 Noon on Thursday folks. Ted Rawson here with our show Where the Drone Leads at Think Tech OE Studios. Pardon my forgetting what the show was named. It's been two weeks since we've done this show. Margie and I were down in New Zealand in our own ways leaving quite an impression on New Zealand and as a result we had two dark weeks the last week with no show. And we were back on and welcoming on one of our frequent flyers and friends in San Francisco, John Mullen from Mea, Inc. John, you there? Hello, yes. How you doing? Okay, pretty good John. There you are. And with the change of time in our show to Noon on Thursday, we actually get you in your core hours of your business which is kind of a nice break from asking folks to stick around after closing hours as we have done before. Anyway, we've had John on many times talking about various aspects of droneism. And the one that's really interesting going on right now is a sort of a combination of the counter drone efforts going on, drone identification, and how this all plays into the larger game of evolving cyber operations and cyber security. Untangling all that, and this is new information John just came out this week. FAA has put in a very high priority the creation of a system that will give an electronic signature outputting from every drone that's flying probably like an AIS on board ship or ADSB out on airplanes, something like that. Some form of electronic identification, electronic fingerprint identification of the drone, the operator, other information that will come into the front here. So every drone will be putting that out on an RF signal. Sometime here, I don't know when it'll start. The design work is going on now. A number of options that exist that would provide that. That really changes the whole picture on our counter drone work. And I wanted just to reflect that back to you and in terms of thinking about how that does influence our counter drone work. Your thoughts? Sure. Sure. Well, one of the things is the different kinds of RF frequencies that the drones use. And if we are countering commercial drones, then we can assume the unlicensed bands, the standard 2.4, 5.8 sorts of bands. But if we are assuming there may be terrorists that are homegrown or military drones, then it's different. So it'll be interesting to see which band and what's the regulatory requirement for the identification. Because that will probably mean additional RF capabilities on drones. So because not all of them are going to be able to communicate in all components. So maybe the next step will also be standardization of ground control RF frequencies. You know, who knows, right? Well, that's right. And in fact, RTCA is working on that very subject, the whole issue of spectrum and RF management for drones. And we don't hear much about them. It's kind of a, that's an operation over there in DOC. But this whole notion of now putting out a fingerprint identification tag electronic on your drone also leads to a lot of social issues in terms of, okay, who's allowed to know that I'm flying a drone if I'm flying a drone? And exactly what information do I put in there? And I think ideally it would get down to the point where a cell phone app of some kind would be able to perceive that signal coming down so that law enforcement, public safety people, fire fighters and such could gain that knowledge and go figure out what's going on and go correct the situation if there's a situation that isn't correct. However, I don't think we have anything like this out there. We have license plates on cars, which just are reflective. We have license plates on bikes, motorcycles or such and name, address on our house and our mailbox. We don't really have anything that I'm thinking of that that I can be aware of this electronic that puts out a lot of information identifying who we are. We are airplanes and ships do, of course, but in our common life, we don't have that sort of thing. Well, even even sailboats, large sailboats will, but then there's always been the issue of people faking that. They've been spoofing that for a long time. And then if you know the freighters, the big oil tankers, because of the cost of licensing at ports, over the years, you've caught many times you'd have like seven or eight Liberian freighters in different parts of the world, all with the same name and all with the same number. So that they didn't have to pay seven different fees, you know. So there's been a lot of a lot of games played with this and there can be. And like you say, somebody could pick it up and know who's flying that drone or and then also as you know, if you get up on the internet and you start to look at who's hacking things, almost any kind of frequency can be hacked by that software defined radio. And there's videos showing how to hack into police bands and how to hack into cell phones and how to hack anything, a garage door opener, you know, so I'm sure that'll be coming too. So all those things are happening. But by and large, I think the majority of people will do it right, hopefully, right? I think so. I think that the what we'll find is the people who simply purchase them and use them without proper knowledge are going to be identified. That's a good thing. People who are willing malicious agents who are manufacturing their own and putting in their own command and control systems, they're not going to do it. So the the the by and large, the bulk of the public that's that's using these today will be protected and identified. Obviously, still, we have the issue of the serious malicious offenders and such. And I think our work in counter grown continues because we're going to still need to sort those issues out. Definitely, certainly. And and those are maybe the