Maybe we could have a prize for whoever trashes the thing first? Or maybe gets control of it with some supersonic gizmo and sets it on its masters? Brilliant idea let battle commence my wager is on AR activists.

Hehe, I reckon environmentalists. The reason being, if AR people did it, it'd be some kind of "conspiracy to blackmail", "intent to harm the contractual relationships of an animal lab" or "SOCPA" charge. If other activists did it, probably just a slap on the wrist! :P Just look at things like office occupations / office demos - somewhat no-go for us AR activists yet environmentalists seem fine to do it? (or at least, much less serious!)

AR activists could do it on some other demo in disguise :P

laser pens may damage the camera, a supersoaker may be intresting or some sort of net?
if only guns were legal im thing or going pro NRA!

they are called quadrocopters - quite a big thing in germany with enthuiasts. I know someone who builds them for a hobby and asked how they fly. Its not actually as complex as i thought. Generally they have four motors that are controlled via a feedback look based on 2 accelerometers using a small control board (so all the system is written in software). The tilt of the machine is measured and then each motor's power is adjusted to put it back in a level position. This is done about 50 times a second, resulting in the machine remaining stable. Its a bit like balancing a spinning plate on the end of a pole - lots of tiny adjustments. Gyroscopics sensors are used to measure the 0 tilt point but they are too slow for a feedback system, so the accelerometers are used with these. To move from a hover position, a false tilt reading is just biased into the calculation to deliberately make it tilt in a certain direction.

Many people have put in a GPS sensor in so you can leave it fly hands-free within a 3meter bubble whilst the operator controls the camera. I imagine it would be too difficult to fly depend way points making it pretty much automonous. Pretty exciting stuff which im sure we'll see as you wouldn't even need an operator. Perhaps they can even just deploy them without any specialist there.

By trying to tamper with it you will be putting people's live at risk if it did plummet out of the sky.
But be prepared to say sorry for making someone suffer from severe learning difficulties for the rest of their lives and to payout for their homecare if it brains somebody in a crowd.

All three: animal and earth liberationists who are anti-fascist.

If you mean which type of demo I'd put my bet on anti-capitalist rather than a passive animal rights protest, a fluffy environmental spectacle or a liberally militant anti-fascist demo.

Unless it's another G20 or Smash EDO event let's face it, it's unfortunately very unlikely!

Just for the comedy value, fit ones of these with a mini heli cam

 http://www.buzzflyer.co.uk/RC-Helicopters/ESky-Co-Comanche/p-70-639/
 http://www.buzzflyer.co.uk/RC-Helicopter-Accessories/Cameras/Mini-Heli-Video-Camera/p-90-109-341/

or any of these heli's which you can add colour & audio cam
 http://www.rcscale.co.uk/eshop/products.php?id=6

Just for the comedy value, fit ones of these with a mini heli cam

 http://www.buzzflyer.co.uk/RC-Helicopters/ESky-Co-Comanche/p-70-639/
 http://www.buzzflyer.co.uk/RC-Helicopter-Accessories/Cameras/Mini-Heli-Video-Camera/p-90-109-341/

or any of these heli's which you can add colour & audio cam
 http://www.rcscale.co.uk/eshop/products.php?id=6

To Anarchist and @:
That's the three type of activists in your universe is it - AR, antifa and green? Pah!

To Rufus:
Quadrocopters are helicopters with four rotors. When used with a camera and microphone as a remote surveillance device it seems fair to call them drones. You get full GPS functionality on a single chip nowadays so lots of hobbyists have been adding GPS to all sorts of model flying machines into what are effectively UAVs. It is handy for getting a lost (or jammed) aircraft back to a preset location, so you can't just jam signals if you are wanting to disrupt these, you have to broadcast stronger control signals - which isn't as hard as it sounds.
Your safety note is important, a falling drone would be a head injury risk to innocents. These drones do fail and occassionally fall from the sky without interference so the real risk, the major legal and moral risk, is by whoever chooses to fly a device above a crowd that will one day drop onto that crowd. How would you recommend circumventing these devices?

