Chapter 44: Counter Surveillance

After their nature-birding walk, Tamara returned with the girls and they chatted for a while; then the older cousins said that they wanted to go to the pool. Barbara stopped by and told her that Terence and Peter had met a few other guys and were shooting hoops on the basketball court.

“Good; he’s keeping occupied,” Tamara told her. “I need to check my email to see if the patent lawyers have anything for me to answer.”

“Fine. See you at the pool later?”

“Yep. Be there as soon as I can. I need to track Ron down too, about the drone problem.”

“Good. Don’t do anything illegal, remember,” Barbara admonished her.

“Yes, mother,” Tamara chuckled.

Barbara snorted and walked away.

Tamara checked her messages and indeed found several about the two patent applications she had in the works. After working on her reply and sending it off, she looked at the FAA site to see what it said about drones, then went to several manufacturers’ sites. When she finished, she closed up and left for the pool area. On the way, she saw Ron riding toward the campground area in a golf cart, so she flagged him down.

“What’s up, Tamara?”

“Hi, Ron. This morning, Barbara told me that I should ask you about the drone problem. I have a few ideas about what to do about it.”

“I’m all ears, Tamara. I found out a little while ago that the bozo is posting stills and videos from our resort on a voyeur website. I’ve got Gary, um, Detective Lynch, coming by tomorrow at 11 am to discuss the problem. So far, we’re stymied.”

“So I guess it doesn’t have any ID you can see.”

“That’s a major problem; it doesn’t. And Gary told me that it should have a radio ID beacon too. Last year when we were trying to find the owner, most drones didn’t have the beacon because it wasn’t part of the rules and for older drones, it was an add-on. I’m not sure about the rules this year, whether it has to have an ID beacon now.”

“I looked at the rules. It should now. What’s the thing look like?”

“Well, it’s a typical drone. Kinda big. Maybe eighteen inches across, has four rotors, and a fairly big camera underneath. And there are four legs that mount on two skids for feet. The guests who spotted it didn’t pay much attention to it ‘cause many thought that we were running it. But we have to stop it from coming; our guests’ privacy is at risk. You want to meet with us and explain your idea?”

“Sure. I’ll bring Peter too. And when we meet, if you have an old electronic gadget you no longer need, please bring it—or ask the sergeant if he has something that he wouldn’t mind getting damaged.”

“Really, Tamara? Your idea doesn’t involve wrecking the drone, I hope. We can’t shoot the thing down, you know.”

“Not doing that. No shots will be fired in anger,” she chuckled. “I’m working on a device that I think might be useful for the Defense Department that I could use. And this’ll be a good field trial.”

“Shit, girl, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Okay, it’s just an idea and if the sergeant says no go, then I’ll drop it. But it looks like the drone is being operated illegally.”

“It is. Well, just come tomorrow. Thanks.”

He drove away, shaking his head and Tamara continued on to the pool. The entire extended Winsberg family was there now and so was a large number of others who Tamara didn’t know. She found out that these were long-time resort members who all had been coming to the resort for their August vacations for many years. After a round of introductions, people began getting their lunches out or buying their lunch from the lunch stand. After lunch they organized some spirited water volleyball games that went on for over an hour.

Afterward, Tamara spent some time socializing with the people she had met and chatting with the college-aged cousins. Then she decided that she had work to do and looked for Peter. She found him talking with a few of his parents’ friends, mostly the parents of the “rugrats” posse. They were telling Peter about how their daughters’ crushes on him was keeping them amused. Peter introduced Tamara to them and then excused himself.

“Tamara needs to talk to me ... I see it in her expression,” he told them, grinning. “Let’s go, sweetie,” he said to her. “What’s up?”

“Lots of stuff. So early this morning, I spoke to Barbara while you and Terence were doing your manly things with the weights,” Tamara teased him. “She told me about the drone sightings last season. Then I saw Ron just before noon and he told me that the pictures from the drone are on some website now, too.”

“Yeah, I heard that too,” Peter said.

