Declan McCullagh wrote:
Or perhaps we'll see someone take a GPS-controlled small plane, which
can carry 1,000 lbs, and turn it into a flying bomb or delivery system
for something quite noxious. These planes can be rented by the hour at
hundreds of small to medium sized airports around the U.S. Though I
don't know if the autopilot is configurable enough to let an attacker
program it to head to a certain altitude at a certain location and
then bail out via parachute.
Another novel that came out with the idea - and the first one to explicitly mention GPS AFAIR - was "The Moon Goddess and the Son" by Donald Kingsbury from 1987 (incorporating parts from stories in Analog back in the 1970s) which has an Afghan refugee studying aero engineering in the US and setting up light planes to autopilot an attack on the Kremlin. (To be honest when I first heard the news about 9/11 that's what I thought might have happened - until I saw a TV screen I didn't realise they were passenger planes)
And of course it was in 1987 that the German teenager Matthias Rust flew a Cessna over the border into the USSR and buzzed Red Square, so it's not clear who had the idea first.
(I remember the name but not the year, so I used Google to find it.)
The general idea of using "asymmetric warfare," via RC planes, bombs, etc., is really not very new. Torching an enemy's village in the middle of the night is a time-honored form of asymmetric warfare, though the War Lawyers have been trying to force armies to wear Official Uniforms and march in Official Patterns.
--Tim May
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams
