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Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Joining IEEE. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN Topic Type Feature History of Technology When New York City Was a Wiretapper's Dream Eavesdropping flourished after WW II, aided by legal loopholes, clever hacks, and "private ears" Brian Hochman 4h 15 min read A man wearing headphones aims a flashlight at some telephone wires in a dark basement room. Six months after a police raid revealed the existence of a massive illegal wiretapping operation in New York City, the movie Wiretapper was rolled out to theaters across the country. Although based on a different case, the movie built on the growing unease about eavesdropping triggered by the sensational revelations in New York. Great Commission Films/Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy On February 11, 1955, an anonymous tip led two New York Police Department detectives and two New York Telephone Company investigators to an apartment on the fourth floor of a residential building at 360 East 55th Street in midtown Manhattan. In the back bedroom of the unit, the group discovered a cache of stolen wiretapping equipment that turned out to have direct lines into six of New York City's largest telephone exchanges: PLaza 1, 3, and 5; MUrray Hill 8; ELdorado 5; and TEmpleton 8. The connections blanketed an area of Manhattan running from East 38th Street to East 96th Street, a swath of the city's most expensive real estate. "There wasn't a single tap-free telephone on the east side of New York," professional wiretapper Bernard Spindel remarked of the arrangement. (Spindel was in all likelihood the source of the anonymous tip.) News of the discovery made the front page of the New York Times a week later. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The midtown Manhattan "wiretap nest," as the 55th Street listening post came to be known, remains one of the largest and most elaborate private eavesdropping operations ever uncovered in the United States. Subscribers whose phones were tapped at the time of the raid included a range of New York commercial interests, with assets both large and small: a modeling agency and an insurance company; an art gallery and a lead mining company; and perhaps most sensationally, two publicly traded pharmaceutical corporations with competing patent interests. (The two firms, Bristol-Myers and E. R. Squibb, were at the time locked in a nasty legal battle over the commercial rights to the antibiotic tetracycline. Evidence later revealed that representatives from a third firm, Pfizer, had employed the wiretap nest to spy on both entities, paying more than $60,000 in cash for the service.) A woman in theatrical garb appears shocked by what she is hearing over a telephone. Burlesque artist Ann Corio was among the celebrities targeted by an illegal wiretapping operation in New York City in 1955.Bettmann/Getty Images Contrary to the popular image of the phone tap as either a technology of state surveillance or a tool of corporate espionage, the vast majority of the lines ensnared in the 55th Street operation turned out to be owned by private individuals. Some--like the burlesque artist Ann Corio, whose phone conversations were recorded in a dragnet search for incriminating information on prominent midtown residents--were the targets of blackmail. Others--like the New York socialite John Jacob Astor VI, who wanted someone to keep tabs on his wife--were involved in messy civil suits and divorce cases. By all accounts, the setup had the technical capacity to monitor as many as a hundred telephone lines at the same time. Between 50,000 and 100,000 individual subscribers were alleged to have been tapped over the course of fifteen months. A man in a double-breasted suit, arms folded over his chest, and with a haughty expression on his face, leans against a wall in a telephone kiosk. New York City private investigator and attorney John G. "Steve" Broady was convicted as the mastermind of the 55th Street "wiretap nest," the largest illegal wiretapping operation ever to come to light in the United States. Broady paid a high price: Besides being disbarred, he served the entirety of his four-year sentence in jail. Evelyn Straus/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images Four men were eventually indicted in conjunction with the raid on the 55th Street wiretap nest: John G. Broady, an attorney and private investigator; Warren B. Shannon, a freelance electrical technician; and Walter Asmann and Carl R. Ruh, two rogue employees of the New York Telephone Company. In the course of the ensuing criminal trial, Shannon, Asmann, and Ruh were all granted immunity in exchange for testifying against Broady, who emerged as the brains behind the operation. Broady ended up receiving an unusually harsh prison sentence--four years, twice as long as the penalty suggested by New York's penal code. At the close of the proceedings the presiding judge broke custom by publicly chastising the principals in the case: "In my many years as a judge, I have made it a rule not to excoriate defendants when imposing a prison