This Little Drone Tried to Deliver Porn and Drugs to a Prison

This week, police foiled a plot to fly a drone laden with drugs and porn over a prison—the latest in a string of similar attempts and the second one this month alone.

It is believed that an inmate at the Western Correctional Institution in Maryland had arranged the drop with two friends on the outside, who were stopped by authorities with a car full of illegal substances, tobacco, and porn, which they intended to hitch to a civilian drone and fly over the jail’s gates.

Though this particular attempt was thwarted, an incident in Ohio just weeks ago demonstrated the dangers these contraband drops pose. More than 100 inmates were present when a drug package containing heroin and marijuana landed in the yard at Mansfield Correctional Institution, sparking a brawl over who would claim ownership. Officers were only able to ascertain the cause of the fight after surveillance footage showed a package—which contained enough heroin for 140 individual doses—flying above them, leading to inmates being pepper-sprayed and nine prisoners being sent to solitary confinement. Add these incidents to the case of Brenton Lee Doyle, who received 15 years in prison for attempting to fly cellphones, marijuana, and tobacco into a South Carolina jail in 2014, and a disconcerting pattern emerges.

A form of smuggling that once seemed novel, drone drops are becoming a growing threat to prison security. “Most of the drone phone drops are orchestrated once a prisoner gets a mobile phone smuggled in,” explains Scott Schober, a cyber security expert and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems. “Then the inmate can plan specifically when the drone should be flown over the wall so they can receive the drop.”

Drones are certainly a more sophisticated means of sneaking contraband beyond prison walls, Schober says, particularly given its lower tech (but highly tested) alternatives such as duct-taping goods to cats, using potato launchers to send things over the gates, and furrowing items inside basketballs. They also boast the primary appeal of digital warfare: anonymity. As with so many modern forms of violence, from online abuse to cyber hacking, the ability to commit crimes under this cloak is behind its prevalence.

With the price of civilian drones plummeting over the past two years, and contraband cellphones easily able to fetch up to $1,000 behind bars, this kind of quick and lucrative maneuver is becoming increasingly popular. “Contraband cellphones being smuggled into prisons are the number one [security] problem,” according to Schober. That was certainly true in the case of Corrections Captain Robert Johnson, an officer with a reputation for weeding out illegal cellphones—one of which was used by an inmate to order a hit. The 59-year-old was shot six times outside his home in Sumter, South Carolina, which required 15 surgeries and left him with walking and breathing problems.

The issue now facing prisons is how to intercept these illicit carriers. “Currently there is little technology to thwart contraband cellphones from coming in over the walls to the yard. Until technology can be deployed it will be challenging to counter this threat,” says Schober.

Detection devices could cost up to $400,000 per facility—a huge cost, though arguably a necessary one. With over 100,000 drones being sold in the U.S. each month, the majority of which are purchased by civilians, the full scale of the issue has likely not yet been realized. Should another drug drop lead to violence of a more serious nature that officers are unable to control, there’s no telling the extent such damage might wreak.

Following the crash of a hobbyist device on the lawn of the White House in January, efforts to bump up drone safety have been widely discussed. A number of measures have been put forward to tackle the problem, but few have proved successful—a likely combination of the Federal Aviation Administration’s inability to impose limits on recreational drone owners and the technology robust interception requires. “Jammers”—which flood the radio spectrum with white noise, throwing them off track—are illegal, while counter drones, where security operatives send up their own devices to disable active ones already in the sky, would require full-time surveillance.

“Drones will be a $10 billion industry in the next few years,” Schober predicts. And without the technology in place to tackle illicit drops, the ever-muddying waters of drone security grow murkier still.