Many years back, a buddy of mine was dating the daughter of an Iowa State Trooper. The father was actually a pretty cool guy and welcomed visitors to his home, perhaps hoping to influence some young minds. One of the pearls he dropped on us was that, in his career in law enforcement, he had discovered that every criminal he had encountered had three personality traits in common. Proportions varied, but all three were always there. Those traits were: Greedy, mean, and stupid.

Not all crooks, though, are completely stupid. Some of them are savvy enough to use technology to aid them in their depredations, which makes it very concerning indeed that there has been a dramatic spike in the use of Chinese-made signal jammers to prevent victims from calling for help.

There’s been an 830% increase in the amount of U.S. Customs and Border Protection seizures of Chinese-manufactured signal jammers since 2021, posing a threat to law enforcement operations, according to a new Department of Homeland Security warning.

DHS issued the warning to law enforcement saying the increased amount of signal jammers being smuggled into the U.S. poses "a threat to public safety and civilian aviation.” CBP “has seen a roughly 830% increase in seizures since 2021, despite Chinese companies’ attempts to subvert inspection,” it said.

830 percent! That's a lot of new jammers. Consider what this means for the crooks, in that the use of a jammer could prevent victims from calling the police.

Signal jammers are often used “to disrupt a range of radio frequency channels, and pose a threat to emergency response, law enforcement and critical infrastructure,” the warning states.

Signal jammers are being used by a new organized theft ring that emerged under the Biden administration, South American Theft Groups (SATG). “South American illegal aliens jam calls to local police during home invasions or bank robberies in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia,” DHS said.

If this isn't a good argument for homeowners arming themselves, then I don't know what is. It's important to remember, and this is just another illustration of this, that ultimately the responsibility for our security lies not with the government, not with the police, but with us. And no Chinese jammer ever made will interfere with an incoming .45 caliber attitude adjustment.

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Here's the thing, though: To jam a signal, that means that the jammer would have to emit a signal itself. It's not possible to passively jam a signal; a jammer would have to emit some kind of white noise to interfere with mobile phone or radio signals, and one would presume that these are on quite different bands. Wouldn't it be possible to track the use of these jammers and home in on them? Use of such a jammer would surely seem to be an attempt to interfere with law enforcement.

Technology has its upsides and its downsides, and this would seem to be one of the latter. Law enforcement is, after all, an arms race; crooks try to find ways to leverage new technology, and law enforcement has to respond. This is one more example of just that.

Maybe the Department of Homeland Security should talk to the Mossad. I seem to remember a neat little trick the Israeli intelligence service pulled off with pagers...