Full Crew Episode 83 brought together legal, technical and cyber experts to unpack the new security realities post-SAFER SKIES Act. Moderator and Autonomy Global Ambassador for Education and Training Bronwyn Morgan opened the show with a promise that security would look different from every angle in the room. By the end of the hour, the three guests had proven her right:
- Angelissa Savino, Founder & Managing Attorney of Savino Skies Consulting PLLC and AG Ambassador for Homeland Security, brought the legal architecture behind the SAFER SKIES Act. She had represented the Department of Justice’s interests during the interagency process that shaped the legislation.
- Brandon Youngblood brought the hard lessons of building counter-drone hardware at ZBeta in a market that changes every ninety days. At the time SAFER SKIESwas being negotiated, he ran the FAA’s UAS Security and Counter UAS Coordination Office on the other side of the table from Savino.
- Dr. Trent Teyama, the current Executive Director of the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies and CEO of CSG Strategies, brought a four-year research lens spanning terrestrial drones to cislunar space. He had spent an illustrious career prior to these roles at the FBI including as the agency’s Chief of Cyber Readiness.
Together they painted a picture of an industry at a genuine inflection point where new federal authority, evolving technology architecture and unresolved cybersecurity questions seem to be colliding at the same moment.
A Watershed Moment for State and Local Authority
Savino kicked the show off with an article she authored for AG about the SAFER SKIESAct. She referred to the legislation as enabling “watershed change” in terms of who gets to use counter-drone technology in the United States.
For years, only federal agencies could legally operate counter-UAS systems, largely because a web of federal laws made it illegal to intercept radio signals or disrupt a drone’s control link without specific legal cover. That cover came from 6 U.S.C. 124n, a 2018 statute Savino describes as a “notwithstanding statute.” It does not technically authorize counter-drone activity so much as it tells federal agencies they will not be prosecuted for the other laws that action would otherwise violate.
That narrow authority meant the FBI and DHS carried the entire burden of protecting events across the country from careless or malicious drone operators. Savino said the FBI could only respond to roughly five or six percent of the requests coming in from states seeking protection.
Congress finally addressed the gap in December 2025 with the SAFER SKIES Act. The DOJ and DHS came close to meeting the deadline to publish implementing rules, releasing the Interim Final Rule on July 1, 2026.
The rule splits authority into two tiers:
- Detection and warning operations can move quickly. Savino noted that agencies already holding the right equipment might only need about two weeks to complete a ninety-minute training requirement and self-certification before switching their systems on.
- Mitigation is a different story. Anyone who wants to disable or bring down a drone has to complete training at an FBI national schoolhouse. That bottleneck is severe. The program can currently train around 150 people in its first two years, but there are roughly 18,000 separate state, local, Tribal, and territorial agencies across the country. Savino ran the numbers and landed on a jarring timeline. Training everyone at the current pace would take somewhere between 230 and 250 years without significant scaling.
Equipment approval adds another layer of complexity. The rule created an Authorized Technologies List for broad categories of counter-drone systems, plus an Authorized Systems List for specific makes and models. Right now, RF technology is the only approved category, populated with 21 approved systems.
Savino warned that agencies buying equipment before the systems list catches up to a given category are taking on real risk, since gear that isn’t eventually listed becomes unusable. She pointed out that public comment on the rule stays open until September 4, and as of the show, only eight comments had been submitted. She hopes it grows before the country settles into a framework likely to govern the space for five to ten years.
Teyama added financial context. He noted the White House task force on counter-UAS delivered $250 million in 2025 aimed largely at the eleven areas supporting FIFA security needs, with another $250 million expected in 2026 for the broader law enforcement community. Spread across thousands of agencies nationwide, that funding disappears fast. Teyama credited the tiered technology list for steering agencies away from the kind of premature equipment purchases that left some departments stuck with gear they never ended up using.
The Shift Toward Open, Hardware-Agnostic Defense Systems
Youngblood’s article traced the technical evolution of counter-drone systems. He built his own Substack account around lessons learned from the earliest days of the ISIS fight, when a single sensor or jammer had to do the whole job and consistently failed.
The industry moved into a second phase built around what Youngblood calls “sensor towers,” integrated stacks combining radar, RF detection, acoustic sensors and mitigation tools under one vendor’s command and control (C2) software. The problem, he explained, is that most of that software is proprietary. Buying into one company’s sensor stack locks an agency into that company’s ecosystem. This makes it expensive and technically difficult to add better third-party sensors or retire legacy systems.
Youngblood argued the industry now sits between that second phase and a third one built around open, hardware-agnostic command and control platforms that can fuse data from any vendor’s radar, RF sensor, camera or mitigation tool into a single operating picture. He pointed to companies working on that integration layer and credited some strategic partnerships between manufacturers for opening the door, but said most of the market still remains locked into closed ecosystems.