worst, you know, so there's certainly nuisance with the public and and, you know, press events and things like that. But but the guys that are really coming after you to do real damage are are not, as you know. So, right, they're not going to cooperate. They don't cooperate today. Well, they might they might cooperate to fake it. You see, right? To begin, if you take the even the civil side where everything is working fine, and you just expand how many drones there could be and how many reports could be going on, you could think of a like a weather map of the US or all the activities going on. And you get some interesting patterns and trends, I think out of that, which I supposed to be useful to somebody. But it does once again, beg the question of of exactly how far does this want to go in terms of identification and who gets access to it? How can that access be controlled? And if it's an RS signal, it accesses there, right? You really can't live unless it's encrypted. Yeah, well, that's true. But look at what happens with with license plates. You can see the license plate ABC 123. That doesn't mean you get to know that person's name or address. A long time ago, you could actually look that up a long time ago in California. But but for a long time, you haven't been able to they restrict access. So there are ways you can still have a readable identity string that police can see and other people can't identify. And I think the drones have to be compared to cars, because it's the only thing I can think of that is so pervasive and ubiquitous, that's going to be everywhere. And then you've got license issues, you've got safety issues, you've got legal issues, you've got identification issues, you got those are all handles, and we have a template for doing that in every, every aspect of the cars. So I think at least from a mental point of view, that's a way to go. Well, that's great. So people have been taking license plates to and that doesn't mean it happens that often, but it does happen. And so as this thing evolves, that was all the wind up. Here's the delivery. Would you like to be involved in consulting on this particular subject from the perspective of cybersecurity and such as this as this notion evolves? Certainly. Okay. Yeah, no doubt about it. But like, like you said, the devil's in the details, and it's often with the humans, not the technology. Oh, right. Policy, you know, and enforcement. But yeah, great. No doubt about it. It has to be done. And it's, it's critical. So anyway, that's kind of a really interesting piece of news here that we've all been wondering how it's going to happen. And frankly, I don't know what the motivation was in Congress or in the FAA that generated this this need. I mean, we all can see it, but there has to be some forcing functions, some, some orders written in this sort of thing to take it into an action. And I wish I knew more about it than that. It kind of snuck up on us all. And I was surprised to find this out this week. But all we'll see we can do it again involved through you on the on the advisory aspects of this because I think the work that you do would be really useful as as this functionality comes around. There are Bluetooth, you know, on some drones and phones have Bluetooth. So that's kind of on your way to doing what you said earlier, the police identifying. So that is one, one potential. Okay. And then that then leads to the larger issue of drones and as a component within the largest cyber network. Now if we can find them all, or at least those that are cooperative. Now we have a new addition to the picture of of interactivity in the country, we have this new picture. And one could look at that as one could look at any aspect like disease or any other thing that has a pattern has a growth rate and it has vectors and such and one could begin to see patterns of how this all works. And it sort of knocks on the door of cyber, to me anyway, and it puts drones in a place where they're involved with the power grid, for example, or with the infrastructure, those kind of patterns could be identified or recognized. And perhaps there's a function there in terms of defying where adverse activity is taking place, even in a cooperative sense. That is, if you're making movies, and you're using drones to record the footage and such, you certainly don't want to have somebody else out there with his drone recording that same movie for free. Or if you're fighting a fire, or if you're make maintaining your power lines and this sort of thing, or seeding corn in your field. That's your business, not somebody else's business. So in some way, there's a there's a piece here that can come up in terms of identifying whether any adverse patterns are occurring, even again, with people who are operating in terms of the RF signature. Sure. Well, if you look at the way the FA worked all along, and you know this much better than I do, they really assigned responsibility to the pilots, because pilots kind of were the light these and they were the ones who did it. And if you look at the last couple years, there's been rules that you can't fly a drone, a commercial drone anyway, unless you've got a pilot's license. And I think, as you said earlier, let's find out what drone this is. And then also who's flying it. And now you've got a chain of responsibility. You see, and you also have a license capability, you've got a fine capability, you've got to, you can pull their license, you've got all sorts of things. If you go in this direction. Well, you know, but I agree with you about the cyber mapping, you know, keeping people a lot of what also is the noise, especially the quadcopters are so loud, they interrupt religious ceremonies, as you know, they're Hawaii and, and