sentence. However, the public interest requires some comment concerning this case. Illegal wiretapping is a slimy activity, which directly and adversely affects our social and economic life. It cannot be condemned too strongly." The gravity of the response to Broady's conviction only heightened the suspicion that there was more to the story than met the eye. A number of strange details from the early newspaper reports on the case remained unexplained at the end of the trial. The freelance electrician initially indicted for the crime, Warren Shannon, turned out to have been living in the apartment at East 55th Street for more than a year. Although he was at home with his wife when investigators arrived on February 11, no arrests were made, and no wiretapping devices were confiscated. When the NYPD returned to the scene a week later, much of the equipment used in the operation had disappeared. Considering the size and longevity of the 55th street operation (established, sources said, in December 1953), it seemed possible that NYPD officials were aware of its existence prior to the February 11 raid. Had dishonest cops agreed to look the other way in exchange for the ability to shake down local criminals via wiretap? Such an arrangement would certainly have been consistent with earlier grand jury inquiries into police corruption in NYPD gambling and vice investigations. The fact that the case involved New York Telephone employees only reinforced this conjecture. Bell system linemen were long rumored to have had a hand in the city's illegal wiretap trade. Tiny, cheap, and almost impossible to detect in action, induction coils were in wide use in wiretapping operations of all sorts by the late 1930s, and nowhere more so than in New York According to journalist Ray Graves, the attempted cover-up of the 55th Street scandal was the American public's first glimpse of "the 'Big A,' or The Alliance." Writing in the July issue of Confidential Magazine, he identified it as "a group made up of corrupt cops, telephone men, and expert illegal wiretappers in the private eye racket...[that] deals in outright blackmail, selling information, and...does much of its work for big businessmen who want to get the jump on a competitor." The midtown Manhattan tap nest was one of many private listening posts around the country ("Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Miami, and Washington all have wiretap centers comparable to the cozy set-up recently exposed in New York"), and the shadowy "Alliance" had a vested interest in keeping their workings under wraps. The rumors of conspiracy and corruption now seem far-fetched. But at the time, the story was plausible enough to occasion internal handwringing among Bell system providers. In a company bulletin dated March 9, 1955, New York Telephone assured nervous stakeholders that there was "no foundation" to national reports that there was a "corrupt alliance between telephone employees, the police, and illegal wire-tappers." Conspiracy or not, the 55th Street "wiretap nest" was itself an unsettling image. That four men could set up shop in a midtown apartment, commandeer an array of stolen electronic devices, and tap into thousands of lines servicing some of the most high-profile addresses in New York City--the story seemed to confirm creeping anxieties about the invasive reach of modern communications systems and their susceptibility to manipulation and control. A man with dark, closely cropped hair and wearing a glen plaid suit jacket smiles bemusedly. Anthony P. Savarese, a member of the New York State Assembly, headed a commission set up after the discovery of the 55th Street wiretapping operation to investigate the prevalence of illegal eavesdropping in the state.Queens Library To quell further public uproar, the New York state legislature in Albany appointed Anthony P. Savarese, an assemblyman with connections to the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, to convene an emergency joint commission on the illegal interception of electronic communications. Charged with cutting through the "miasma of hearsay" surrounding the tap-nest scandal and recommending corrective legislation, Savarese began his work in late February 1955. He filed a hotly anticipated preliminary report the following year. But the commission's official findings only served to bolster the sense that wiretapping was more entrenched and pervasive than the national debates had made it seem. According to the Commission's March 1956 report, the 55th Street scandal was the product of a host of developments that had made the New York telephone system "vulnerable to tapping:" technological advances that made phone taps both easier to plant and harder to detect; corruption among state police officers and low-level employees in the telecommunications industry; and the unfettered expansion of the private investigation field in the years following World War II. Yet the Commission's most enduring conclusion--echoed in later studies like Samuel Dash's influential 1959 report The Eavesdroppers--was that any honest effort to curb illegal wiretapping in America would have to start at the state and municipal levels. Excerpted