UK Creates Anti-drone Squad To Combat Prison Smugglers
Janet Denzel
Throughout history, prisons have been confronted with the daunting task of preventing the flow of contraband. Inmates and their connections outside the prison walls have utilized ingenious tactics to bypass security measures. Smuggling through visitors, mail, and corrupt staff members has been a common practice. These methods have had severe consequences, leading to violence, drug addiction, and compromised prison environments. Traditional approaches to tackling contraband delivery have often fallen short, necessitating innovative solutions for the evolving challenges.
For instance, despite efforts to curb contraband in Texas prisons, such as implementing stricter mail rules and halting visitation due to the pandemic, the problem persisted. According to an investigation by The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project, drugs are still prevalent in these facilities, with staff members being the main source. The issue has reportedly worsened due to the pandemic, with officers largely stopping searches of each other at the front gate due to safety measures and staff shortages.
In South Carolina, as many as 20 people have been arrested for involvement in a scheme to deliver contraband to prisoners at the Lee Correctional Institution via drones. The deliveries included items such as candy, cash, drugs, phones, and weapons. The problem of contraband smuggling by drone has been a growing issue at prisons across the US and elsewhere, leading to the US Bureau of Prisons publicly seeking technology to detect and stop them.
Prison authorities are also fighting off an aerial invasion by drones being used to smuggle drugs and other contraband into Victorian jails while the system has been in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. The airdrops, containing packages of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics and street drugs such as heroin, have kept the jailhouse drug market alive after a ban on face-to-face visits during the pandemic cut off the most common supply route. Corrections Victoria received 97 security incident reports from prisons about remotely piloted vehicles from March to early November (2020), up 246 percent compared to the full year before COVID-19 struck. Prison authorities were caught ill-prepared to counter the high-tech threat and have scrambled to install drone detection equipment at five of the prisons considered most at risk.
To combat the increasing threat posed by drone-based contraband delivery, the adoption of anti-drone solutions is becoming imperative. These technologies leverage advanced detection and mitigation capabilities to neutralize drones and prevent their unauthorized entry into prison facilities. Anti-drone solutions can utilize a combination of radar systems, radio frequency (RF) detection, optical sensors, and protocol analysis to identify and track drones in real time, as well as locate the operator. Once detected, these systems can employ countermeasures such as jamming, spoofing, capturing, and pairing to neutralize the drones and prevent the delivery of contraband.
By implementing anti-drone solutions, prisons can future-proof their security measures against the evolving landscape of contraband delivery. These solutions serve as a crucial layer of defense, complementing traditional security protocols and strengthening overall prison safety.
The Sentrycs system is designed to work flawlessly, even in dense urban environments, without any communication interruption. It boasts zero false alarms, ensuring that security personnel can focus on real threats without being distracted by false positives.
One of the standout features of the Sentrycs system is its ability to operate either manually or autonomously, providing flexibility based on the situation at hand. Moreover, it ensures no collateral damage, making it a safe and reliable solution for prison environments.
The system also has the ability to differentiate between friend and foe, allowing prisons to use their own drones without interference. This feature is particularly useful for prisons that use drones for surveillance or other security purposes.
The landscape of contraband delivery in prisons is rapidly changing, driven by advances in technology. As demonstrated in this article, the rise of drones has posed a significant challenge to prison security. From traditional methods to high-tech approaches, the creativity and persistence of contraband smugglers persist, thus demanding equally innovative and effective countermeasures.
The growing number of drone incidents in prisons globally highlights the urgency of the issue. These unmanned aerial vehicles, though originally designed for commercial purposes, have been appropriated as tools for illicit activities, Making the ongoing issue of illegal items in prisons even worse.
Relatively small, easy-to-acquire drones have been implicated in everything from attempted political assassinations, to airspace incursions that have forced major airports to shut down, to smuggling contraband into prisons. The widespread availability of easy-to-pilot drones with good camera capabilities raises security issues that have fueled a growing market for technology to stop such remotely piloted aircraft.
