STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We ask about the underlying reality of a news story - the repeated claims of drones over New Jersey. In the old "Superman" show, the people of Metropolis call out, look, up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Superman. Speaking yesterday on ABC's "This Week," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says, in fact, many of the objects in the sky are just planes after all.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THIS WEEK")
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: I want to assure the American public that we in the federal government have deployed additional resources, personnel, technology to assist the New Jersey state police in addressing the drone sightings.
INSKEEP: In the cases where they might be a drone - so why all the mystery? Stacie Pettyjohn is following this. She is director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, which is a bipartisan think tank specializing in defense. Good morning.
STACIE PETTYJOHN: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Do you find Secretary Mayorkas basically credible when he says, maybe I can't identify what every single thing is, but this is not a danger?
PETTYJOHN: I do find his statement credible in this instance. I think that the sightings over New Jersey have gotten a bit overblown, and people are seeing drones everywhere, even when it is normal air traffic in the sky. But a lot of this stems from some deficiencies in the government in terms of being prepared to deal with a counter-drone threat, responding in a timely fashion so that people don't get worried, and also some of the difficulties just associated with identifying whether it is a drone and who is flying it and why they are flying it where they are.
INSKEEP: I guess the first question is whether the ordinary person would be able to tell what they're looking at if it's thousands of feet in the air. Is that obvious in every case?
PETTYJOHN: No, it's not. When it's really far away, it's very hard to identify it, especially at night. In most of the videos and pictures I've seen, it's hard to determine what you're looking at.
INSKEEP: Now, with that said, I'm thinking this through. And I gather it is sometimes impossible to prove - for the federal government to prove that this or that object was simply an ordinary aircraft and an ordinary flight pattern. And I want to figure that out because if there was an event in a convenience store, there's a security camera. It's being recorded. Somebody winds back, and they can see what happened. Is it not possible for the FAA to do that - to wind back and say, oh, that was an airplane? That's what we expected to be in that space at that time.
PETTYJOHN: I think that in normal altitudes where aircraft fly, which is much higher than most of the small drones, yes, they are tracking it, and they could wind things back. But they would have to correspond the sightings that they're getting from people using their phones, videotaping it or taking photographs with the air traffic, and that could be a pretty onerous task.
What they can't do is go back in time and necessarily look at the small drones because it's not clear that they had in place the technologies that are needed to identify them and to track them. And even if they did, they might be able to say it is a small drone 'cause they can see the radio emissions that connect it to its controller, but they're not going to be able to identify who is operating it after the fact. You need to find the person in real time.
You may be able to geolocate where they're sitting and where they're flying the drone from. But once they move and leave, they're gone, so the other option is catching the drone itself. So if you're able to disable it and force it to land, you might be able to exfiltrate some information and get a sense of what they were looking at and doing, but you still probably aren't going to be able to find the person who was flying it.
INSKEEP: I want to figure this out because it seems to me that drones flying overhead are now a fairly normal thing. Any time that I turn on the television and I see an overhead shot of a neighborhood or a town or whatever, that is typically just some journalist who launched a drone themselves. I've actually been part of a crew that has done that. There are plenty of reasons that people put drones up in the air. Isn't this an ordinary thing at this point in life?
PETTYJOHN: It is becoming an ordinary thing. I mean, I've played with drones myself, though there's not many places to fly them in the D.C. area. And I think people need to get accustomed to it, and part of the fear that you have right now is that this is something different. They're not used to seeing drones. They think they're frightening. They hear about them being used in Ukraine and in other wars. But in reality, most drones out there are used by hobbyists. You can go on Amazon and buy one for less than a thousand dollars. They're used in agricultural industry and for other various reasons, so people do need to become accustomed to seeing them. And the government also needs to adjust itself and its expectations so that it is prepared to identify them and to defeat those that are deemed to be a threat because this is a phenomenon that's not going away.
INSKEEP: Ah, interesting point. Something there could be dangerous at some time, and you think the Defense Department or - what? - Homeland Security - somebody should be ready to respond to that. In a couple seconds.
PETTYJOHN: All of the above. We need an interagency solution. There is a potential future threat. I don't think there's one right now in New Jersey.
INSKEEP: Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. Thanks for your insights.
PETTYJOHN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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