Nancy Guthrie's neighbors flag camera glitching as experts explain Wi-Fi jamming
TUCSON, Ariz. — The task force investigating the February abduction of "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie's mother has reportedly begun asking neighbors about a potential internet outage the morning of her abduction, prompting speculation that the kidnapper may have used a Wi-Fi jamming device.
A move like that would add a layer of sophistication for the masked suspect who appeared on 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie's front steps carrying a Walmart backpack and oddly placed holster.
"It shows an astounding amount of planning if they were used," said Joshua Ritter, a Los Angeles defense attorney and Fox News contributor.
Neighbors told Savannah's network, NBC, that a team of investigators sweeping the neighborhood Thursday asked specifically about internet outages.
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According to NBC News, a couple who live adjacent to Guthrie's home said they have four cameras on their property, noting the one closest to the missing 84-year-old's home was "not available" during the overnight hours of Feb. 1 when she disappeared.
The neighbor said it seemed "uncanny" that the security video wasn't available during that timeframe.
"That’s really weird, isn’t it?" the neighbor said.
That prompted speculation about the so-called Wi-Fi jammers, which are illegal in the United States under Federal Communications Commission guidelines.
They're not particularly high-tech. And they can be obtained online, which is potentially something investigators could track.
But the fact that the FBI and Google were able to recover video from Guthrie's Nest doorbell camera, when the device was physically missing, and she did not have a cloud subscription, indicates a Wi-Fi jammer may not have been deployed at her front door.
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"If they were using Wi-Fi jammers, then I would expect that we would not be able to see any video from the front door cameras," said Morgan Wright, the CEO and founder of the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases. "I took a look at some of the videos with the other gangs that use Wi-Fi jammers, and had one been up and running and persistent, you wouldn’t have gotten the clear pictures that we did from the front."
Guthrie's router wouldn't detect the presence of a signal jammer, either, unless its internal logs recorded the sudden disconnects of multiple devices at the same time, like Guthrie's exterior cameras, Wright said.
"The router won’t see the jammer as a device," he told Fox News Digital. "It’s not attempting to connect. … All an RF (radio frequency) jammer does is flood a frequency band with noise so legitimate signals cannot be decoded."
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So, unless the router in Guthrie's home logged the disconnects, which not every make and model does, the jammer wouldn't have a digital footprint for investigators to uncover, he said.
"Whether investigators could detect a jammer, the answer is almost certainly no," Wright said. "It operates at the radio layer. The router records events at the network layer."
Jammers function by spamming the airwaves on the same frequencies as Wi-Fi devices, interrupting their connections to the internet.
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Early adopters to home Wi-Fi may have seen similar interruptions if they took a call on a wireless landline phone while surfing the internet. People who live in densely populated apartment buildings can also face interference from their neighbors. More advanced routers are more resilient to conflicting signals.
Commercial jammers have a range of about 10 to 30 yards, Wright said, and they get more effective the closer they are to the victim's router. From a distance, they can cause lag and glitching but might not black out a camera's signal entirely.
While devices used by the military and the U.S. Secret Service have a much greater range, they're larger and use more power.
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For that reason, he said it's unlikely that neighbors saw an impact from a jamming device deployed at Guthrie's home.
"If they say, ‘Well, I had an internet outage,’ it’s got nothing to do with an RF jammer," he said of the neighbors. "That RF jammer would have to be high-powered, military-style stuff to affect a neighbor."
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Wi-Fi jammers have no effect on wired security cameras or alarm systems. Some wireless cameras can store video locally and upload once an interrupted connection is restored. It depends on the make and model.
Jammers have been used by organized burglary rings to overcome home security systems in recent months, including a South America-linked group busted in Houston, Texas, last month. The same gang has ties to similar theft operations in California, New York, Florida and Wisconsin, according to authorities.
"We all know the South American theft groups have been using them in burglaries across the country," said Lisa Miller, a retired detective and law enforcement executive at the Colorado Attorney General's Office.
"I find it to be a plausible theory but not as likely," she told Fox News Digital. "Here’s why. The video of the porch monster released by the FBI didn’t appear glitchy. At all. I mean, even police car laptops have glitched during traffic stops of someone with a jammer."
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The apparent antenna seen in the suspect's pocket on that Nest video could more likely be part of a handheld radio, she said.
"I think it’s smarter to use that than a burner phone," she said. "The criminals know what the FBI ... can do. Of course, I’m opining based on experience, and it fits my theory that porch monster had an accomplice."
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Other experts are also skeptical based on the added level of sophistication a jammer would bring.
"If they were forward-thinking enough to purchase and use one of those jammers, I think they would have done better than what we saw at the front door," said Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant and spokesperson for the National Police Association. "It is definitely a possibility, but that would require so much advanced thought and action. That brings us back to someone who knew her and very specifically targeted her."
On the other hand, if the suspect knew her well enough, they might have known she didn't have a cloud subscription for the cameras she did have.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department declined to comment on any potential internet outage in Guthrie's neighborhood at the time of her abduction.