On at least two occasions in 2014 (once in November and again in December), anyone listening to Santa Barbara County Fire’s radio frequencies would have heard someone apparently impersonating a dispatch operator. Joe Ayala, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office dispatch supervisor, said county officials asked the Federal Communications Commission to help investigate the matter.
Ayala recently told the Sun that the FCC was indeed looking into the case.
Michael Snyder, an FCC spokesman, told the Sun he could neither confirm nor deny if the agency was conducting an investigation.
County officials began their own investigation into the matter as well. The alleged impersonator was laughing and joking over the airwaves.
“One of the transmissions sounded like they were at a party,” Ayala said.
Fire officials suspended their Twitter feeds and updates from a smart phone application called Response Deck after it appeared that the person was broadcasting details of emergency calls from the app over public airwaves, Ayala said.
Response Deck is an app that gives first responders instant access to information on emergency calls received by dispatchers, but it can be downloaded by anyone with a smart phone. Ayala said the app is back online, and its developer is working on an update requiring smart phone users to identify themselves in order to access it.
Ayala believes that the person was using Response Deck to receive the details of dispatch calls rather than following the Twitter account because the information is updated more quickly on the app.
He said that the person, whoever it was, probably had a radio that could broadcast on the same frequencies as county fire emergency personnel. It’s not illegal to have such a radio, Ayala said, but it becomes illegal when the radio is used to transmit without an FCC license.
No one’s heard anything unusual over the airwaves since December, Ayala said, except for a “suspect” transmission in early January—though he’s not sure if it’s connected.
Ayala said county officials implemented monitoring equipment that will help narrow the area where the transmissions are coming from, but there’s not much they can do until the person tries to transmit again.
“Either this person got tired of playing around or they grew up or they know that we’re trying to find them,” Ayala said.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 5, 2015.