While regulations for the flying of drones are far more settled in 2020 than they were in 2010, the regulatory landscape for technology to stop them is more unsettled. While many technologies exist that can variously track, identify, and disable drones in flight, these countermeasures risk either jeopardizing communications, violating Federal Communications Commission rules, infringing privacy, or causing inert robots to crash to the ground. Separate from this, but confounding the problem, security concerns around the testing of counter-drone tools mean that useful comparison data is hidden from the public, and often unavailable to government officials.
Beyond the confusing nomenclature, drones encompass a range of aircraft sizes, forms, and capabilities, all of which change how effective any given counter-drone approach can be. Drones include everything from relatively cheap hobbyist toys to multi-million-dollar plane-sized aircraft with flight times measured in days, not minutes.
The counter-drone market, as a category, sometimes concerns these larger vehicles. Without an onboard human pilot, even the largest of drones are vulnerable to signal disruption, GPS spoofing, or other means of electronic warfare, which seek to exploit the remote nature of control and turn it into a unique vulnerability.
Much of counter-drone technology is designed to work, broadly, against small- and medium-sized hobbyist, commercial, or industrial drones. Some of the devices used are also applicable against larger and more sophisticated, military-style vehicles, but as already noted, if the drone is big enough conventional anti-air systems work.
So far, the highest profile threat from drones is that of a drone carrying an explosive. From a small grenade to a shaped charge to a larger explosive payload, putting a bomb on a drone offers someone a few advantages over placing it or launching it with a more conventional weapon. The most immediate advantage is that, by and large, most places, people, buildings, and vehicles are less protected on top, and a drone-delivered bomb can be especially effective if flown overhead. Another reason to use a drone is that it offers a degree of control and precision in targeting, especially if the drone has a camera.
Bomb-carrying small drones have been used in Iraq, Ukraine, Syria, and even implicated in an assassination attempt on Venezuelan President Nicols Maduro. It is the top-line fear of most security forces tasked with defending against drones, and it is a threat that has a special place in the marketing of counter-drone tools. There are also special-designed grenade-carrying drones, as well as one-way drone-like missiles, marketed to militaries and built for use in combat.
Beyond direct, deadly attacks, small drones can be used in a variety of ways to bypass existing, terrestrial defenses. Most simply, hobbyist drones offer an aerial camera, allowing people to scout out a facility from above and at a distance, before finding a way in or a path around a defense. This filming can also be done in real time, so a group of people could benefit from an airborne overwatch as they sneak around.
Small drones are also often cheap enough that they can be used as somewhat expendable smuggling tools. This has in many reported cases come in the form of drones used to smuggle contraband into prisons. Drones have also disrupted sporting events, like the time a drone carrying an Albanian flag flew onto the pitch of a soccer match between Serbia and Albania in 2015.
Small drones also pose serious safety issues at airports, where a commercial airliner striking a drone or sucking one into a jet engine could have disastrous consequences. Over two days in 2018, a series of drone sightings at Gatwick Airport shutdown the busy airfield, stranding 140,000 people. No drone was ever confirmed to be found, though multiple counter-drone technologies were brought to the scene and the airport has invested in counter-drone tech going forward.
Beyond documented incidents, the range of possible small drone intrusions is only limited by the bounds of imagination: One could conceivably use a small drone to approach and break into a sensitive Wi-Fi network or pilot one onto the roof of a car and spoof its GPS system.
Finding and acquiring the right tool to detect, and mitigate, a small drone intrusion depends a lot on the kind of attacks specifically feared. It means something very different to protect a convoy on patrol from quadcopters in an ambush than to keep an office free of unwanted aerial surveillance.
The single best source of reporting and tracking on the counter-drone market is the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. A survey of the existing counter-drone market by the Center published in February 2018 found 235 counter-drone products. An updated study, published in December 2019, found at least 537 unique counter-drone systems.
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