To Stratergy Time
That's the stuff, and those strategies need testing. I'm still fond of potato guns too.
Bear in mind though it is better to steal the aircraft - and perhaps reuse it on the side of good - than just damage it. An Indymedia reporter published photos of the trial here including the operators equipment. Now bear in mind if you had the same transmitter with the same codes and were closer to the plane, you could land it at your feet. You may not know how to progress that but someone at your local technical college will.

Danny all can say is that if you think your group is gonna win get out do it!!!!!! (animal rights enviromental and antifa where the first groups to come in to my head) But by all means prove me wrong.

Think a few folk have plans in place already, see

 http://fitwatch.blogspot.com/2009/08/fit-at-red-white-and-blue.html

I'd say they are quite vulnerable these things. Which is probably why they are a bit careful where they deploy them...

 http://www.gpsworld.com/gps/system-challenge/the-hunt-rfi-776

 http://www.google.co.uk/products?hl=en&as_q=barnett+pro+diablo&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&scoring=p&as_occt=any&price1=19&price2=28&show=dd&safe=active

Yes, I was thinking something like that or distress flares. Both are very useful for other things too. More fun could be had though by taking along your own radio controlled model aircraft and knocking it out of the sky in a dogfight.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_interference

Hand Held Van Der Graaff Generators! Lots of static
 http://www.firebox.com/video/1991

If you just jammed the GPS at a site then the operator would land the aircraft using the remote. If you spoofed the GPS then you could get it to land where ever, but that's expensive kit required.

Sling shots and any other 'anti-aircraft flak' have to be used realising the law of gravity and Murphys law -what goes up will come down, and it'll come down on someone you don't want it to come down on top of.

Maybe barrage balloons. Maybe fireworks at least for smoke cover at height. For a planned mass event in the country, you could try using cheap kamikaze model aircraft to attack their aircraft.

It's a serious problem but it is a fun problem too, it is amusing to view it as a group challenge.

The Animal Rights approach will be to find out who the manufacturer is and vandalise their car and home while sending pissed off letters to their board of directors, their shareholders, their banks, their neighbours. Every so often they will break into one of the factories and liberate hundreds of the drones, which they will fit with solar panels and AI chips before releasing them into the wild.

The environmental approach will be to highlight the true lifetime carbon footprint of UAVs through a series of chat-show friendly 'proud to be posh' protestors. They will take action to disrupt amateur model aircraft clubs, since all short haul flights are evil, and they'll offer to save the police electricity by carrying carrying the UAVs around with them at their events.

The antifascist approach I suspect will be to treat any low flying UAV as a poor-mans clay-pigeon, since they are just stool-pigeons in the sky.

The anarchist approach would be to hack a subroutine into the GPS on a chip so that police UAVs can be used to dive bomb the factories that produce them.

"The Animal Rights approach will be to find out who the manufacturer is and vandalise their car and home while sending pissed off letters to their board of directors, their shareholders, their banks, their neighbours. Every so often they will break into one of the factories and liberate hundreds of the drones, which they will fit with solar panels and AI chips before releasing them into the wild."

Not such a bad idea as you might think, depending how big a part of the companies business production of these drones is a few AR style actions might just stop the supply of any new ones. If the current ones were 'liberated', then that would be the end of it. Theoretically anyway. lol

So much for jumping to false presumptions. I just answered the question. No I don't think activists are either eco/animal/anti-fascism, that would be ridiculous! The three examples do however theoretically include all social activism, but not represented in the best way.

Apologies @

You said it would be the anti-capitalists who got the first police UAV. I've never really known any anti-capitalists, though I've known plenty of pro-anarchists or pro-communists even, but they survived in capitalist countries, often with credit cards and such capitalist devices.

