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"The City of Boston had extra security at the Boston Marathon today, with 4,000 uniformed and plainclothes police officers and 100 police dog units lining the 26.2-mile course-twice as many as last year's event, when two bombs that exploded near the finish line killed three and wounded 260. Low-flying helicopters were keeping watch from above, while a radiation-seeking chopper flew over the course, trying to pick up spikes in radiation levels that weren't there during its initial flyby on Thursday. But what's missing-at least as far as we know-is a security measure that some experts say will become inevitable in time: drones. "Drones are going to be the standard," says Joseph F. King, a criminal justice professor at Manhattan's John Jay College who has served as chief of the national security section in New York's Department of Homeland Security office. Sprawling, citywide events such as marathons present a particularly thorny security problem, King says. "You can't just set up roadblocks and search everybody going to the marathon," he says. "You're talking about a dense population; it's as simple as crowd control. If you put in a drone, you can zero in a camera on a particular individual. The operator can directly contact the local sector sergeant and say, 'move officers here.''"