from The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States by Brian Hochman, published by Harvard University Press (2022). To be sure, the failings of New York state wiretap law were legion. A comprehensive court-order system had governed the phone tap protocols for New York law enforcement agencies since 1938. Although many policy experts considered the system a model for federal wiretap reform, the Savarese Commission discovered that judicial oversight was easy to circumvent, and existing criminal laws offered the state little room to prosecute police officers who chose to tap wires illegally. The foundations of New York's laws against private wiretapping (i.e., wiretapping conducted by individuals acting outside of the state's "sovereign authority") were even shakier. The New York penal code prohibited any attempt to "cut, break...or make connection with any telegraph or telephone line, wire, cable, or instrument," a clear sign that wiretapping without the written permission of a state judge was a criminal offense. The problem was that the statute was written in 1892. Six decades' worth of technological advancements had all but rendered it obsolete--so much so, the Commission noted, that almost every attempt to prosecute illegal wiretapping in the state of New York since 1892 had failed on technical grounds. A man places an electronic device near a wire while a woman operates recording gear. Eavesdroppers started using induction coils to tap into phone calls in the 1930s. Here, technicians demonstrate the state of the art in 1940.FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images One major challenge to New York's 1892 wiretap law, frightful for midcentury observers to behold, was the rise of what was known as induction wiretapping, a newfangled eavesdropping technique that didn't require a physical connection to a telephone line. With the help of simple magnetic devices called " induction coils"--essentially spare radio parts, available at most any hardware store--the induction method amounted, somewhat paradoxically, to a wireless wiretap. In the words of one electronics manufacturer, "Simply slip [an induction coil] under the base of a desk phone or lay on top of a ringer box of wall phones" and achieve "optimum results.". Tiny, cheap, and almost impossible to detect in action, induction coils were in wide use in wiretapping operations of all sorts by the late 1930s, and nowhere more so than in New York. In part this was because the state's penal code had explicitly defined illegal wiretapping as an unwarranted physical connection to a telephone line. As the Savarese Commission pointed out, it was impossible to bring criminal charges against wiretappers caught using induction coils when they never so much as touched the phone company's equipment. The 55th Street operation had relied on wiretapping techniques that were more primitive than induction. But the Savarese Commission went to great lengths to show that even simple wiretap installations were impossible to prevent and prosecute according to the letter of the law. For most of the twentieth century, both private surveillance experts and law enforcement officials mostly relied on what was known as the direct wiretap method. As its name suggests, this technique involved connecting directly to the circuitry of the telephone system, either by scraping away the insulation along the route of a phone line and appending an extension wire, or by attaching an amplifier and headphones to a telephone junction box, where multiple residential lines met and joined the system's main frame. Direct wiretapping was tedious work that became both more and less difficult to carry out in the postwar years. More difficult, because installing a direct wiretap required the ability to find the subscriber's line and pinpoint the location where the tap wire needed to be connected. Identifying this location, known as an " appearance" point or location, became increasingly difficult as the telephone system expanded its labyrinthine reach. By World War II, telecommunications providers had also wised up to security concerns, adding locks to the most obvious direct tap locations, such as basement junction boxes. But direct wiretapping proved less difficult to carry out in this period for almost the exact same set of reasons. The sprawl of the telephone system also meant that communications hardware and infrastructure--and, more importantly, the employees who managed them on a daily basis--were impossible to oversee in their entirety. For the right price, the Savarese Commission discovered, anyone who wanted to find a line to tap could bribe a phone company employee for the relevant cable appearances, or even for direct access to the main frame, just as John Broady had when setting up the tap nest. The wiretapping statute was written in 1892. Six decades' worth of technological advancements had all but rendered it obsolete "90 per cent of all tappers today are old telephone company men," reported William J. Mellin, a retired government investigator who claimed to have tapped more than 15,000 lines during his forty years of work for the Internal Revenue Service. Mellin's