Harris showcases Signal Sentry 1000 solution that detects, locates GPS-jamming sources

“For example, there was a shipping port on the east coast that was shut down for six hours, because the GPS signal was blocked,” he said. “The tower cranes use the GPS for synchronization, and for some reason, it was blocked. The port came to a halt for six hours.”

GPS jamming also can be used to make flying planes much more difficult, upsetting the normal efficiency of airport operations. Meanwhile, GPS jamming also has been used to undermine asset-tracking systems in an effort to perpetrate the theft of valuable merchandise, such as expensive automobiles, Rolli said.

“People would go into high-end car dealers in Los Angeles and lease an Audi or a Mercedes,” Rolli said. “They’d have bad credit, so the finance people would put a GPS tracker on the car. They would buy a GPS jamming device for $35, wire it to the battery, drive it to the port and export the car to Korea.

“So, they had 46 cars go through the Los Angeles port, all with jammers on them.”

And the Pharmaceutical Cargo Coalition reports that similar GPS jamming tactics are used to steal trucks transporting valuable over-the-counter items such as Viagra, Oxycodone and baby formula, Rolli said.

“They use jamming technology to highjack trucks,” he said. “They jam the driver’s cell phone, so he can’t call for help. Then, they jam his GPS, so he ‘disappears’ [from monitoring efforts], and they take off with the truck.”

Deploying a Signal Sentry system is not cheap, typically costing about $300,000 to buy and install the GPS-detection system for a 2-square-mile area, Rolli said. However, the potential costs to a critical-infrastructure entity like a port, airport or utility caused by malfunctioning GPS signals can make Signal Sentry deployment a reasonable investment.

In contrast, Rolli said that GPS jammers are fairly easy to purchase and typically cost less than $35 per unit on the Internet. Most are packaged in a manner that makes them difficult to detect.

“They come in as routers, cell-phone boosters or some other type of device, so customs doesn’t necessarily detect them,” Rolli said. “Some of them look like the little charger for your cell phone, some of them look like cigarette packs, and some of the larger devices look like a regular Wi-Fi unit that you’d have in your house.”

Although Signal Sentry can report the location of a GPS jammer to authorities and using a GPS jammer is illegal, enforcing the law has proven to be difficult, Rolli said.