, both out of genuine anger and to score points within the jihadi community. Al-Qaida’s chief bomb-maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, may still be out there and has likely passed his sophisticated techniques on to others in Yemen.

The bad news is that Raimi and AQAP may seek revenge, both out of genuine anger and to score points within the jihadi community.

Over time, however, Wuhayshi’s death may push AQAP to focus even more on Yemen and less on the West. His close, personal ties to the al-Qaidacore may have been part of why AQAP was a steadfast ally of Zawahiri in his power struggle with the Islamic State. The opportunities and risks in the civil war are both tempting and frightening for AQAP. On the one hand, by taking up arms against the hated Shiites, AQAP can position itself as the defender of Yemen’s Sunnis, a strategy that has worked well for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. AQAP might gain more recruits and local support, while drawing foreign fighters and money from Sunnis eager to find yet another Shiite-Iran axis to oppose. Not surprisingly, AQAP has stepped up its operations against the Houthis in recent months.

AQAP also has an opportunity to govern. And the bad news for the West is that it has learned from its own many mistakes on this front. In the past when AQAP made gains, it tried to impose a strict version of Islamic law that alienated local communities. Now when its fighters seize territory, theywork with local tribal figures and other elites, avoiding the most controversial measures and trying to portray themselves as guardians, not overlords.

Wuhayshi’s death also comes at a time when the broader jihadi movement is split between backers of al-Qaida and supporters of the Islamic State, a struggle in which AQAP has long played an important role. As al-Qaida’s most active anti-Western affiliate, AQAP was important to Zawahiri’s claim that he was leading the struggle against the United States. Its strength in Yemen, moreover, also expanded al-Qaida’s presence and prestige to an important part of the Arab world. Islamic State supporters have already conducted attacks in Yemen, and the death of Wuhayshi offers them a chance to expand their influence there. The core leadership of AQAP is not likely to join the Islamic State, but some of its cells and supporters could break off if Raimi proves a weak leader.

For now, Wuhayshi’s death means the United States has another point in the struggle against the jihadi movement. In the long term, successful disruption is more likely if the United States and its allies can keep the pressure on AQAP, forcing its leaders to go on the run and hindering their ability to communicate — particularly difficult challenges for a group in transition under new leadership. Wuhayshi’s death also comes on the heels of the deaths of several other AQAP members, including its top ideologue and spokesman. Having to hide also makes it difficult for the group to govern, as its exposed leaders run the risk of being killed. But AQAP has lost many leaders before, yet remains a force to be reckoned with. So at best, this should be seen as winning a battle, not the war.

Event Information

On September 30, 2011, the U.S.-born radical Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed by an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first extra-judicial killing by the United States government against a U.S. citizen. Placed at the top of a CIA kill list in 2010 by the Obama administration, al-Awlaki was known for his intimate involvement in multiple al-Qaida terrorist plots against U.S. citizens, including the 2009 Christmas Day airline bombing attempt in Detroit and the 2010 plot to blow up U.S.-bound cargo planes. His calls for violent jihad remain prominent on the Internet, and his influence has turned up in many cases since his death, including the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 and the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris early this year. In a new book, “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone” (Crown, 2015), The New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane, drawing on in-depth field research in Yemen and interviews with U.S. government officials, charts the intimate details of the life and death of al-Awlaki, including his radicalization, his recruiting efforts for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and the use of drone strikes by the United States to prosecute its counterterrorism goals.

On September 17, the Intelligence Project hosted Shane to examine the roles played by al-Awlaki in al-Qaida plots against the United States, al-Awlaki’s continued influence on terrorism, and the current state of al-Qaida today. Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Audio

• Anwar al-Awlaki, Yemen, and American counterterrorism policy

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20150917_awlaki_yemen_transcript

Also in this podcast: Russ Whitehurst discusses the cost of universal education for preschool, and David Wessel comments on the current state of the economy

"To use some of the time honored clichés, 'The enemy may get a vote too.' Or the Bolshevik line, 'You may not have an interest in war, but war may have an interest in you' I paraphrase that to say we may not, at the moment, have an interest in counterinsurgency and stabilization missions, but they may have an interest in us… we can't be like the ostrich putting our head in the sand just because we're tired of these kinds of wars. They might come back, whether we like it or not." says Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon about his new book, "The Future of Land Warfare."