estimate would have the ring of hyperbole if the Savarese Commission hadn't come to the same conclusion. What truly distinguished the Empire State in the 1950s--what made it America's " eavesdropping capital," in the words of the privacy law expert Alan Westin--was yet another loophole in state wiretap law, one that raised doubts as to whether the sort of wiretapping that the NYPD discovered at East 55th Street was even illegal at all. The loophole was the result of a curious court decision involving a Brooklyn businessman named Louis Appelbaum, who sued his wife for divorce in 1949. The evidence in the suit was partly based on telephone conversations that Appelbaum had permitted Robert La Borde, a notoriously prolific New York private investigator, to record on his home line. The presiding judge dismissed the divorce suit and went on to charge both Appelbaum and La Borde for violating the state's wiretapping law. Both men were convicted. But an appellate court reversed the ruling in 1950, reasoning that telephone subscribers maintained a "paramount right" to tap their own lines. The language of the appellate court's opinion in People v. Appelbaum (1950) was unambiguous in its support for what would become known as "one-party consent" eavesdropping: "When a subscriber consents to the use of his line by his employee or by a member of his household, or by his wife, there is a condition implied that the telephone will not be used to the detriment of the subscriber's business, household, or marital status.... In such situations, the subscriber...may have his own line tapped or otherwise checked so that his business may not be damaged, his household relations impaired, or his marital status disrupted." For a resident of New York in the early 1950s--a man, most likely, because the gendered language of the ruling perversely implied that men had more claim on subscriber's rights than women--it was entirely legal, under Appelbaum, to record any conversation made on your home telephone. It was also entirely legal to hire someone else to do it for you. The Savarese Commission spent most of its investigative energy working to understand the effects of the Appelbaum decision, eventually coming to the conclusion that it had encouraged a "lively, active, and lucrative" private eavesdropping industry throughout New York State. According to the Commission's March 1956 report, the case had thrown into confusion what was left of New York's 1892 wiretap law. It had also created a growing market for an urban professional whose doings had long preoccupied studies of electronic surveillance nationwide: the wiretapper-for-hire--or, more colloquially, "private ear." These were men (again: almost all were men) with a uniquely modern expertise. They knew how to tap any telephone, and they knew how to locate any telephone that was tapped. The tools of their trade were cheap, easy to use, and virtually impossible to detect in action. Appelbaum gave them license to bring their work, long maligned as dirty and disreputable, out into the open. Two men in suits stand near a table heaped with tape-recording and other electronic gear. Among the committees set up to investigate illegal wiretapping after the sensational revelation of the 55th Street "wiretapper's nest" in New York City was one in the U.S. House of Representatives led by Emanuel Celler [right], a New York Democrat. On 3 May 1955, professional wiretapper Bernard Spindel startled Celler by playing back for the congressman recordings of his own recent telephone calls. Bettmann/Getty Images After 1950, in the words of the Savarese Commission, New York private ears were "immune practitioners in a nonhazardous occupation." They went about their business as freely as plumbers, housepainters, and insurance salesmen. Reliable facts and figures about the private eavesdropping industry that prospered under Appelbaum are difficult to find. The Savarese Commission conducted months of closed-session interviews to create a thumbnail sketch of the men who were offering freelance wiretapping services around the state of New York. Most were either proficient in electronics early on, tapping their first lines by the age of twelve or thirteen, or had received special technical training while serving in the military. Most had gone on to find paying jobs in telecommunications, law enforcement, or freelance private investigation, three professional fields that expanded dramatically after World War II. And in the course of their regular duties, most had the opportunity to discover that telephone lines were easy and lucrative to tap--easy and lucrative enough, in any event, to turn wiretapping into a dedicated career, despite the risks that occasionally came with it. In 1955, the year of the 55th Street scandal, private wiretapping contractors were reported to net as much as $250 per day in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The jobs with the most legal exposure commanded the highest rates. The biggest names in the profession-- Robert La Borde, John Broady, Bernard Spindel--tended to make their money monitoring telephone lines for New York businesses. Many more found work in the domestic