Geospatial worker tied to drone crash

WASHINGTON — It was 42 degrees, lightly raining and pitch-black near the White House when an inebriated, off-duty employee for a government intelligence agency decided it was a good time to test-fly his friend’s quadcopter drone.

But officials say the plan was foiled, perhaps by the wind or a tree, when the employee — who is not being named by the Secret Service

— lost control of the drone. He texted his friends, worried that the drone had gone down on the White House grounds.

Investigators said the man had been drinking at an apartment nearby.

It was not until the next morning, when he woke to his friends telling him that his drone was all over the news, that he contacted his employer, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and then called the Secret Service to confess.

In the process of what officials describe as nothing more than a drunken misadventure with a drone, the employee managed to highlight another vulnerability in the protective shield that the Secret Service erects around the White House complex.

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