other things. So there's lots of different dimensions. I think when you said earlier about a temporary like you could put up, I'm going to hold this space this square mile for the next four hours or two days, and I don't want any drones coming there. Well, the right kind of network could handle that, and could keep people out of that. So I think that's going to be something that is on the kind of on the fringe of people's rights and such. But I think it's important. And I think that a power company for sure, a petroleum plant, a hospital, for example, anything it should really find a way to define its own territory. And it should at least know what's going on there, let alone patrol it and protect it. So that is so somewhere between cyber and operations. But I think we'll see that capability coming forth once we have this is indicator coming down. The next one I immediately think about is how high you get the right kind of drone up, you know, 2000 feet with a good camera. Nobody knows that the drone's up there, but he's taking all the pictures. So, you know, I know that what is their limit, I guess there's a 200 foot limit. And then there's a couple of them, but look, look at that's a really interesting point. I'm glad you brought that up. Look at back to that after our break here. I wanted to bring up that aspect of expectations that people have. And also the point you made about the FAA using aviation thinking as a framework here and and talk about those after we get back from our break. Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of Eyes on Hawaii. Make sure you stay in the know on Hawaii. Join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then. Aloha. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? A dive heart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Dive heart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, dive heart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Dive heart has helped them transition to their new normal, search diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. You're watching Think Tech on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts five live talk shows from noon to 5pm every week day, and then streams our earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. It is afternoon on Thursday night, folks. Ted Rawson here in the Think Tech Studios downtown, the second half of our show where the drone leads as we spin the show back up after two weeks of no show. With me from San Francisco coming in by Skype is John Mullen, CEO of Promia, a leading company that thinks through the really hard and complex problems of cybersecurity. And John, welcome aboard again. Thank you. And just before break, we were talking about two really interesting subjects. One was the, we got into the privacy issue, which we don't often get into. But I think it's important that we do that here. Second is, we'll talk about first is the, the really cleverness FAA has used in turning drones into a component of aviation. And in my view that goes this way, by having a getting an airman certificate, which is what you get when you're a drone operator, you take this an airman certificate and put you into that class called Airman, who are supposed to have full knowledge, full understanding and full responsibility and full liability for operating your equipment in the national airspace. And unlike the other categories of operation where a lot of specific rules and codes and limitations are provided. In the drone world, it's really up to you to understand what risks are facing you and mitigate all of them. And as a result, there are no or there are very few hard and fast rules. It's basically your obligation to understand whatever it might be and mitigate against that. And that puts the responsibility totally on the operator. And also, if you were to fail in that obligation, you get your license taken away, your certificate taken away, you can't operate. So it's a real strong motivation to understand what that means. But this isn't something that we train or teach in in the normal parts of our life. We learn how to drive a car, we have certain rules, speed limits, and the car stays on the road and things like that. But the total picture of what issues you might be getting into in a car are are so controlled by rules that you don't really have this decision making process you have to go through like you do in drones. But you mentioned 400 feet before the break 400 feet, who's going to measure 400 feet? You know, there's issues that come up that that that that test your ability to really process potential faults and such we're doing some work adjacent to an airport out here in Hawaii. Actually, we're permitted to operate near an airport because it's class G airspace. However, logic would say, we really need to make sure we've talked to everybody who operates at that airport and understand all the deviations they might go through, because those are possible things will occur. And we have to pre mitigate against those, as opposed to just asserting our right. So I think that's maybe the difference. In aviation, you mitigate and you think through very carefully and eliminate all faults, rather than assert your way through. And asserting our way through is how we conduct ourselves and most of the rest of our business and our life. So that's a change that people are going to have to think about. And I bring that up to you because the issue of maintaining your correct electronic signature on this electronic downlink is going to be something that you're obligated to do as a drone operator. And it, of course, sets a stage for somebody who isn't performing properly to be have his license pulled. And I think more than the license pulled, just like in