sphere, helping to litigate civil and marital disputes. A man in a suit stands next to a woman in a white sleeveless dress holding a fur coat. John Jacob Astor VI was among the powerful people whose name was dredged up by the investigation into the 55th-Street wiretapping operation. Shortly after returning from his honeymoon, Astor had filed for divorce from his third wife, the former Dolores Margaret "Dolly" Fullman, and was thought to be seeking incriminating evidence against herBettmann/Getty Images The Savarese Commission discovered that divorce wiretapping was far and away the most common job for private eavesdropping specialists in the 1950s. Because New York divorce laws were "adversarial," requiring one party to show fault in the other before the state could terminate a union, wiretap recordings that captured evidence of infidelity could have a dramatic effect on the outcome of individual cases. This was why John Jacob Astor VI had turned to John Broady--Astor believed that a wiretap would prove that his wife was having an affair with another man. The Savarese Commission found the arrangement to be surprisingly common. New York's private ears tapped more lines to monitor cheating spouses than their counterparts in law enforcement did to gather criminal evidence. The Savarese Commission's report would inaugurate a new day for wiretapping in the Empire State--or so it seemed on the surface. In July 1957, after more than two years of legislative wrangling, policymakers in Albany added an amendment to the New York penal code that expanded the state's definition of illegal eavesdropping to include both direct and induction wiretapping and levied hefty fines on phone companies that failed to report violations of the new law. The amendment also closed the Appelbaum loophole, prohibiting one-party consent eavesdropping and barring the use of wiretap recordings or transcripts in civil court proceedings. But when the Savarese Commission recommended tightening oversight of law enforcement wiretapping, police officials pushed back, and lobbyists in Albany eventually pressured the legislature to keep the state's court-order system intact. The resulting compromise seemed to place New York law enforcement beyond the reach of reform. In 1955, the year of the 55th Street scandal, private wiretapping contractors were reported to net as much as $250 per day in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The legacy of the 55th Street scandal in New York was thus mixed. By the end of the decade, it seemed as though both everything and nothing had changed. When Congress held exploratory hearings on " Wiretapping, Eavesdropping, and the Bill of Rights" in the winter of 1959, ranking members of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights wrote to Wellington Powell, New York Telephone's vice president of operations, to testify about the outcome of the wiretap nest case. In an official letter later introduced into the congressional record, Powell expressed optimism about the success of the Savarese Commission's effort to curb illegal wiretapping in New York. "The new laws have strengthened privacy of communications by providing new sanctions and by eliminating loopholes and administrative difficulties under old laws," he reported. To bolster the new legal regime, New York Telephone had also "added more specially trained personnel to [its] special agents' forces" and intensified "indoctrination and supervision concerning security practices." But between the lines, Powell's letter offered an ominous set of statistics that underscored just how unworkable the twin ideals of privacy and security were in the field of telecommunications. In Manhattan alone, the New York Telephone Company managed 75,000 terminal boxes. Those 75,000 boxes connected to more than 4,000 miles of cable, and those 4,000 miles of cable contained more than 3 million miles of telephone wire. The entire New York Telephone System serviced an estimated 7,900,000 handsets. In a communications network so unmanageably vast, preventing an isolated illegal act was nothing less than a Sisyphean task. Federal agencies wouldn't begin to face political consequences for the abuse of wiretaps in national security investigations until the 1970s. In the wake of the 55th Street controversy, state and municipal governments around the country likewise passed a flurry of wiretap reforms, many of which sought to prohibit the private use of electronic surveillance equipment. But at least in New York, the sense among those who knew best was that aggressive policy measures amounted to little more than sound and fury. "You can't legislate...against illegal wiretapping," warned New York District Attorney Edward Silver. "They did it before there were statutes and they will do it regardless of what you do." On the other side of the law, private ears like Bernard Spindel offered equally worrisome predictions about the spread of the wiretap trade in the face of new policies: "Never before have so many people been willing to pay so much to find out what others are thinking and doing. Never before have we been so capable of accomplishing these desires. Whatever legislation