After learning about the various scenarios that might necessitate land warfare, we'll hear Russ Whitehurst, senior fellow in Economic Studies and Editor of the Evidence Speaks project, discuss the cost of universal Pre-K. "The question is: what should the nation or states do to increase participation rates to a universal level?" Whitehurst asks in this project. "And what I've found by looking at the evidence is that actually people haven't provided very good evidence on how many children are presently served."

Also, stay tuned to hear expert David Wessel update us on one of the nation's most alarming economic problems – wage stagnation.

Show Notes:

• Read more about O'Hanlon's book, "The Future of Land Warfare"
• The future of the U.S. army
• Toward a "Reaganov" Russia: Russian Security Policy after Putin
• Obama the Carpenter: The President's National Security Legacy
• What role will evidence play in the 2016 election?
• Do we already have universal preschool?
• Why public school vouchers could have bi-partisan appeal
• Hutchins Roundup: wealth inequality, student borrowing, and more

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen on Stitcher, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

Good morning and welcome to the "future." At approximately 4:29 p.m. Hill Valley time on Oct. 21, Doc Brown and Marty McFly arrive at the present day. For many millennials especially, the 1985 film series Back to the Future represented the far-flung fantastical future that many dreamed would come. But how does the Reagan-era vision of a future where we don't need roads compare to our daily lives today?

Sadly, you probably came to work today on the same street you may have trodden as a child back in 1985 without a hover board. But our future is still pretty fantastic, and many of the outlandish futuristic devices you saw in the 1989 film Back to the Future II are closer than you think—or already here. Here are three predictions that the film made that today might actually turn the head of an ‘80s time traveler

Drone proliferation

When Doc Brown and Marty McFly arrived in 2015, the sky was filled with more flying cars than the drones that sometimes dot our skies, but the film did point to some potential uses for unmanned remote flying devices. In the future, the film envisioned drones for walking the dog and even remote photography drones reporting on the day's news. While drones today don't exactly fill these roles, that future is perhaps closer than you think.

"Private actors will soon operate drones in equal if not greater numbers than the government," Brookings Fellow Wells Bennett wrote in a report on civilian use of drones last year. Amazon has tested drones to aid in home and business delivery. CNN has been given clearance by the government to explore the use of drones for reporting. Even law enforcement and public safety officials have used drones to aid in policing and fighting fires.

The widespread use of drones in daily life is probably still part of our future rather than our present in 2015, but regulations for this future are being written today. Federal regulators just this week announced that recreational drones will need to be registered. Last year as part of our project on civilian robotics, Gregory McNeal offered his own suggestions for federal and state regulators on how best to tackle civilian drone regulations.

Cybernetic humans and wearable technology

In the 1989 film, Marty faces off against his son's cybernetic bully, Griff Tannen. The bullies of the present don't exactly resemble Griff or Locutus of Borg, but cybernetics is closer than you think—even resting in your palm right now.

Taking a walk through Hill Valley in the real 2015, a time traveler might see several pedestrians immersed in their smartphones or glancing at notifications on their wearable devices. In our homes, virtual reality is becoming more prominent as well. Systems like Oculus and Google Cardboard resemble very closely the remote television visors worn by Marty's kids in the future.

"The proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude that [cell phones] were an important feature of human anatomy," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2014 opinion referencing the cybernetic future we are living today. Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong acknowledge in their report on the emerging cyborg future that the connection we have with technology is becoming more personal. While surveillance laws of the past might make distinctions between human tissue and the devices we use in our daily lives, Wittes and Chong argue that perhaps the separation between the human being and technology in some cases is no longer there—and the law should adapt to acknowledge this.

