This is what you can’t do if you spot an unidentified drone passing close to or over a piece of your critical infrastructure: take aim with your 12 gauge and blast it out of the sky.

Even in Texas.

Forget about jamming command and control frequencies, too. That would run you afoul of Federal Communications Commission regulations which forbid jamming except by the government entities.

In fact, forget about downing it altogether. Drones are defined as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and taking them down by any means violates federal law.

“What can you do today to protect yourself and your critical infrastructure against drones?” asked Jennifer L. Richter, Washington, D.C.-based partner with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, during a recent webinar. “The answer is: almost nothing.”

As recently as December 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos discussed delivering products by drone during a segment of “60 Minutes.” In 2018, Richter said, 73,000 remote pilot certificates have been issued and drones have morphed from industrial pipedream to a tool with what Goldman Sachs expects to be an economic impact of around $82 billion by 2025.

Congress established the need for guidelines for this new industry in Section 2209 of the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016. In it, the FAA was required to set up procedures for operators or owners of fixed-site facilities such as an oilfield, natural gas processing plant, transmission plant or refinery, to restrict the ability of drones to operate near their facilities.

The deadline for implementation was 240 days after the act took effect, or Jan. 15, 2017, but it was not ready to go. The regulators’ approach was to allow only “crown jewels” of the facilities to be protected by no-fly zones, leaving less-critical components of a plant vulnerable.

Akin Gump gathered members of Congress, the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) into a working group to develop and propose effective guidelines for Section 2209 when it is ultimately implemented.

“We’re really in the early stages of the regulatory mechanism that will allow commercial operators to continue to utilize this technology,” said Mark Aitken II, Washington-based senior policy adviser for Akin Gump.

That could allow industry to step in and influence the regulations. One vexing issue is remote identification. How can a facility know if a drone 400 feet in the air is gathering data for a competitor, poses a threat or just belongs to a clueless hobbyist?

Input from national security experts made it clear that the issue needed to be resolved before rulemaking could go forward.

“This is something that the FAA truly is still struggling with,” said Aitken, which creates an opening for industry players to weigh in on possible solutions or share data on the effectiveness of solutions already in place.

Neither the FAA nor the Department of Transportation have the budget, staff or expertise to understand what the burgeoning UAS phenomenon really means and how to regulate it, Richter said. That’s why various industry-government working groups have been tasked with offering recommendations to shape the rules.

“We started hearing this term being used [Transportation] Secretary Elaine Chou and Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell: regulatory humility,” Aitken said. “It’s a recognition that the FAA doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.

“The iterations of the technology are happening so fast they can’t even keep up with what the latest developments are.”

Joseph Markman can be reached at jmarkman@hartenergy.com or @JHMarkman

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