driving down the street, you can either have criminal things where you do something wrong that hurt someone else, or that breaks a flat law, or you can have civil torts and civil wrongs committed with no contract, which is a another sort of exposure. So it's not just losing your license. And once they know who you are, and they can demonstrate, you did this, or you didn't do that, then there is more exposure. And unfortunately, that's not a very good way to govern or have policy. But as you pointed out, that's what we have to do here. Because every situation is different, and you have to mitigate the possibilities. So the more we can make these devices automatically do certain behaviors, the easier that's going to be. But we're on our way, still, still early. It's a great partnership between the technical team. So I have to go forward and make things perform correctly under ASTM and under RTCA and then the operators who have to learn this new way of thinking. There was a case, the case law actually is where all these things start coming up, right? That's where where reality occurs. And the first one of big record was in the Seattle and was just announced a couple of weeks ago. Some video photographer was doing a parade with the drone, lost control of it, the drone hit a building and drone parts came down on the parade crowd and injured two people. And so in that case, the operator was found, he hadn't mitigated the potential risks of his drone hitting a building hadn't figured out how to do that or what to do about it. And was therefore liable. And I think he's got a year and $10,000 plus medical costs that he has to take care of right now I'm sure it's being being contested. But that that was the starting point. So we'll see that more but then the other piece you mentioned a noise and disruptions and such. I think part of what that guy that operator has to understand is what the rules are the expectations of public has of their privacy and their rights and their their rights to not to no disturbance, their rights to no observation. And so that'll be a factor as well. If they won't take care of that, that's on the civil side, I think where that sort of issue will come up. But yeah, to the extent that you express yourself in public today, whatever that limitation or that freedom as you have is how you define yourself by your external expression and observation, that can't be altered by drones. So observation, listening, irritating, penetrating, all those things are, are a deviation from that. And it will be a cause for for action under various forms of civil rights, or or privacy evasion. Yeah, I don't know how many times you've been hiking up in the mountains and had somebody walk by with a very loud music blasting as they're hiking up in the mountains. It's kind of irritating. I mean, that that's something you're not going to, you're not going to litigate, you're not going to, you know, call the police. But it's usually you just talk to somebody and say, put your headsets on or something. And then you can listen to your music and I can listen to quiet, right? So, but it's, it's something that has to be worked through. There's that. Yeah, and certainly, the boombox in the mountain is a situation. And actually, interesting enough, in Hawaii here, the state of the city parks have had rules on, on decibels of recorded music and musical instruments and all the sort of things. So that issue has been addressed, at least in the parks. And I suppose it could be extended to the mountains if we if we had a serious issue there. But I think even even the drones, even with regulations and such are still going to be that gray area between when something is actually is prosecuted versus just trying to get somebody to get somebody to cooperate. Sure. Well, I hope the drones get quieter. How's that? Yeah, well, I hope they do too. I was, yeah, we've actually, my wife and I have been have had that experience already. And it isn't, you know, you kind of wonder what, who's up, what's what's going on here? And I really want that ID tags, like I look at my cell phone app and figure out who it is, and go and talk to them. Yeah, yeah, the vertical takeoff landing, the fixed wings seem to be quieter and longer. Those quadcopters are the buzzy ones from my experience. Plain old aerodynamics that's propulsive lift is always a lot noisier burns a lot more fuel is about one fifth the efficiency of wing borne operation. So there's the factor right there. And that turns into into into tip speed on the props and turns into power consumption and that turns into noise. So it all all fits. But you're right, they are and some of them, some of them are really noisy. And you can hear them on a hundred feet without any problem. Yeah, I wish they would copy Owl's wings. So you can't even hear them at all. My expertise. I think we're a long ways away from a Bernoulli type of flapable wing on a on a on a mechanical device. So John, the other other subject we often talk about is cybersecurity and and trends and such that are going on there again, we talked about the role of drones as being an input to the cyber system and maybe even a corrected measure when we think of discovering and discovering information and such. But in terms of the general processing of cybersecurity and the emergence of quantum computing as such, what do you see going on here in that in that future? Well, quantum is a major, I think my humble opinion, it's the biggest change in computing since the original computing machine, since the original digital machines, I think, and you know, there's been many, many advances in computers, but this is more than any of the my opinion. This is a bigger scale effect than the then going from analog to digital in the