Announcing the Lawfare Drone Smackdown, Part Deux

One of Lawfare's current interns, Staley Smith, discovered a few days ago this site's illustrious history of practical robotics—that is to say organizing stunts that involve playing with robots as a way of exploring the security challenges and opportunities they pose.

There was this fun time flying a drone around Brookings:

There was this memorable occasion when the estimable Andrew Borene brought a throwable tactical recognizance robot by to snoop on my colleagues:

And then there was the Lawfare Drone Smackdown and its covert cousin, Operation Stux2bu:

Staley wanted to know: What fun robot stuff are we going to do this summer?

It's a good question, and here's the answer: the Lawfare Drone Smackdown, Part Deux.

No, we're not going to stage another robot air war, but new robotic products are coming out every day: new drones, new robotic tools, new tactical devices. We want to see them. We want to write about what they can do. We want to figure out which are the coolest, which pose interesting public policy and security problems, which potentially solve those problems, which are going to help our troops, and which are going to empower scary people to do scary things.

So as Emma Lazarus might say, "Give us your tired robots, your poor robots, your huddled masses of robots yearning to breathe free." If you're a drone maker, send us a drone. If your robots are too big or too expensive to part with one blithely, bring one by like Borene did. We'll sit down and talk through what it does and how. And we'll play with it. It'll be fun.