Flying cars and the transportation of the future

The most-often panned prediction of the film is admittedly the most disappointing—there are no flying cars in our future. This has been a fantasy for even Baby Boomers who were thrilled by the Jetsons' view of the 21st Century. Flying cars do exist in a limited form, but they are more accurately described as ultra-portable planes that require a pilot’s license to fly. However, the future of transportation is even better than Marty or Doc Brown ever realized; they just needed to travel a few more years in the future to see it happen.

Driverless cars have the potential to be the biggest seismic shift in transportation that many of us will experience in our lifetime. Numerous automotive makers and even Google are preparing for the autonomous future. Imagine your vehicle circling the parking lot to pick you up after a film; traversing rush hour traffic to deliver your daughter to softball practice; even serving as designated driver on Friday night after drinks at the bar.

The future seems like a fantasy, but liability concerns about whom to sue when an automated vehicle gets in a fender bender—or worse—clouds this would-be future.

"While liability will always be important with respect to motor vehicle operation, automation will dramatically increase safety on the highways by reducing both the number and severity of accidents," writes John Villasenor in his report on how to tackle liability in the driverless era. Despite many reservations about driverless cars, Villasenor argues that current liability law frameworks would be well equipped to address concerns.

Of course, whether the DeLorean Motor Company will come out of mothballs and produce a driverless DeLorean remains to be seen.

Discuss the future's impact on the modern workforce

At least according to Robert Zemeckis, we've arrived in the future. Not that you’re here, join us at 2 p.m. Oct. 26 when we'll discuss one of the important consequences of all of this technological automation: its impact on the workforce and the availability of social benefits.

Technically, all of the Star Wars films occur a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but there are countless gadgets featured in the films that human beings in this galaxy can find here on Earth. Here are a handful of gadgets you will see this weekend when the seventh Star Wars film, "The Force Awakens," blasts into theaters.

Drone surveillance

The evil Galactic Empire has long employed drones and machines to do their dirty work. Way back when the empire was just a glint in Darth Sidious' eyes, his merciless apprentice Darth Maul used autonomous drones to search the desert landscape of Tatooine for fugitive Jedi. Later, when Darth Vader tirelessly searched the galaxy for Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance, he sent similar autonomous drones to countless worlds such as the ice planet Hoth.

Sure, the Empire may call them droids, but on the planet Earth these instruments are essentially remote drones you might see flying in cities or around your neighborhood. In the U.S. the use of unmanned drones to aid law enforcement is on the cutting edge of technology and sparks a spirited debate among privacy advocates. Should fear law enforcement as we would a Sith lord and thus burden them with a warrant-based, technology-centric approach to drone surveillance that might curtail the beneficial use of drones?

Gregory McNeal wrote last year in a Brookings report that a property rights-centric approach with limits on surveillance would best appease privacy advocates and law enforcement, enabling drones to protect privacy in ways even manned surveillance can't achieve. By crafting simple, duration based surveillance legislation, law enforcement would only be permitted to surveil a person for a limited amount of time. Additionally, data retention guidelines could limit the amount of time that surveillance would be accessible to law enforcement.

"Legislators should reject alarmist calls that suggest we are on the verge of an Orwellian police state," McNeal writes, as privacy advocates almost always invoke the the novel 1984 when technology makes surveillance more widespread and pervasive.

As McNeal points out, the police state is hardly as nefarious as Darth Vader, so sensible legislation may be enough in this case to keep law enforcement from falling to the dark side.

Holography

In the first Star Wars film, Princess Leia recorded a short holographic message for Obi-Wan Kenobi asking for his help delivering the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance. The droid R2-D2 recorded the message almost as succinctly as many of use record short videos on our cell phone. But when can we expect to send and receive holographic messages ourselves?