“When I saw him before, I told him that I have an idea how to stop it but both he and Barbara are dubious about whether it’s legal. Ron told me he called the detective; they’re meeting tomorrow and we’re going to be there too.”

“Um, ‘We’?”

“Yep. I want you there for moral support. Or immoral, whatever,” Tamara giggled. “I wanna ask the detective about my idea for stopping the drone and catching the guy.”

“Just how do you think you can do that?” Peter asked.

“You know that I was going on my computer earlier. I had some emails to take care of, but then I started researching drones. Let’s get back to the cabin and I’ll show you what I’m thinking.”

On the walk back, Tamara told him what she had learned when she was reading about the drones. When they got back to the cabin site, she took her backpack out of Barbara’s car.

“I need to make some adjustments to this gadget I’ve been playing with,” Tamara told him as they went into their cabin.

Tamara opened her backpack and pulled out what looked like a small infrared heater with a copper-colored reflector bowl on one side and a boxy shaped projection on the other. Then she produced a battery, meter, a toolbox, a box of parts, a little vacuum vise, and an IC soldering kit. Peter’s eyes bugged out.

“Honey, you don’t travel light, do you? What is all that stuff for?”

“Some time ago, I thought of a device that has possible military applications and I’ve been working on it at home. I don’t want it in Emma’s lab and I don’t want to leave it in the apartment when I’m not there; it’s too dangerous if someone finds it and messes around with it.”

“Damn, honey, what does it do?”

“So, it should be able to fry electronics at a distance of maybe a hundred feet, maybe more.”

“Jeez, that is dangerous. What does it do to electronics, exactly?”

“Makes a series of powerful EMF bursts, electromagnetic frequency radio and microwaves. I told you about how I zapped the RFID chips in Florida, remember?”

“Yeah...”

“So this is a kind of refinement of that. It’s somewhat frequency-tunable, has variable power, and uses the accumulator I invented as a power source so that there’s virtually no recovery time needed between pulses. I thought of using this against that drone. On those drone sites, I read that there are guns that shoot nets and ones that shoot RF to take down drones; but those gadgets are only for official, like government or military use, though. And I have this device right here; it probably can do the same, but in a much cruder way. Now I need to modify it a bit for the frequencies that the drone uses, so you can give me a hand with doing that, okay?”

Peter shrugged but sat down with her and assisted her, mainly by using the meter to tell her the power readings and frequencies her device was emitting as she adjusted its circuitry. After an hour and a half, she was satisfied with her adjustments so, thanking Peter, she packed her electronics shop back up into her backpack and stowed it in the bedroom.

People were beginning to return to the family site now to get dinner prepared, so Tamara and Peter joined them to help and soon everyone was enjoying a nice dinner.

This experience is just so awesome, Tamara thought at one point. I’m gonna hate it when it all ends. And to think—I haven’t even had a single thought—not one—about being nude, for days!

The rest of the evening was spent quietly. They had a fire ring set up in front of the main house and some of the guys started a campfire. The marshmallows, graham crackers, chocolates, and roasting sticks came out and everyone enjoyed roasting marshmallows and making s’mores.

When the fire died down, Tamara, Peter, and a few others visited the hot tub and spent the time discussing their plans for the coming school year and what they hoped to do after they graduated. Soon their yawns convinced them it was bedtime so they returned to their cabins to retire for the day.

Tuesday was an overcast day. Rain threatened all morning but it didn’t deter the runners from getting their exercise. In fact, the cloud cover helped with keeping the heat from being bothersome, and the generally uncomfortable mid-Atlantic summer humidity this morning was more like Florida’s, Tamara thought. When the time for her meeting drew near, Tamara grabbed her backpack and with Peter, they set off for the office.

When Tamara and Peter got to the office, the detective was already there, talking to Ron. Both greeted the couple.

“Ron tells me that you have some kind of secret weapon to use on the drone,” Lynch said with a smile.