I get exceptionally sick of people forgetting the British people are at war with the Afghan people for some unknown reason, that British teenagers coffins and Afghani toddlers unmarked graves are ignored by the media - independent and mainstream. The best action in the UK over the past ten years was the Derry Raytheon action, which was an anti-war act - fuck hanging banners, sling some serious computers out the windows. Cost Raytheon some of their bloody lucre, purely on moral grounds

I squirm with embarrassment when I read greens like [self-censored] spout shite about how this decade is the environmental decade and the 1960's was the anti-war decade when he, and many others, used the peace movement as a stepping stone without ever recognising war is the single biggest environmental failure, the most easily preventable stupidity. The current green movement would haggle with Hitler over the need for climate changing incinerator chimneys and the associated gases but not the actual slaughter. The past ten years saw the biggest grassroots marches in history against war, but we are still at war partly thanks to a government friendly long term misfocussing of all protest onto climate change at the expense of perhaps more urgent problems, even ecological issues like the protection of species.

Brings me on to animal rights. The AR folk have been the most demonised and targetted of peaceable activists for so long that they have some of the best techniques that they keep to themselves. I find it admirable that humans can look at a picture of a baby orang utan, orphaned in the corporate pursuit of cheap palm oil for the USuk consumer, can feel as much empathy as with the picture of the little Iraqi orphans in the corporate pursuit of crude oil. To me though, the fact the little Iraqi orphan can talk and explain how she feels makes the difference between her and any other species my society orphaned.

And then the AF, they take on some of the fascists, but there isn't AF near me and there are fighting-fit fascists who can raise five or six others in minutes by phone. Never mind that, you have to deal with local problems locally, there are bigger problems with AF. The AF are successful at keeping fascists out of power most of the time, but look at the politicians who do get in power.
I have had to argue, including in cop shops, that it is legal to call for Tony Blair to be assassinated because the wannabe assassins of Hitler were all subsequently pardoned. I hated Hitler because he was a business friendly 'leader' who launched merciless aggressive resource wars under false pretenses and committed acts of genocide, and I thus fail to understand why the AF focus so much on Griffin and not Blair and Brown who are committing the same crimes today.

None of these issues are mutually exclusive and they all overlap with war, so a better competition between those three movements would be to do the best anti-war action in your own style. I propose a prize for the best anti-war act committed by a 'self-proclaimed' green, AR or AF perp. If anyone can beat the Raytheon Derry action in my arrogant opinion then I personally promise to provide a relevant liberated UAV as a prize, whether that is the first liberated UAV or not. I'll try and get one of the big ones that fire missiles and rarely are visible if your anti-war action is that important. We could turn this into the Direct Action Olympics, with specialised events like the 100m race before climbing a 30m razor wire fence and another 100m sprint, then a judo tussle, then if you make it this far, you have to toss a computer, or perhaps throw a kitchen knife into mannequins masked with politicians faces.

Alternative challenge - build your own drone and use it to spy on cops.

Buzz it around New Scotland Yard or use it to spy on what they are up to in the lead up to big events. Or just hover it over top cops' gardens to check they are behaving themselves.

Drones reliant on GPS to remain in an envelope have already been bought down. Not so difficult. The technique is simple and just requires someone technical (such as Danny) to explain chaff. Then link the idea of chaff to the simple idea of childrens balloons, on strings.

They really are a good deal more sensitive to external conditions than their manufacturers would like you to believe. The joy of balloons is, no two are exactly alike. The consequence being that the operator spends more time in control activities than in recording activities. They stay in the sky but they are useless. Thus tying up both the technology and the technologist.

Then all you need to do is work out how the balloons can actually bring the thing down. Hint: do not use rubber ones.

Chaff is tiny metal filings, the stuff on the floor after metal work class at school, and light strips of metal foil. It was first used as an anti-radar device since a cloud of chaff looks like a solid object. A cloud of chaff effectively scrambles radio signals and any UAV that entered it would be solely reliant on it's IR LED horizon sensors and altimeter circuitry to get through it.

