Page 36 - Security Today, March 2018

Get Out of Our Space Responding and mitigating the threat of drones in and around stadiums
BMy Logan Harris
ost people, when confronting a drone (Unmanned Air Vehicle/Unmanned Air System) operating in or around their area of responsibility in an unsafe manner, would like to bring it down immediately.
Unfortunately, unless you are a federal agency with special permission or on a military base, it is unlawful to inter-
fere with the flight path of a drone. So what can be done?
Prevention
As it is commonly said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The first step is to inform the public that flying drones in and around a stadium is illegal and dangerous and operators will be pros- ecuted. For instance, at the 2015 Super Bowl, signage and billboards displayed the message that the area was a “NO DRONE ZONE.” This type of media campaign has also proven quite effective in Utah, significantly reducing the number of drones present at wildfires with posters and signs such as this one, below.
Reducing the number of incidents of drones overhead makes it simpler to deal with the remaining drones.
Ideally, the safest and most ideal preventive action would be to stop the drone from ever entering the stadium. A simple way to do
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this would be to direct a beam of RF energy onto the drone that would disrupt the communications to the operator. This can be done with the kind of Wi-Fi RF jammer that is sold to military and government groups. These Wi-Fi jammers will stop most, if not all, hobbyist, commercial and unsophisticated terrorist drones and cause them to return to where they launched with very little chance of do- ing much more than interfering with people’s Wi-Fi connection in the very near vicinity.
If after activating the Wi-Fi jammer the drone continues toward the stadium, then there is a very high probability of a serious threat. The next stage would be to activate a GPS jammer that jams the GPS receiver on the drone. However, a GPS jammer will also interfere with cell tower and emergency communications, and should only be used if the Wi-Fi jammer is ineffective. This technology is already available and in use by approved organizations.
The problem with the above response method is that it is not le- gal to be utilized by stadium operators and law enforcement in most locations around the world, including the U.S. Namely, it is illegal to interfere with the flight path of a drone or intentionally interfere with another electronic device. Some start-up companies have approached this by trying to develop drones that capture other drones or net guns
DRONE SECURITY
Dmitry Kalinovskyt/Shutterstock.com