Tamara shook her head. “Um, not a weapon, it’s an electronic countermeasure device. The Defense Department already has a number of things like those but I thought of this gadget that I’m building when I heard about the drone problem.”

“That’s okay, I suppose,” Lynch responded. “Not a weapon, good. Anyway, Ron told me that the perp is posting photos and videos now. He was already violating the FAA flight rules. He’s not operating within line of sight and he’s flying it over groups of people. And now he’s violating their privacy rule. But we can’t just shoot it down; that’s illegal and dangerous too. We need to locate the perp and get him, not the device.”

“Yeah, I read about the FAA rules on their drone site,” Tamara said. “They have some pretty stiff penalties and I don’t want to get involved with any federal prosecution. Anyway, Peter told me that last year, the drone was flying at about treetop level, that it was first seen coming from one direction, and leaving the area in another. So we can’t backtrack it or project its flight path. What I propose doing is to confuse the thing and blind its navigation. Is that guy committing a crime, other than violating the FAA flight rules?”

Lynch replied, “Actually, yes. Taking photos like he’s doing violates the state’s ‘peeping tom’ law, in Maryland it’s called ‘visual surveillance with prurient intent.’ That law doesn’t require that the surveilled subjects be in an enclosed private place; any place where they expect that they won’t be photographed is considered private. And our laws also forbid any type of photographic surveillance by outsiders on property where a private residence is located, and on this resort, I know that there are many private residences. It’s illegal to use a camera to record an unsuspecting person on private property.”

“Okay, but I also don’t want to be in the position of breaking one law to catch another person who’s breaking other laws,” Tamara told him. “Apart from that, the things that the drone guy’s doing will have an economic impact on the resort, if word should get out that there’s an aerial voyeur who’s posting their pictures on the web. The gadget I’ll show you now could be a possible solution. This device will interfere with the electronics of the drone enough that it should be confused. One option would be to just zap the electronics to bring it down; but that would cause damage.”

“Really don’t want that,” Lynch said.

“Yeah, of course. Another would be to mess up its directions until the power runs out or it flies into a tree. I read that the more expensive drones will do an emergency landing when the power’s low.”

“That’s better, but it still violates FAA regs over interference with an aircraft,” Lynch told her.

“True, but cops break speeding laws when chasing a fleeing suspect, right?” Tamara grinned. “Law enforcement people have much more leeway in bending laws to apprehend someone who’s wilfully breaking others, right?”

“Huh. Lectured in police procedure by a civilian. Tamara, you’re right. What do you have cooked up?”

She put her backpack on the table and opened it, then pulled out the device she had worked on the previous day while Peter watched.

“I have several inventions that DARPA over in Arlington has licensed and this is an extension of one of them. Now I’ll need to trust you not to talk about this so I won’t bother with getting non-disclosure agreements from you all—and I can’t tell you exactly how the technology works ‘cause then you would have to sign an NDA. Essentially what it does is to make bursts of electromagnetic waves and they can disrupt electronics. It’s called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Kinda like what happens in a lightning strike, but not as dramatic. I’ve been playing with this device for a while and it works on the little circuits I’ve tested it on, but so far I’ve never tried it on a more complex device.”

“What does it do to electronics?” Ron asked.

“At high power it can fry electronics. Integrated circuits, things like microprocessors, are the most susceptible to damage. At lower power close by, or at higher power at extended distances, it can set up eddy currents—induced currents—that interfere with the device’s circuits’ operations. Ron, do you have something we can try it out on?”

“Yeah, I found an old cassette tape player. It still works, but of course it’s worthless; nobody uses them anymore. What will you do to it?”

“First, I’ll try scrambling it. The tape drive itself is mostly mechanical; a motor driving belts, I’m guessing, so quick EMP bursts won’t do much there, but I think I can affect the audio circuit. We need to do this outside ‘cause I don’t want to hurt any electronics in here. Sgt Gary, please leave your phone and radio in here. Any other electronics on you? I can see that Ron and Peter aren’t burdened with electronics—or anything else.”