Barring some laughable election night hologram shenanigans on CNN, there have been some notable uses of holography in this galaxy. In 2012, the late rapper Tupac Shakur took the stage at the Coachella Festival with contemporaries Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. At the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, Michael Jackson performed on stage—five years after his death. These holograms were made possible by artful projections and reflections, creating convincing illusions suitable only for crowded concert halls. The technology is especially popular in South Korea where K-Pop performers regularly "perform" at virtual concerts to adoring fans.

But a bona fide hologram? Researchers at Swinburne University this year used lasers and a specialized graphene mesh to project 3D objects in the air very much like you would see in Star Wars. As TIME Magazine reported, "It’s not quite Princess Leia-quality, and researchers say it has a long way to go before commercialization, but it’s a step."

BB-8 Droid

Since the first teaser for the new Star Wars films, fans have had questions about the new droid character BB-8. Rather than resort to computer animation to bring the droid to life, director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm designers sought to produce a live prop that could portray the droid on film.

The filmmakers demoed the droid on stage at Comic Con to the roar of audience applause and delight—"It was the first official confirmation that BB-8 was not a CG creation, but rather, a practical effect."

The use of practical effects in "The Force Awakens" is a return-to-form for the filmmakers who have shunned the special effects and digital artistry of the Star Wars prequel trilogies and instead embraced the kinds of practical effects and puppetry that made the original trilogy so beloved.

The droid BB-8 even has a cousin here on Earth—the robotic ball toy Sphero. Inventors Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson have adapted their smartphone-controlled spherical toy into a BB-8 toy that performs many of the same practical effects the screen version of BB-8 does in "The Force Awakens."

As the new sequel trilogy continues, filmmakers are sure to wow audiences with amazing technologies—some we may even recognize from planet Earth.

Editors’ Note: Organized crime actors have increasingly adopted advanced technologies, with law enforcement agencies adapting accordingly. However, the use of ever fancier-technology is only a part of the story. The future lies as much behind as ahead, writes Vanda Felbab-Brown, with criminal groups now using primitive technologies and methods to counter the advanced technologies used by law enforcement. This post was originally published by the Remote Control Project, a project hosted by the Oxford Research Group.

The history of drug trafficking and crime more broadly is a history of adaptation on the part of criminal groups in response to advances in methods and technology on the part of law enforcement agencies, and vice versa. Sometimes, technology trumps crime: The spread of anti-theft devices in cars radically reduced car theft. The adoption of citadels (essentially saferooms) aboard ships, combined with intense naval patrolling, radically reduced the incidence of piracy off Somalia. Often, however, certainly in the case of many transactional crimes such as drug trafficking, law enforcement efforts have tended to weed out the least competent traffickers, and to leave behind the toughest, meanest, leanest, and most adaptable organized crime groups. Increasingly, organized crime actors have adopted advanced technologies, such as semi-submersible and fully-submersible vehicles to carry drugs and other contraband, and cybercrime and virtual currencies for money-laundering. Adaptations in the technology of smuggling by criminal groups in turn lead to further evolution and improvement of methods by law enforcement agencies. However, the use of ever fancier-technology is only a part of the story. The future lies as much behind as ahead (to paraphrase J.P. Wodehouse), with the asymmetric use of primitive technologies and methods by criminal groups to counter the advanced technologies used by law enforcement.

The seduction of SIGINT and HVT

The improvements in signal intelligence (SIGINT) and big-data mining over the past two decades have dramatically increased tactical intelligence flows to law enforcement agencies and military actors, creating a more transparent anti-crime, anti-terrorism, and counterinsurgency battlefield than before. The bonanza of communications intercepts of targeted criminals and militants that SIGINT has come to provide over the past decades in Colombia, Mexico, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world has also strongly privileged high-value targeting (HVT) and decapitation policies-i.e., principally targeting the presumed leaders of criminal and militant organizations.