His most pointed criticism focused on federal procurement itself. He described a major counter-UAS contract award and a subsequent $500 million deal for a foreign-made system, arguing that neither move reflected a real commitment to hardware-agnostic architecture. He tied the stakes directly to the National Capital Region, where he said every federal agency operating in Washington, D.C. runs its own counter-drone detection capability, yet none of those systems talk to each other. “You have the most protected piece of airspace on the face of the planet with billions of dollars of detection gear, and they don’t share information between each other, largely because they are technically unable to do it,” Youngblood said.
The conversation then moved into artificial intelligence (AI). Youngblood raised a scenario that grounded the discussion in something relatable: his own father wanting to fly a drone at a fishing tournament to startle competitors, a harmless but technically unauthorized flight near a restricted area. He argued that most detected drones reflect exactly that kind of careless or clueless behavior rather than criminal intent. AI trained to recognize context, like agricultural spraying near a farm field versus a drone lingering outside a substation, could help law enforcement triage genuine threats from noise. Teyama agreed, predicting that registration requirements, mandatory flight plans and transponder use will become the norm as regulators try to separate legitimate operators from bad actors.
Youngblood then pushed the conversation toward critical infrastructure. He warned that law enforcement agencies are already stretched thin and simply do not have the resources to prevent a determined drone attack on a substation or similar target. He described how a coordinated strike on transformers could trigger a cascading effect leading to extended blackouts and pointed to the war in Ukraine as a preview of what that kind of attack looks like in practice. He voiced support for pending legislation, including a Senate bill from Senator Cotton and a House resolution aimed at giving critical infrastructure operators and airport authorities more direct protective authority, closing what he sees as a persistent gap even after the SAFER Skies Act’s passage.
Securing the Entire Ecosystem, Not Just the Aircraft
Teyama’s article grew out of a four-year dissertation research project spanning drone operations at low altitude all the way up to cislunar space, built on consensus findings gathered from top experts across cybersecurity, governance and the space industry. His core argument reframes the security conversation entirely. A drone does not need to be hijacked in flight for an adversary to cause serious damage. The ground control station, the cloud dashboard, the communication link back to base, and even the software supply chain feeding a system’s firmware all represent potential entry points, often more exposed than the aircraft itself.
Teyama connected his research to a shift he calls the move from “old space to new space.” He noted that SpaceX alone conducted roughly 350 launches in 2025 and now accounts for the large majority of all launches worldwide. That commercial explosion matters for counter-drone security because larger drones increasingly rely on satellite links for command and control, while smaller systems depend on RF, cellular connections, tethered fiber, or increasingly autonomous AI-driven navigation for operating in denied environments. Each of those pathways carries its own vulnerabilities. Teyama stressed that hardware assurance, checking for backdoors or compromised components before a system ever takes flight, deserves the same attention as the software running on top of it.
He drew a direct line between his forensic background investigating IEDs for the FBI and the emerging challenge of examining downed or captured drones. Once a drone is intercepted, agencies need to trace where it came from and who built it, work that demands the same kind of careful evidence handling used in traditional bomb investigations. Teyama also flagged a genuine tension between operational speed and legal process. He noted that traditional wiretap authorization requires approval reaching all the way to the Attorney General’s office, a process built for deliberate speed rather than the split-second decisions counter-drone operators sometimes need to make.
Savino connected Teyama’s cybersecurity concerns directly back to the SAFER SKIES Interim Final Rule. The rule already anticipates a scenario where a counter-drone system’s own software fails or behaves unexpectedly. If that happens, agencies must report the incident immediately. Federal regulators can order every agency using that same equipment to stop operating it until the issue gets resolved.
Youngblood confirmed the scenario is not hypothetical. He described an actual incident in Oregon where an FBI team successfully cut a drone’s command link during a mitigation operation, only for the drone’s onboard programming to interpret the lost signal as an obstruction and climb to 2,500 feet, directly into general aviation and helicopter traffic. The episode raised an unresolved legal question about who actually owns a drone once its control link has been severed by a third party. Youngblood likened the potential fallout to a commercial aircraft fleet grounding, where one technical failure with one operator can shut down an entire class of equipment nationwide.
Savino added that the legal exposure runs both directions. Because defense attorneys have rarely had the opportunity to challenge this technology in court, she expects a wave of suppression motions once prosecutions begin picking up under the SAFER SKIESAct’s new penalty structure. Those cases, she argued, will ultimately produce the case law the industry needs to understand exactly which technologies and data practices hold up under legal scrutiny.
A Field Still Writing Its Own Rulebook
What made this episode distinct was how each guest’s specialty kept circling back to the same underlying tension. Savino’s legal framework, Youngblood’s hardware architecture, and Teyama’s cybersecurity research all point toward a counter-drone industry racing to build governance, interoperability and trust into a technology category that outpaced its own regulatory scaffolding years ago. The SAFER SKIES Act and its Interim Final Rule represent real progress, giving thousands of agencies a legitimate path to detection capability for the first time. But as all three guests acknowledged, mitigation remains bottlenecked by training capacity, procurement remains fragmented by proprietary systems and the software running underneath it all remains only as secure as its weakest ground station or supply chain link. The next several years of public comment, litigation and real-world incidents will decide whether the framework built in 2026 becomes durable infrastructure, or an early draft in need of serious revision.