An impersonator hijacked the Santa Barbara County Fire Department radio waves once again, causing the department to suspend its Twitter account in late December.
The impersonator has been hijacking the radio waves since October, said Joe Ayala, the dispatch supervisor for the Santa Barbara County’s Sheriff’s Office. The impact has been relatively low, according to Ayala, and has thus far only involved someone impersonating dispatch and speaking what Ayala calls “a little nonsense” over the waves. In one incident during the evening of Nov. 25, a man was laughing over the airwaves, and at one point, it sounded like he said, “Do you have a license to smoke weed?”
The county fire department responded by shutting down the feeds to its Twitter profile and to ResponseDeck (a iPhone app specifically made to facilitate emergency calls for Santa Barbara County emergency personnel) for a brief period of time and brought the feeds back online within less than 24 hours.
But the most recent incident has caused officials from both the Santa Barbara County fire and sheriff’s departments to investigate the matter more closely, and investigators hope to get the feds involved. The impersonator was apparently following the fire department’s Twitter feed—which often contains posts of the department’s emergency calls—and verbally directing emergency units to calls over the radio. Ayala said he suspended the Twitter feed for the fire dispatch until the person is caught.
The impersonator is a problem, Ayala said, because hearing his voice over the radio waves is causing confusion and could send emergency personnel to the wrong call.
“The potential could be disastrous,” Ayala said.
Authorities aren’t sure if more than one person is involved. Nobody seems to know where the transmissions are coming from. A recent audit of the county’s emergency radios showed that none of them came up missing, according to Ayala, who added that radios purchased from electronics stores can easily access emergency frequencies.
Authorities managed to record some of the unauthorized transmissions and will be presenting a list of them to the Federal Communications Commission. If caught, the impersonator could face a number of federal charges, including a slew of FCC violations and interfering with public safety.
Catching the impersonator could be a bit of a challenge, but it’s not impossible. A number of different technologies could be deployed to catch the suspect, the easiest of which is triangulation. Ayala said that the sheriff’s department is on guard for when he (or she) strikes again. If they find out which tower the person is using, Ayala said he could isolate the impersonator to a specific geographic area.
“It’s not that hard getting a radio to transmit on these frequencies,” Ayala said.
This article appears in Jan 8-15, 2015.