The proliferation of SIGINT and advances in big-data trawling, combined with some highly visible successes of HVT, has come with significant downsides. First, high-value targeting has proven effective only under certain circumstances. In many contexts, such as in Mexico, HVT has been counterproductive, fragmenting criminal groups without reducing their proclivity to violence; in fact, exacerbating violence in the market. Other interdiction patterns and postures, such as middle-level targeting and focused-deterrence, would be more effective policy choices. 

A large part of the problem is that the seductive bonanza of signal intelligence has lead to counterproductive discounting of the need to:

1. develop a strategic understanding of criminal groups’ decisionmaking—knowledge crucial for anticipating the responses of targeted non-state actors to law enforcement actions; Mexico provides a disturbing example;
2. cultivate intelligence human intelligence assets, sorely lacking in Somalia, for example;
3. obtain a broad and comprehensive understanding of the motivations and interests of local populations that interact with criminal and insurgent groups, notably deficient in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; and 
4. establish good relationships with local populations to advance anti-crime and counterinsurgency policies, such as in Colombia where drug eradication policy antagonized local populations from national government and strengthened the bonds between them and rebel groups. 

In other words, the tactical tool, technology—in the form of signal intelligence and big-data mining—has trumped strategic analysis. The correction needed is to bring back strategic intelligence analysis to drive interdiction targeting patterns, instead of letting the seduction of signal data drive intelligence analysis and targeting action. The political effects, anticipated responses by criminal and militant groups, and other outcomes of targeting patterns need be incorporated into the strategic analysis. Questions to be assessed need to include: Can interdiction hope to incapacitate—arrest and kill—all of the enemy or should it seek to shape the enemy? What kind of criminals and militants, such as how fractured or unified, how radicalized or restrained in their ambitions, and how closely aligned with local populations against the state, does interdiction want to produce? 

Dogs fights or drone fights: Remote lethal action by criminals

Criminal groups have used technology not merely to foil law enforcement actions, but also to fight each other and dominate the criminal markets and control local populations. In response to the so-called Pacification (UPP) policy in Rio de Janeiro through which the Rio government has sought to wrestle control over slums from violent criminal gangs, the Comando Vermelho (one of such gangs), for example, claimed to deploy remote-sensor cameras in the Complexo do Alemão slum to identify police collaborators, defined as those who went into newly-established police stations. Whether this specific threat was credible or not, the UPP police units have struggled to establish a good working relationship with the locals in Alemão.

The new radical remote-warfare development on the horizon is for criminal groups to start using drones and other remote platforms not merely to smuggle and distribute contraband, as they are starting to do already, but to deliver lethal action against their enemies—whether government officials, law enforcement forces, or rival crime groups. Eventually, both law enforcement and rival groups will develop defenses against such remote lethal action, perhaps also employing remote platforms: drones to attack the drones. Even so, the proliferation of lethal remote warfare capabilities among criminal groups will undermine deterrence, including deterrence among criminal groups themselves over the division of the criminal market and its turfs. Remotely delivered hits will complicate the attribution problem— i.e., who authorized the lethal action—and hence the certainty of sufficiently painful retaliation against the source and thus a stable equilibrium. More than before, criminal groups will be tempted to instigate wars over the criminal market with the hope that they will emerge as the most powerful criminal actors and able to exercise even greater power over the criminal market—the way the Sinaloa Cartel has attempted to do in Mexico even without the use of fancy technology. Stabilizing a highly violent and contested—dysfunctional—criminal market will become all the more difficult the more remote lethal platforms have proliferated among criminal groups.

Back to the past: The Ewoks of crime and anti-crime

In addition to adopting ever-advancing technologies, criminal and militant groups also adapt to the technological superiority of law enforcement-military actors by the very opposite tactic—resorting asymmetrically to highly primitive deception and smuggling measures. Thus, both militant and criminal groups have adapted to signal intelligence not just by using better encryption, but also by not using cell phones and electronic communications at all, relying on personal couriers, for example, or by flooding the e-waves with a lot of white noise. Similarly, in addition to loading drugs on drones, airplanes, and submersibles, drug trafficking groups are going back to very old-methods such as smuggling by boats, including through the Gulf of Mexico, by human couriers, or through tunnels. 