first place. I think so. I think so. It's very strange. And I think many people who are currently in the business of computing are not going to be able to make the shift. The operating environment is is very odd. The programming environment is very odd. The operational environment, the networking environment is very odd. So it's going to be a whole different world. But that's that's definitely one piece of it. And the reason that people usually give for the immediate knee-jerk reason is because of the speed of these machines to solve simultaneous mathematical problems, they can crack crypto readily. That's that's the theory and it's being proven now. And then if you if you have two of these quantum machines, they're talking to each other, then their crypto link is supposed to be very close to being unbreakable. So so if you're asynchronous, where you have one trying to attack our current computers, it's no battle at all. And then if you have two of them, then so that's that's very important as far as all of this goes. And then also the whole thing about jamming and the electronic warfare, I think those two electronic warfare and cyber are melding very quickly here, where you've got the RF signals, as well as the data inside those RF signals, and different layers. So we're going to see a wholesale change in in in thinking and that has to come first, and then followed by programming, and followed by applications, you can't even imagine what they are at this point in time. Can you this going to be generated kind of think of holographs, instead of talking to each other instead of video like we're doing right now, being able to see and move and touch around. I mean, there's certainly that that's only on the very shadow scale. I mean, you know, when you're dealing with different kinds of mathematics, you deal in many, many, many, many dimensions, and many, many unknowns, not just three, four, five, seven, 10, 15, but hundreds. And so that's kind of where we're going. So the world of modeling and simulation, then could take a shot in the arm in this direction as well. Definitely. And that's all the good stuff. But because I do defense a lot, I think of the bad stuff. And so in that way, you don't need a whole lot of people to know how to do things, you just need one bad person knows how to do certain things, and he's got a problem. So, you know, those are the things I kind of gravitate towards, but you're right. As far as the upside goes, it's it's, there's no no boundaries, it seems. One of the things I've been thinking about for a long time and others have been to is some kind of a virtual test range that would be useful for examining really complex systems like 500 drones over Honolulu, for example. How's that going to work? And there's so many variations, so many variables, and so many variances that need to be accommodated. It's not that's beyond the ability to think through it in a linear fashion. So modeling and simulation would be useful in examining how this whole drone world is going to be forthcoming. And I think the quantum computing would create the framework that would allow that high level of variation to be accommodated in modeling. Certainly, no doubt about it. I think that's why I gravitate always to the RF because generally, you have 500 drones, but they're in one or two spectrums, even if they're skipping, even if they're split spectrum, you still can focus on them and get one kind of control point for all of them. But as you say, if they're all indifferent, and they're in different areas at different times, then boy, it's a total crap shoot, I guess. So we have to design a system that accommodates that. And I think the only way to design is going to be with really intense modeling and simulation that can represent these 500 different individual actors. Right. Interacting and communicating or not even with malicious input or rain coming through, for example, or something like that. There's a lot of functionality that this emerging world of quantum computing will give us on a good side. I take it back to when what we used to call mini computers first came out because I was working with the mainframes a long time ago. And then we started to see the PDP 1170s and the Digital Equipment Corporation and some of these things that they were only used in risk-based machines, that they were only really used for scientific calculations, because that's how they're Fourier. That's their forte and how they did things. Whereas the the bigger mainframes were more business machines moving data from one place to another. And I think that's where these quantum are going to come out first is scientific processes of weather, weather pattern, water, pipe or water on ocean or, you know, the complex things with many, many, many variables. And we'll think of where they play very well. And the cool thing there is that kind of a capability, we can we can accommodate millions of drones out there collecting information feeding into the system and getting that oceanography picture, that bathymetry picture, that coastal geology picture in a big gigantic way. That's right. And also, as you have the submersible drones, you get it layers down to the bottom. So I have the others. Yeah. Okay, well, John, thanks so much for coming on as we got this show started again here. And we're at the end of our half hour. But I'd like to suggest that the next time we have a new piece of information like either something of the equivalent of quantum technology or quantum computing or the electronic fingerprint, we bring you back on again and see what that's going to do to the future of drones and how these all tie together into the cyber network. Looking forward to it. Okay, John, thanks a lot. See you all next Thursday.