It also fucks up any electrical system not designed to be resistant by shorting out circuits, and was used by the USAF to short-out powerstations in the invasion of Iraq. A bag of chaff thrown into the air would be an effective way to destroy all the computers in a data centre for instance. One easy way to produce a bag of light aluminium chaff quickly is to snap hundreds of CD's and DVD's inside a sealed bag, discarding the plastic.

I presume 'Passing Shopper' is proposing tetherered helium balloons that can release chaff when an UAV is near (or perhaps, more simply, so many metalised balloons at various heights to achieve the same effect). A bag of chaff attached to the balloons with a release cord, or the chaff could be inside the helium balloon meaning you could just burst the balloon to release it, perhaps with an air-rifle.

I like the idea of lots of helium balloons on (seven-strand multicore wire) metal tethers. The cables would be a physical obstacle, but you could also use the cables to transmit radio signals. If you had the right radio signals copied from the base unit then you could land it, as even small signals close to the UAV will override or jam the distant operators remote control, or at least confuse it. You could even just temporarily electrify the cables when a UAV was close, assuming they were insulated to a safe height.

The more direct approach is to locate and interrupt the operator, and three recievers scanning the appropriate bandwidth would be able to triangulate the UAV operators location.

Another way to spread chaff at height is by adding it to fireworks, which have the advantage of spreading smoke at height that will interfere with surveillance. Even a water rocket could disperse chaff at height.

I was at one green event where a real police helicopter was used to disrupt the event, hovering literally outside of someones bedroom at one point. When they get that low, super-soakers and bean-bag guns come into play.

'Janus' suggests using activist UAVs, and again it has been done to a degree but should be done more often. Mark Thomas' TV show had a RC helicopter fitted with a camera looking over the fence at a military base, careful not to stray into the 'no-fly' zone directly above the base. For work like hunt-sabbing such a device would be perfect.

I'm already working on enough electronic hobby projects (traffic light changers, dog and horse repellers, paint throwers) but I've met enough green anarchos who have the Electrical&Electronic qualifications to do any of this, and it does sound like a fun challenge that when successful once or twice will inhibit police spending on redundant UAVs.

 http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-114.htm

The BLU-114/B detonates over its target and disperses huge numbers of fine carbon filaments, each far smaller than the crude wire spools used in the gulf war. The filaments are only a few hundredths of an inch thick and can float in the air like a dense cloud. When the carbon fiber filaments dispensed from the BLU-114/B submunition contact transformers and other high voltage equipment, a short circuit occurs and an arc is often created when the current flows through the fiber, which is vaporized. The graphite, which is a conductor of electric current, is probably coated with other materials to enhance these effects. At the spot where the electric field is strongest, a discharge is initiated, and electrons rapidly form an ionized channel that conducts electricity. At this stage current can flow and an arc forms. This causes instantaneous local melting of a certain amount of the material at the surface of the two conductors. If the current involved is strong enough, these arcs can cause injury or start a fire. Fires can also be started by overheated equipment or by conductors that carry too much current. Extremely high-energy arcs can cause an explosion that sends fragmented metal flying in all directions.

Other forms of cheap and cheerful chaff - finely shredded crisp packets or better yet small strips of kitchen foil.
Tiny polystyrene bits painted with metallic spray paint.
Metallic thread.

'stratergy time' mentioned laser pens could damage the camera. Those lights can also damage the horizon sensing Infra red Light Emitting Diodes which are also CDD coupled. On most cheap UAVs these sense the horizon by measuring the heat difference between the earth and the sky and are one of the main control inputs. I don't know what will happen if it is hit, but in theory it'd be much more likely to crash.

Here is a cool homemade laser pen project that will do more damage to these devices - or could even burst a balloon or light a firework at distance which may be handy for several related purposes:  http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/272/90/

The chances of hitting a distant moving target are tiny, though if you don't want to have to "Trust in the Force, Luke" then you could spread the beam.