Conversely, society sometimes adapts to the presence of criminal groups and intense, particularly highly violent, criminality by adopting its own back-to-the-past response—i.e., by standing up militias (which in a developed state should have been supplanted by state law enforcement forces). The rise of anti-crime militias in Mexico, in places such as Michoacán and Guerrero, provides a vivid and rich example of such populist responses and the profound collapse of official law enforcement. The inability of law enforcement there to stop violent criminality—and in fact, the inadvertent exacerbation of violence by criminal groups as a result of HVT—and the distrust of citizens toward highly corrupt law enforcement agencies and state administrations led to the emergence of citizens’ anti-crime militias. The militias originally sought to fight extortion, robberies, theft, kidnapping, and homicides by criminal groups and provide public safety to communities. Rapidly, however, most of the militias resorted to the very same criminal behavior they purported to fight—including extortion, kidnapping, robberies, and homicides. The militias were also appropriated by criminal groups themselves: the criminal groups stood up their own militias claiming to fight crime, where in fact, they were merely fighting the rival criminals. Just as when external or internal military forces resort to using extralegal militias, citizens’ militias fundamentally weaken the rule of law and the authority and legitimacy of the state. They may be the ewoks’ response to the crime empire, but they represent a dangerous and slippery slope to greater breakdown of order.

In short, technology, including remote warfare, and innovations in smuggling and enforcement methods are malleable and can be appropriated by both criminal and militant groups as well as law enforcement actors. Often, however, such adoption and adaptation produces outcomes that neither criminal groups nor law enforcement actors have anticipated and can fully control. The criminal landscape and military battlefields will resemble the Star Wars moon of Endor: drone and remote platforms battling it out with sticks, stones, and ropes.

An American drone strike that killed leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour may seem like a fillip for the United States’ ally, the embattled government of Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. But as Vanda Felbab-Brown writes in a new op-ed for The New York Times, it is unlikely to improve Kabul’s immediate national security problems—and may create more difficulties than it solves.

The White House has argued that because Mansour became opposed to peace talks with the Afghan government, removing him became necessary to facilitate new talks. Yet, as Vanda writes in the op-ed, “the notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.”

[T]he notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.

Mullah Mansour's death does not inevitably translate into substantial weakening of the Taliban's operational capacity or a reprieve from what is shaping up to be a bloody summer in Afghanistan. Any fragmentation of the Taliban to come does not ipso facto imply stronger Afghan security forces or a reduction of violent conflict. Even if Mansour's demise eventually turns out to be an inflection point in the conflict and the Taliban does seriously fragment, such an outcome may only add complexity to the conflict. A lot of other factors, including crucially Afghan politics, influence the capacity of the Afghan security forces and their battlefield performance.

Nor will Mansour’s death motivate the Taliban to start negotiating. That did not happen when it was revealed last July’s the group’s previous leader and founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died in 2013. To the contrary, the Taliban’s subsequent military push has been its strongest in a decade—with its most violent faction, the Haqqani network, striking the heart of Kabul. Mansour had empowered the violent Haqqanis following Omar’s death as a means to reconsolidate the Taliban, and their continued presence portends future violence. Mansour's successor, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s former minister of justice who loved to issue execution orders, is unlikely to be in a position to negotiate (if he even wants to) for a considerable time as he seeks to gain control and create legitimacy within the movement.

The United States has sent a strong signal to Pakistan, which continues to deny the presence of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network within its borders. Motivated by a fear of provoking the groups against itself, Pakistan continues to show no willingness to take them on, despite the conditions on U.S. aid.

Disrupting the group’s leadership by drone-strike decapitation is tempting militarily. But it can be too blunt an instrument, since negotiations and reconciliation ultimately depend on political processes. In decapitation targeting, the U.S. leadership must think critically about whether the likely successor will be better or worse for the counterinsurgency endgame.