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Saturday, August 06, 2022

Drones and Contraband

 Remember being asked this question a while back ...  

Drone Contraband Deliveries Are Rampant at US Prisons         Wired, Jeff Link

Law enforcement officers face an air assault as drugs, weapons, and phones are flown in to prisoners.

On August 26, 2019, at 1:30 am in rural Georgia, two men stopped a car 100 yards away from Telfair State Prison, a closed-custody facility that backs into a forest of cypresses and oaks. Inside a duffel bag, the men had a 1.9-pound Storm Drone 4, a Radio Link UAS controller, a Spektrum video monitor with DVR headset, 75 grams of loose tobacco, four rounds of loose ammunition, and 14 cell phones.

Their plan, plotted out for over a month, was simple: To fly the drone over the prison’s walls, where it would drop the payload and soar off, undetected, into the night. But when they switched off the car lights, they caught the attention of deputies from the Telfair County Sheriff’s office stationed nearby.

One of the deputies approached the vehicle to question the driver, who told him he was with two other men. Later identified as Nicolas Lo and Cheikh Hassane Toure, the men, who had fled to the woods, were taken into custody, and later indicted in the US District Court on grand jury charges for a plot to smuggle contraband into the prison. They were sentenced to 12 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to their roles in the scheme.

Lo and Toure were two of the first US federal prosecutions of noncommercial aircraft pilots for the charge of “serving or attempting to serve as an airman without an airman’s certificate,” a violation of Title 49 of US code, which requires anyone operating an unmanned aircraft “for compensation or hire” to hold the certificate. .... '

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