In what sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie, the FBI reported this week that last year a hostage raid was undone when criminals employed a swarm of drones to get in officers’ faces.

According to Joe Mazel, the head of the FBI’s Operational Technology Law unit, this is a new way that criminals are using modern technology to their advantage.

Speaking at the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver, as reported by Defense One, Mazel said Thursday that agents were observing an unfolding situation in an undisclosed U.S. city when they heard the buzz of a fleet of drones. The drones, he said, made “high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them.”

This essentially blinded the agents, said Mazel, and it worked. The agents for a time lost situational awareness of their target. “It definitely presented some challenges,” he said.

Unable to give too many details because the incident is still law enforcement-sensitive, Mazel said the criminal gang had brought the drones to the scene in backpacks, aware that the FBI would likely turn up. Once employed, the drones didn’t just get in the way, but also sent video back to other gang members via YouTube.

“They had people fly their own drones up and put the footage to YouTube so that the guys who had cellular access could go to the YouTube site and pull down the video,” he said. This kind of countersurveillance, said Mazel, is a fast-growing phenomenon among criminal gangs.

He added that drones have also been used to surveil police departments to keep an eye on who is visiting the place, such as who might be witnesses to crimes and can later be threatened to prevent testifying. In the U.K. and the U.S., news reports have emerged over the last few years regarding how these relatively cheap flying machines have been used in a number of burglaries when gangs are surveilling houses.

Last year the Australian media reported how gangs were using drones in prison smuggling operations, while in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said drones have been used to keep an eye on law enforcement, thereby supplanting human scouts.

The new Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill seeks to make it illegal to weaponize drones, but also that operators using drones out of their line of sight identify themselves to law enforcement. As it stands, the unmanned aerial vehicle is a useful tool for police and criminals alike.

Image: Peter Linehan via Flickr