Many detainees continue to organize their illegal drug trades from inside prison walls. A cell phone is an essential means for the detainee to keep the drug organization running and closely controlled. By contacting visitors before they arrive, prisoners can arrange for a transfer of drugs and drug paraphernalia, allowing them to continue the same illegal habit that placed them in custody. Frequently, the family endures harassment from its incarcerated relative, demanding bail when the family recognizes the relative is better served remaining in custody.
While we don’t know more about this particularly anti-drone antenna/rifle yet, we’ve seen other similar designs. The Battelle Memorial Institute built an anti-drone antenna that mounts to a rifle, and called it the “DroneDefender.” A more recent version of that weapon was spotted deployed in Iraq earlier this year. In November, cell phone jammer company Drone Shield unveiled the DroneGun, a similar antenna-rifle with a backpack power supply. The whole effect looked a little bit Ghostbusters in appearance.
A cell phone in a prisoner’s possession allows him to contact outside partners in crime to coordinate escape plans, thereby creating life-threatening situations for the guards and public surrounding the institution. More often, reports from correctional facilities overwhelmingly indicate that hidden cell phones have been used to harass the victims of their crimes, or an inmate repeatedly intimidates his victim in an effort to persuade the victim to recant the charges or change his story to instill suspicion in the testimony.
Rather than jamming a drone, the Army Cyber Institute at West Point built an antenna-and-computer rifle that fed information into an open channel of an unlocked Parrot drone. This allowed the cyber rifle to send an override code to the Parrot drone, crashing it, without violating FCC and FAA rules on signal jammer. At a training exercise this summer, West Point cadets encountered a drone on a simulated raid, and had to use the cyber-rifle to knock it out of the sky. The consequence, for a team that failed to plan around the drone, was an artillery strike that took out the entire machine gun section of the platoon.
People have been using drones to smuggle goods for years. Porn, weapons, drugs—god, so many drugs. The tiny whirring machines have proven discreet little contraband-transport contraptions, but one smuggling operation’s astoundingly successful run just got grounded.