Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail | Hacker News Reader

Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail

hothardware.com

49 pointsus0r93 comments

I don't think jail is required here, I think a simple "don't do it again would suffice". It is not like he intended to disrupt the entire city.

I have the similar issues trying to keep my kids focused during the school day. I finally found a way to block him that didn't block my job access, and turns out all the kids are passing around VPN accounts to get around parental locks. For all my work I only managed to keep him off Minecraft for ~45 minutes.

Screen time on Apple devices. Mine hasn’t figured out how to get around that or if he has he’s doing a good enough job at school I’ll overlook it.

I bought a Gryphon router to deal with this. It conditionally blocks VPN access by device/user. It's generally been really good, but I've had to back down some of the settings occasionally because school assignments/sites were blocked.

Hopefully that will get your kids interested in things like obfsproxy, and maybe they'll even end up being able to contribute new methods to bypass China's Great Firewall when they grow up.

I've thought about controlling mobile data for specific high-security scenarios.

My design, which I never got to try out, was to cover the walls in RF shield paint, there is a corresponding film for windows. Then you can install an indoor LTE antenna/booster on a physical switch and viola, managed access to data.

Jammers like this in the US (and apparently from this article, other jurisdictions) are illegal if their effect reaches beyond your property since it can block access to emergency services, etc. I think RF containment is a legally-safer strategy.

> Jammers like this in the US (and apparently from this article, other jurisdictions) are illegal if their effect reaches beyond your property since it can block access to emergency services, etc. I think RF containment is a legally-safer strategy.

Without commenting on the legality of your RF containment idea, it's worth noting that jamming is also illegal in the U.S. even if confined to your own property. The Communications Act, 47 U,S,C, 333, prohibits causing "willful or malicious interference" to a radio licensee categorically, regardless of where it occurs. That is why the FCC fined Marriott Hotels $600,000 for operating a jammer[1] at their own resort property. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-14-1444A1.pdf

[1] The FCC treated it as a jammer, so the example applies for illustrating the scope of 333. But it's worth noting out of interest that, in this case, Marriot was transmitting Wi-Fi deauthentication packets to keep people off of private AP--presumably in an attempt to force conference attendees to pay for the resort's Wi-Fi service. Regardless, the FCC concluded that this constituted willful interference.

Edit: It would be more accurate to have said that the FCC treated Marriott's behavior in that case as causing "willful interference." The actual feature of the equipment that they used (which I think was a standard enterprise Wi-Fi AP) has other legitimate uses. She FCC did not say that the equipment itself was a jammer across the board.

[1] n.b. the purpose of that feature is to deauthenticate your own organization's computers if they try to connect to an access point that is not operated by your organization (e.g. if someone accidentally connects to the phishers operating m4riott-c0rp).

>Marriot was transmitting Wi-Fi deauthentication packets to keep people off of private AP-

Isn't that a standard feature on most enterprise access points? It is in Ruckus's at any rate.

Yes. Though I believe some vendors caution users about using the feature in the U.S. There are probably permissible uses for it, such as bona fide network maintenance and security. So I don't believe that the feature itself is illegal--Marriott just used it in an illegal way.

IMO, buildings that are effectively Faraday cages to cell frequencies should be considered unsafe for human occupancy unless they have emergency phones every 8 feet along every wall, and an automatic backup generator unless all of the phones have copper wires all the way to the phone company.

phones used by humans are far too unreliable for the level of safety you require. What you need are mandatory wireless health monitoring implants and the required installation of transmitters in any building shielded against their frequencies. For optimum safety add a shocker so any unsafe behavior can immediately be reprimanded by the authorities. </snark>

I don't want any new monitoring or emergency equipment to be mandatory. But if someone chooses to have such equipment, building owners shouldn't be allowed to just forcibly disable it.

I think you'd find it much harder to block RF signals than you would expect. As Matt Blaze found[1], creating even a small effective faraday cage can be quite difficult, and I imagine the problems only compound as you scale up.

1. https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/

An illegal action which causes harm to (many) others should come at a cost. Maybe the cost can just be an inconvenience and a bit of public embarrassment, such as is the case here.

I absolutely would apply this to people who disrupt a flight and cost the other passengers time and the airline $$$.

I would also apply this to idiots on the road who create enormous accidents. Maybe their actions were a mistake, but when it costs a lot of people time and money, it is a harm.

If you're capable of sourcing and setting up such a jammer, you must have enough comprehension to know that it could affect other people. It is doubtful that he expected to take out a large group of peoples' internet, but he could not have been completely ignorant to the risks of collateral harm.

Agree the jammer is a bad idea, but it is sad that most mobile providers do not provide parents with this kind of blocking downtime feature.

Mobile providers are providing connectivity. The parents need to provide parenting - like controlling access to the phone in the first place.

Are you familiar with the concept of parental controls?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

I feel like the choice he made was the dumbest of all available.

There are parental controls built into every mobile os I know of. Why would it be up to the mobile providers?

Absolutely. I should be able to easily turn off the data on my kid's phone, so they can't just circumvent me blocking the Wifi for them at certain times. Maybe I'm fine with the kid using their phone, but don't want them to be doom scrolling reddit.

I can't think of a single worse signal jamming activity than interfering with civilian aircraft frequencies. No, it won't make a plane drop out of the sky immediately, but imagine an extremely busy airport like Heathrow without access to ATC. Then imagine one of those planes has an emergency. It means that ground crews won't be ready. It means that runways might not be cleared. Weather conditions might not be conveyed. So much can go wrong so quickly. Communications authorities are right to apply heavy penalties for signal jamming.

