The Enforcement Action Database continues to show a relatively lackadaisical year of pirate-hunting shaping up: just 35 actions through mid-April.
Should the trend continue, enforcement activity against unlicensed broadcasters may approach levels not seen since 2005-06, the start of the FCC’s post-LPFM station-hunting campaign. This would signify a significant shift and could be indicative of strategic revisions involving the agency’s spectrum enforcement priorities more generally.
However, some of the FCC’s divided attention seems to be turning in an unexpected direction – shortwave pirates. Booming for years, the last time the agency conducted organized enforcement on the shortwave bands was more than a dozen years ago.
According to Ragnar Daneskjold, producer of the PiratesWeek podcast, station WEAK was taken off the air in February by Douglas Miller, Director of the Atlanta District Field Office.
PiratesWeek played a clip of WEAK’s visit and shutdown (clip begins at 8:20). Mr. Miller announced his visit on-the-air and then killed the transmitter. He has since confirmed by e-mail that the incident occurred.
This would not be the first time an FCC agent has announced the bust of a pirate over its own airwaves. Former FCC Enforcement Bureau chief Richard Lee did the same thing when he silenced Philadelphia’s Radio Mutiny (the progenitor of the Prometheus Radio Project) in 1998.
Mr. Miller himself is not unknown to radio pirates: he participated in the infamous FM enforcement sweep of 1998, hauling off gear from the studios of Free Radio Memphis.
Ragnar comments that three shortwave stations have been investigated and/or contacted by the FCC over the last “several months.” Intriguingly, the agency has not published any formal notification of these activities, strongly deviating from its FM anti-pirate protocol, where a Notice of Unlicensed Operation is almost always issued.
There has been little public discussion of this among shortwave pirate enthusiasts, but if I were a broadcaster I’d want to know about FCC enforcement activity so that I could properly assess my relative risk of being on the air.