may be enacted...is already many years too late." Futility was the order of the day. "Most experts believe that no matter what legislation is enacted, the unhappy outlook as of now is that wiretapping is here to stay and will increase," Newsweek reported in an article on "The Busy Wiretappers" in the spring of 1955. The tumultuous decade that followed proved all of the predictions right. From Your Site Articles * Expert to FBI: Please Join the 21st Century, We Could Use the Help ... > * The Athens Affair - IEEE Spectrum > * Phreaking Out Ma Bell - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * The Listeners -- Brian Hochman | Harvard University Press > * The History and Law of Wiretapping > * A Short History of Wiretapping - The New York Times > * A History of Wire-Tapping | The New Yorker > eavesdropping wiretapping bugging listening devices {"imageShortcodeIds":[]} Brian Hochman Brian Hochman is director of the American Studies program and an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. His interests include the history of communications and other topics at the intersection of cultural movements and technology. The Conversation (0) Photo of astronaut on the moon with an antenna in the foreground. Topic Type Opinion History of Technology Engineering Lunar Network 2.0 5h 3 min read An orange quadruped robot with wheels at the end of its limbs stand upright on two wheels Robotics News Type Topic Video Friday: Quadruped Transformer 6h 3 min read Illustration shows a blue lock with circuitry and red , white, and blue lines passing through it. Telecommunications Topic Type History of Technology News Success Storied: How to Advocate for Tech Policy 7h 3 min read Topic Careers Type News Engineers Say "Nyet" to Doing Business in Russia, Survey Says Tech professionals also take personal action in support of Ukraine, via donations, activism, and hacktivism Tekla S. Perry Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University. 8h 2 min read scene of Moscow iStockphoto Russia blind careers Ukraine Get my company out of Ukraine! That's the sentiment expressed by 64 percent of tech professionals responding to a survey conducted by Blind at the request of IEEE Spectrum. (Blind operates private social networks for verified tech employees.) Respondents in Europe were more likely to answer "Yes," but many engineers at most companies surveyed supported an exit. Exceptions included Meta (formerly Facebook), Spotify, Twitter, and ByteDance (owner of TikTok). (Some other exceptions, like Instacart, haven't ever done business in Russia, so the question didn't really apply.) See the chart below for company-by-company details. Blind conducted this survey on its platform from 11 to 15 March 2022. It received responses from 7,948 tech professionals in the United States and 839 in Europe. The survey also asked whether respondents had taken personal action in support of Ukraine, such as making a donation or participating in a demonstration. Here, the numbers were much higher in Europe than in the United States, with 56 percent of respondents in Europe taking action compared with 36 percent in the United States. More than 2,600 respondents provided details on actions taken via a write-in response. Of those write-ins, the vast majority (77 percent) indicated that they had made a donation, including several donating entire paychecks. A number of respondents also indicated that they participated in demonstrations, provided direct support to Ukrainians, or booked Airbnbs in the Ukraine. These and others wrote that they have also been cooking for refugees, coordinating evacuations, housing refugees, creating informative websites, or helping with data transfer for Ukraine-based organizations. Others are flying the Ukrainian flag at their homes and painting it on rocks around their neighborhoods. Three respondents--two at Amazon and one at Microsoft--indicated that they had personally participated in cyberoperations or done computer hacking in support of Ukraine. And a Meta employee indicated that he has traveled to the Ukraine to directly assist. From Your Site Articles * How Russia Sent Ukraine Racing Into the "Energy Eurozone" - IEEE ... > * War in Ukraine: We Need to Talk About Fossil Fuels - IEEE Spectrum > * Stories of the War in Ukraine: Hanna - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Russia demands Google restore access to its media YouTube ... > * Facebook and TikTok block Russian state media in Europe : NPR > * Remarks by President Biden on the Assistance the United States is ... > Keep Reading | Show less Topic Aerospace Type News Puzzling Out the Drone War Over Ukraine To date, Russia has had little to show for a $9 billion investment in UAVs Vikram Mittal Vikram Mittal is an assistant professor of systems engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He holds a BS in Aeronautics from Caltech, an MSc in Aerospace Engineering from Oxford University, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. 