Partnership to aims to help law enforcement solve drone crime
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Since the start of the World Cup last month, federal law enforcement agencies have reported seizing more than 600 drones flying too close to the sites of tournament matches and fan zones.
Yet those seizures represent just the beginning of the necessary investigations to determine whether the operators of those UAVs were carelessly violating restricted airspace or doing so with much more hostile intentions in mind. In the latter case seizing the drone is only the first step in bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice.
Seeking to provide the key to helping law enforcement agencies collect the evidence needed to make their cases, SkySafe, a U.S. drone-detection and airspace-intelligence company, recently partnered with Israel-based Cellebrite, a provider digital of investigative and intelligence solutions.
The companies say their exclusive partnership will combine Cellebrite’s advanced digital forensics with SkySafe’s advanced drone detection technology.
“I think that the key thing here is that now there are a lot more things involved in investigations beyond just mobile phones, and drones are one of the critical ones that are popping up in more and more incidents,” SkySafe CEO Grant Jordan said in an interview.
He said that in addition to SkySafe’s drone awareness capabilities, the Cellebrite partnership will enable the company “to help in the investigative side, pulling all of the information about what that drone was doing, where have we seen it in the past, and merging that with the digital-forensic artifacts that come from that drone.”
David Gee, chief marketing officer at Cellebrite, said that for law enforcement officials, the investigative work begins once have they have the drone in their possession.
“Once the drone has been mitigated and you have the drone physically, we have a device that you attach it to, which does the access and extraction. So, you have some real-time data physically from the drone of whatever was in the drone’s memory,” he said.
“But what’s important here is also combining that with what SkySafe does, which is historical drone information, which is not just the information that’s physically on the drone, but the database and the records and the tracking that the SkySafe team have access to,” Gee said.
Combining the forensic data extracted from the drone itself with the information in SkySafe’s database allows investigators to get the historical references such as where that drone has flown, its ownership and other salient data points that go into an investigative process.
Cellebrite’s background in cell phone investigations
Cellebrite is a public company, listed on the Nasdaq, with a market cap of about $4 billion. Founded in 1999, for much of the past 20 years of its history, the company had focused on creating technology that enabled sanctioned law enforcement officials to be able to access, extract, decode and analyze data from mobile phones.
“Your phone is your digital twin. When something bad happens, we are a post-event technology, meaning your phone becomes part of an investigation,” Gee said.
Working with more than 7,000 law enforcement agencies, defense and intelligence organizations across the globe, Cellebrite uses its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software to accelerate more than 1.5 million legally sanctioned investigations annually.
In March, Cellebrite completed its acquisition of SCG Canada, a provider of hand-held digital forensics tools that enable access to more than 80 of the most commonly deployed UAVs. In much the same way that Cellebrite’s software allows it to extract data from cellular phones, SCG’s technology enables the company to perform extraction, decoding and visualization of millions of data points from seized drones.
“What we do is once the drone is down, we can interrogate that drone and understand: where it was, where did it fly, what did it do, did it go up, down, sideways, left, right?” Gee said. The software can determine, based on its acceleration-deceleration changes, whether the drone was carrying a payload and whether it dropped that payload.
Such information could prove vital in a case involving a drone suspected of dropping off a payload of contraband over a prison, for example. In another case, involving a drone downed after flying too close to a World Cup site, the software could help determine whether the pilot was simply an irresponsible teen hoping to get some cool aerial shots for his social media page, or if the UAV have overflown the same site a dozen or more times, indicating it was being used for surveillance for more nefarious purposes.
Technology expected to aid in rules enforcement
Jordan said the partnership with Cellebrite would enhance the suite of services that SkySafe currently offers its customers, many of whom are also customers of Cellebrite. He said this is especially true in the case of solving the growing problem of drones being used to deliver contraband into prisons.
“We’ve seen dozens of cases where our tracking and the forensics work have come together to solve and to prosecute cases where prisons have had drone incidents of smuggling,” he said. “That’s probably one of the most immediate high-impact areas that we’ve seen for bringing together these worlds of traditional digital forensics and drone-awareness technology.”
Another area in which the combination of airspace-awareness and digital forensics technologies is expected to have a more prominent role in the future is in protecting critical infrastructure sites from unwanted drone incursions, he said. He pointed to the FAA’s efforts to institute Section 2209, designed to allow owners and operators of important fixed sites to request that flight restrictions be imposed over their facilities.
“I think part of the way to think about this is there’s the question of overall awareness and management of our national airspace,” he said. “And then after the fact is the investigative side, the law enforcement side, where they are trying to actually enforce the rules of the road so that good operators can do their commercial operations with drones safely and the public can be safe.”
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
