What role does digital forensic intelligence play after a drone-related security breach?
When a drone is captured, the first thing investigators go after is the GPS and telemetry data. Where did it take off from? What path did it fly? Were there preprogrammed waypoints? Where was the operator? The Russians and Ukrainians have been particularly good at this. Both sides have built rapid forensic pipelines that extract and act on data within hours of recovering a downed platform. The second is supply chain forensics. Opening the drone up and looking at what’s inside: the flight controller, the motors, the camera, the battery, the communication chipset and which countries it originated from. Another is payload analysis. What was it carrying and what was it designed to do? A surveillance camera is a different story from a weaponised attachment.
Kaushal Bheda, Director, Pelorus Technologies
How prepared are Indian cities and critical infrastructure zones to handle coordinated drone-based threats?
The Indian Air Defence did an outstanding job during Operation Sindoor. But drone attacks can now originate from within the country itself and not just across borders. Operation Spiderweb, carried out by Ukraine’s SBU, is the clearest illustration. Drones hidden inside cargo trucks, launched from deep within Russia, simultaneously struck five Russian Air Force bases. One of them was Belaya, which is closer to Japan than it is to Ukraine. In my view, that is the lesson for India. What concerns me is that power grids, refineries, and other critical assets deep within the country may have very limited anti-drone coverage today. We need to urgently build layered bubbles of protection around these assets across the country’s interior.
What are the biggest technical challenges in detecting rogue drones in dense urban environments?
RF clutter is a significant one. Cities are saturated with wireless signals like cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, industrial equipment. Isolating a drone’s communication signature from that background noise reliably and in real time is difficult. Line-of-sight is another. Radar and optical sensors don’t work well when buildings obstruct coverage, which is why multi-modal detection across acoustic, optical, RF and radar working together is necessary.
How do you balance surveillance innovation with privacy and civil liberty considerations?
India has strong laws in place and follows due process. There is a robust legal framework covering authorised surveillance: what requires sanction, what oversight applies, how evidence is handled. What botheres me is that the debate always focuses on what data shouldn’t be collected. The question nobody asks is: do we have enough data to actually solve crimes? I would also push back on the assumption that privacy and surveillance are straightforwardly in opposition. The countries most vocal about civil liberties are the ones with the most extensive surveillance infrastructure in the world.
How critical is domestic R&D in reducing dependence on foreign surveillance technologies?
Both tracks have to run simultaneously. The argument that domestic R&D solves the foreign dependency problem is correct as a long-term goal. India should invest seriously in domestic R&D. But at the same time, we should buy best-of-breed international products where they fill a genuine gap. At the end of the day, an agency should have the best tools available to do its job, regardless of where they come from.
–author is Kaushal Bheda, Director at Pelorus Technologies
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