10h 6 min read A man in combat fatigues pushes a military drone across an airport tarmac while another man in fatigues walks away Ukrainian servicemen push a Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone at the Kulbakyne aerodrome during the Exercise Sea Breeze 2021 in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine. Yulii Zozulia/Ukrinform/Future Publishing/Getty Images uavs ukraine ukraine conflict Russia drones In 2014, Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Crimea knew that the sight of Russian drones would soon be followed by a heavy barrage of Russian artillery. During that war, the Russian military integrated drones into tactical missions, using them to hunt for Ukrainian forces, whom they then pounded with artillery and cannon fire. Russian drones weren't as advanced as those of their Western counterparts, but the Russian military's integration of drones into its battlefield tactics was second to none. Eight years later, the Russians are again invading Ukraine. And since the earlier incursion, the Russian military has spent approximately US $9 billion to domestically produce an armada of some 500 drones (a.k.a. unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs). But, astonishingly, three weeks into this invasion, the Russians have not had anywhere near their previous level of success with their drones. There are even signs that in the drone war, the Ukrainians have an edge over the Russians. How could the drone capabilities of these two militaries have experienced such differing fortunes over the same period? The answer lies in a combination of trade embargoes, tech development, and the rising importance of countermeasures. Since 2014's invasion of Crimea, Russia's drone-development efforts have lagged--during a time of dynamic evolution and development across the UAV industry. First, some background. Military drones come in a wide variety of sizes, purposes, and capabilities, but they can be grouped into a few categories. On one end of the spectrum are relatively tiny flying bombs, small enough to be carried in a rucksack. On the other end are high-altitude drones, with wingspans up to 25 meters and capable of staying aloft for 30 or 40 hours, of being operated from consoles thousands of kilometers from the battlefield, and of firing air-to-surface missiles with deadly precision. In between are a range of intermediate-size drones used primarily for surveillance and reconnaissance. Russia's fleet of drones includes models in each of these categories. However, sanctions imposed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea blocked the Russian military from procuring some key technologies necessary to stay on the cutting edge of drone development, particularly in optics, lightweight composites, and electronics. With relatively limited capabilities of its own in these areas, Russia's drone development efforts became somewhat sluggish during a time of dynamic evolution and development elsewhere. Current stalwarts in the Russian arsenal include the Zala Kyb, which is a "loitering munition" that can dive into a target and explode. The most common Russian drones are midsize ones used for surveillance and reconnaissance. These include the Eleron-3SV and the Orlan-10 drones, both of which have been used extensively in Syria and Ukraine. In fact, just last week, an Orlan-10 operator was awarded a military medal for locating a site from which Ukrainian soldiers were ambushing Russian tanks, and also a Ukrainian basing area outside Kyiv containing ten artillery pieces, which were subsequently destroyed. Russia's only large, missile-firing drone is the Kronshtadt Orion, which is similar to the American MQ-1 Predator and can be used for precision strikes as well as reconnaissance. An Orion was credited with an air strike on a command center in Ukraine in early March 2022. Meanwhile, since the 2014 Crimea war, when they had no drones at all, the Ukrainians have methodically assembled a modest but highly capable set of drones. The backbone of the fleet, with some 300 units fielded, are the A1-SM Fury and the Leleka-100 reconnaissance drones, both designed and manufactured in Ukraine. The A1-SM Fury entered service in April 2020, and the Leleka-100, in May, 2021. On offense, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are closely matched in the drone war. The difference is on defense. The heavy hitter for Ukraine in this war, though, is the Bayraktar TB2 drone, a combat aerial flyer with a wingspan of 12 meters and an armament of four laser-guided bombs. As of the beginning of March, and after losing two TB2s to Russian-backed separatist forces in Lugansk, Ukraine had a complement of 30 of the drones, which were designed and developed in Turkey. These drones are specifically aimed at destroying tanks and as of 24 March had been credited with destroying 26 vehicles, 10 surface-to-air missile systems, and 3 command posts. Various reports have put the cost of a TB2 at anywhere from $1 million to $10 million. It's much cheaper than the tens of millions fetched for better-known combat drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper, the backbone of the U.S. Air Force's fleet of combat drones. The Ukrainian arsenal also includes the Tu-141 reconnaissance drones, which are large, high-altitude Soviet-era drones that have had little success in the