That’s going to depend on the power. A single flashlight won’t blind me, but 10,000 will. Will a green laser that can damage your eye make a noticeable hot spot on your finger?
Why are you suddenly worried about your property being viewable from airplanes? Why are you more afraid of certain models of airplane?
I imagine someone will market/distribute radio-jamming devices to knock out the smaller drones. I shouldn’t want to spend more than a few minutes a day on such defenses though.
:dubious:
Seriously? :rolleyes:
I am, as always, concerned about invasions of my privacy.
An airplane several thousands of feet up, with no cameras, poses little threat.
OTOH, a drone is designed to do nothing other than invade the privacy of others.
And those would be illegal, too.
I’m sure a War on Radios would be a good use of national resources.
They need to scale up the anti-mosquito laser system.
IR lasers do damage eyes, and are arguably more dangerous to people because you don’t see that it’s shining in your eye and look away.
So I can’t foil a drone, but I can foil my head? That was actually Plan B. 
I really just wanted to know about passively resisting domestic drone spying. Sounds like it’s nearly impossible.
I should have explicitly stated that this was a hypothetical situation. I rent in a city, no yard. Whether one is doing something illegal is not the only determinant of interaction with the authorities, and yeah, the invasion of privacy is a bit of a concern.
The use of radio jamming equipment has been illegal since probably the 1930s. It’s also profoundly reckless to force a flying object, weighing anywhere from 10 pounds to 10,000 pounds, to lose control and perhaps crash into something. If someone were to jam a signal as was proposed, and the aircraft became uncontrollable, struck and killed someone, the person jamming the signal would probably be guilty of murder.
Or deliver pizza. 
Bill Holman?
No communication is 100% reliable. I would hope that unmanned drones will have a “fly to these GPS coordinates over the lake and auger in” backup plan in case they lose communication with the pilots. Still not a good idea to jam them, but I doubt they’d crash into a school or anything.
No Problemo. You just need to send faked GPS signals to the drone to make it think that the backup landing spot is your backyard. Presto! You are now the proud owner of a drone Bonus points if you go on the Internet and brag about it.
Forget the laser and just go with LED’s. Particularly infared led’s. Won’t be noticable to you (or the neighbor checking out your hot wife/GF/sister/daughter through his telescope), but it’ll turn the area into whitish blur for most optical cameras.
If you’ve ever looked at your house on Google Earth, you have seen that airplanes with cameras have already flown over your house and invaded your privacy.
People in some urban areas have had police surveillance aircraft (manned drones oh no) over their homes for decades. The government already has the capability to put actual people right over your house to look at your stuff.
The main function of a drone is flying without a pilot on board. Any other functions are secondary. Drones do not have to look at your stuff, and your stuff can be looked at from the air without a drone. Drones are irrelevant to what you want to do. What you need is superiority over all airspace near your home. The UK was able to do this in the Battle of Britain with a little under 2,000 airplanes; do you have 2,000 airplanes?
Blanketing the area with IR is probably the best bet. It would obfuscate everything with a white haze. Until they switch to UV, but, you could blanket the area with both UV and IR!
You’d have to go out in a suit to protect yourself from the IR and UV. But, at least you are keeping it local. Also, now, you totally have the interest of the authorities as who would go through all that trouble?
Of course, it will be as illegal to interfere with a drone as it is to interfere with police radar or to trash red light cameras. If the “obstruction of justice” or “interfering with a criminal investigation” law in your locale does not already stretch to cover it, then there will shortly be an amendment to it. The crashing a disabled drone into a car scenario may sound a bit like hyperbole, but at the very least you are responsible for property damage and at the most, various FAA laws about interfering with a pilot will also apply to the remote operator.
As for camouflage, it depends what they are looking for and what you are trying to hide. If you have, say, a grow-op and want to hide the heat exhaust, IR lighting may not work. Maybe you need to do real disguise, and over-insulate the house and run the air conditioner as a heat pump into a giant swimming pool… Spray a cool mist over the house and see if that works, etc. If you want to disguise outbuildings, well, all you can do is put them underground or insulate really well - good luck hiding a buried building during construction. If you are trying to hide the number of vehicles or people coming and going - good luck with that. IIRC the recent tax clampdown in Greece, they used Google Earth to identify people who did not pay taxes for having swimming pools. (I’m reminded of the Cheech and Chong movie with the pool painted on the cover of their grow-op building…
The trouble with most schemes is they draw attention to you. That’s not good when the police are perfectly capable of using that as a reason to look closer. If they already suspect you, positive steps to stop their spying will just add to their curiosity. Camouflage works for the military because the other side can’t just drive up and knock on the door if the cameras are blocked.
In this case, drone protection is like encrypting your email - makes you stand out like a sore thumb, unless almost everyone does it. Then you just blend in.