Drones are becoming the new, high tech version of smuggling a file into prison by baking it into a cake. Police in Maryland arrested two men planning to use a drone to smuggle drugs and pornography into a state prison using a drone to get it past guards and fences according to a story in The Washington Post. Though it may sound like the plot of a bad comedy movie, using drones for crime like that is very much the wave of the future.
"It's the latest in a long of events," a spokesman for DroneShield, a Herndon, Va.-based drone detection technology developer told DC Inno in an interview. "We're well past the start of this trend. I hear about a story a week on something like this."
"I hear about a (drone sneaking into prison) story a week"
DroneShield offers clients a network of sensors that can identify drones by sound from hundreds of yards away and send a message to let its owner know what it heard and decide what to do. The tech has been used at the Boston Marathon and for various private and corporate clients, but prisons and law enforcement are starting to increasingly reach out to the company. DroneShield's tech is used by by several prisons overseas, mostly in Asia, and is running pilot programs for some prisons in the U.S.
The fact is that drones bypass all of the usual security measures put in place to stop contraband, and most of the time there's no way to know it's coming until it's already there, causing riots in prisons including in Ohio and the UK, the spokesman explained. In the case of the Maryland arrests, law enforcement had actually built the case to arrest the men based on contraband found and information gained inside the prison. But if the duo had not been arrested in their car with the drone and the drugs, things might have been tougher. Short of spotting the drone and tracing it back to the pilots while it's in flight, there's a limit to what guards at the prison could do.
"There's a trend of de-manning towers," DroneShield explained. "And even where there isn't, it doesn't make sense for guards to constantly be watching the sky."
DroneShield has also developed related tools including net gun to knock drones out of the sky, but that's not always a smart move. Drones can crash onto innocent people or otherwise cause damage to property. In the case of drones flying over prisons, the DroneShield spokesman said it's usually better to simply clear prisoners away from open areas and let local police know about the drone. If DroneShield or similar tech is involved, the direction the drone came from can be determined, and police can investigate possible launch areas and try to catch the pilots.
"You don't want to knock it down and have it crash onto a road and kill a bus full of school kids or something," DroneShield's spokesman explains. "It's much safer to just track it and find the pilots.
Maryland lawmakers are working on developing plans and funding for drone detection according to the Post story, with each facility costing between $350,000 and $400,000 per prison. The DroneShield spokesman said he hadn't heard whether any company had been chosen to fulfill the contract yet, but that there are enough companies out there working on drone detection that a bidding process would make sense.
Federal and state agencies are working to come up with rules and laws to fill in the gaps of policy and responses to illegal drone use. Criminal drone use is a problem that's only going to grow, and that means startups like DroneShield, formerly based out of tech startup incubator 1776, will be ever more in demand to stop prisoners from using technology to update their prison smuggling schemes.