war. At the small end of the Ukraine drone complement are 100 Switchblade drones, which were donated by the United States as part of the $800 million weapons package announced on 16 March. The Switchblades are loitering munitions similar in size and functionality to the Russian Zala Kyb. The upshot is that on offense, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are closely matched in the drone war. The difference is on defense: Ukraine has the advantage when it comes to counter-drone technology. A decade ago, counter-drone technology mostly meant using radar to detect drones and surface-to-air missiles to shoot them down. It quickly proved far too costly and ineffective. Drone technology advanced at a brisk pace over the past decade, so counter-drone technology had to move rapidly to keep up. In Russia, it didn't. Here, again, the Russian military was hampered by technology embargoes and a domestic industrial base that has been somewhat stagnant and lacking in critical capabilities. For contrast, the combined industrial base of the countries supporting Ukraine in this war is massive and has invested heavily in counter-drone technology. Russia has deployed electronic warfare systems to counter enemy drones and have likely been using the Borisoglebsk 2 MT-LB and R-330Zh Zhitel systems, which use a combination of jamming and spoofing. These systems fill the air with radio-frequency energy, increasing the noise threshold to such a level that the drone cannot distinguish control signals from the remote pilot. Another standard counterdrone technique is sending false signals to the drone, with the most common being fake ("spoofed") GPS signals, which disorient the flyer. Jamming and spoofing systems are easy to target because they emit radio-frequency waves at fairly high intensities. In fact, open-source images show that Ukrainian forces have already destroyed three of these Russian counterdrone systems. The exact systems that have been provided to the Ukrainians is not publicly known, but it's possible to make an educated guess from among the many systems available. Additionally, some of the newer drones being used by the Ukrainians include features to withstand such electronic attacks. For example, when one of these drones detects a jamming signal, it switches to frequencies that are not being jammed; if it is still unable to reestablish a connection, the drone operates autonomously with a series of preset maneuvers until a connection can be reestablished. Meanwhile, Ukraine has access to the wide array of NATO counterdrone technologies. The exact systems that have been provided to the Ukrainians is not publicly known, but it's possible to make an educated guess from among the many systems available. One of the more powerful ones, from Lockheed Martin, repurposes a solid-state, phased-array radar system developed to spot incoming munitions, to detect and identify a drone. The system then tracks the drone and uses high-energy lasers to shoot it down. Raytheon's counterdrone portfolio includes similar capabilities along with drone-killing drones and systems capable of beaming high-power microwaves that disrupt the drone's electronics. While most major Western defense contractors have some sort of counterdrone system, there has also been significant innovation in the commercial sector, given the mass proliferation of commercial drones. While many of these technologies are aimed at smaller drones, some of the technologies, including acoustic sensing and radio-frequency localization, are effective against larger drones as well. Also, a dozen small companies have developed jamming and spoofing systems specifically aimed at countering modern drones. Although we don't know specifically which counterdrone systems are being deployed by the Ukrainians, the images of the destroyed drones tell a compelling story. In the drone war, many of the flyers on both sides have been captured or destroyed on the ground, but more than half were disabled while in flight. The destroyed Ukrainian drones often show tremendous damage, including burn marks and other signs that they were shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile. A logical conclusion is that the Russians' electronic counterdrone systems were not effective. Meanwhile, the downed Russian drones are typically much more intact, showing relatively minor damage consistent with a precision strike from a laser or electromagnetic pulse. This is exactly what you would expect if the drones had been dispatched by one of the newer Western counterdrone systems. In the first three weeks of this conflict, Russian drones have failed to achieve the level of success that they did in 2014. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, have logged multiple victories with drone and counterdrone forces assembled in just 8 years. The Russian drones, primarily domestically sourced, have been foiled repeatedly by NATO counterdrone technology. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian drones, such as the TB2s procured from NATO-member Turkey, have had multiple successes against the Russian counterdrone systems. 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