A drone, possibly radioactive, has been found on the roof of the office of the Prime Minister of Japan.
The police in Tokyo said that the drone was carrying a camera and a bottle of unidentified liquid that bore a sticker with the universal symbol for radioactivity.Okay, based on the radiation symbol and the fact that it was a Cesium dousing of low intensity, it's pretty clearly some sort of guerrilla anti-Fukushima protest.
The police also said traces of radioactive cesium were detected on the roof near the drone, though it was unclear if they came from the drone. Cesium is not usually found in nature, but large amounts of it were released into the atmosphere during the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Still, the discovery of radioactivity prompted concern about whether the drone might have been part of a terrorist attack. There was also speculation it could have been a protest against the Fukushima accident.
Real terrorists may tell you all about an attack in a move to gain notoriety and spread fear, but they certainly wouldn't surreptitiously place a drone on a roof not knowing how long it would take to find it, not tell anybody about it, specifically warn you that it was radioactive, have it actually be radioactive, but then not be actually dangerous. This is almost the exact opposite of terrorism, more an attempt by a lobby group to give the government a message. By putting the radiation symbol on the container it would force the substance to be tested, the nature of the radiation would be discovered, and the Japanese government would be told...something something. It's hard at this point to know the details, and as we discussed on this blog last month asian politics is a hard thing to wrap the brain around.
Still, the bigger story is the power and capability of drones, and how nobody -- from Shinzo Abe to President Monkey -- is safe from the crowdsourced possibilities of these devices.
