In January of 2015, a hobbyist's two-foot-wide quadcopter crashed where it shouldn't have been flying at all - on the White House lawn. The 3 a.m. drone incident, the result of an inebriated off-duty government worker having a go with his buddy's DJI Phantom, triggered a lockdown of presidential grounds, a top-level national security investigation, and plenty of buzz about the potential threat unmanned aerial systems pose to everybody's security and privacy. A few days earlier, three pounds of fake explosives had been strapped to the same model copter at a Department of Homeland Security conference to showcase "how easily it could be used to launch an attack," The New York Times reported. In the months that followed, more errant drone mishaps ensued, including other flights too near to presidential quarters and revelations of dozens of close calls with commercial jets.
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