Not disagreeing about jamming aeronautical frequencies, but wouldn't ATC assume an emergency when they realize they can't communicate with the aircraft?

Yes they would, but if they can't also communicate with other nearby aircraft to get them out of the way then it becomes a problem.

> collateral harm

The harm involved in taking cell based internet offline from 12 to 3am is probably provably negative (e.g. actually positive).

Because nobody's ever had to call 911 in the middle of the night?

Does the punishment fit the crime?

In my opinion - absolutely. If you're caught driving at 150mph you will go to jail even if you didn't hit or kill anyone, because the potential for harm was huge. It's the same here - even if no one suffered as the result of his jammer, it could have easily led to a situation where someone else was unable to call emergency services when necessary. The law about jammers is what it is for a very clear reason.

It is not enough to be able to imagine a hypothetical very bad outcome. The expected negative impact (probability*badness) has to actually be large.

I can imagine blocking an ambulance and a patient dying if I leave my car double-parked. I can imagine someone slipping and breaking their neck if I don't shovel my sidewalk as required by the city. I can imagine a car swerving to avoid me and hitting someone else if I jay walk. But we don't punish these crimes with jail time.

The total negative impact of this jamming crime is probably dominated by the degradation of normal service for normal people (which I expect is large!), not rare events.

The law against jammers(and the harsh punishment) is absolutely dictated by the fact that it blocks emergency services first and foremost though. It's messing with critical infrastructure of our society. The fact that it blocks someone's netflix access is only secondary.

1. All justifications I have read for these sorts of laws list both emergency services and daily services in the very first sentence of justification.

2. The current discussion is about what the law should be, not how it is; there are lots of stuff (e.g., laws combating terrorism) that are poorly justified using appeals to rare events.

I can imagine someone slipping and breaking their neck if I don't shovel my sidewalk as required by the city.

I think its more like purposefully icing your sidewalk or driveway to make it harder for salesmen/canvassers/etc to make it to your door.

I agree that is even more analogous to the crime under discussion, but I think the point stands either way. We wouldn't put someone in jail for purposefully icing a sidewalk unless the risk was actually really large or someone actually got hurt.

Usually (at least in common law countries) crimes are supposed to have an element of malicious intent.

People shouldn’t be put in prison for making honest mistakes, and laws that do that are unjust.

It is believable that he didn’t know that it would knock out the entire town’s connectivity, or that the device would extend beyond his property. He seems to be not very technically adept as he didn’t know how to use parental controls.

"involuntary manslaughter". This will incur a big penalty, and the theory is that there was not intent on behalf of the person who commited the crime.

Involuntary manslaughter only applies when the killing happened during another crime. So, even if the killing was unintentional, the happenstance was.

Not true.

Generally involuntary manslaughter can be either due to a "unlawful act" or "criminal negligence" and your comment only applies to the former type.

>>Usually (at least in common law countries) crimes are supposed to have an element of malicious intent.

Really? You can go to jail(for a very long time) just for having some drugs on your person, or for some underage pornography on your computer. Just having those things, with "no malicious intent" is enough to sentence people to years in prison. That's in countries with common law.

>>People shouldn’t be put in prison for making honest mistakes

And he might not be, 6 months in jail is just one possible outcome - most likely he will get the 30k euro fine and a some community service.

>> It is believable that he didn’t know that it would knock out the entire town’s connectivity, or that the device would extend beyond his property

Maybe, but actually look at his setup - this isn't some $50 jammer bought off alibaba. He bought a very powerful device that affected a large area around his house - ignorance of technical details and ignorance of the law only stretches so far.

I’m often curious as to whether people like yourself would feel the same after actually spending time in jail (much less prison).

I don’t think the evil inherent in robbing someone of their autonomy is warranted outside anything but the most severe crimes.

>>I’m often curious as to whether people like yourself would feel the same after actually spending time in jail yourself (much less prison)

I would hate it, but I hardly see how that's relevant. My dislike for the idea of spending a night in jail is not as strong as my dislike for the idea of not being able to call emergency services because some idiot bought an illegal jammer to stop his kids going online. Out of the two I'd rather spend a night in jail than not be able to call an ambulance.

The parent post was lamenting that people find it far to easy to demand prison sentences instead of considering more humane forms of punishment. And "a night in jail" is not at all comparable to "six month in prison", including the likely loss of employment and employability, social stigma, straining of relationships, and so on. (ok, arguably the parent post was only about the restraint of freedom)

The demand for imprisonment seen today in discussions like this is comparable to a medieval mob cheering for public executions. It is the most violent form of punishment our society uses, so the mob demands we use that - anything less would mean the unperson gets away easy. Most people seem to demand imprisonment with little idea how horrible that punishment actually is, or worse, they don't care, as long as there is blood for the blood god. Not to mention the costs.

Let me reformulate it as a question of justification against alternatives: Why do you think imprisonment is necessary and useful in this case instead of a monetary fine or forced labor / "community service"?

Well.....allow me to reprhase my original comment then.

The crime comes with a range of punishments attached to it. One of them is jail time, the others are financial fines.

In general I think that yes, jail time fits the crime of jamming critical infrastructure - like, in a general broad sense. You mess with emergency services, the punishment for that is jail.

However, the law allows for lesser punishments - and I believe in this case he won't actually go to jail. As far as the article suggests, he wasn't acting maliciously so he will just get a financial fine. But I still think that the option of jail should be there for people who are found to be acting recklessly or maliciously.

Penalty doesn't have to mean imprisonment. It could mean a big fine or a lengthy community service judgement. Whatever it is, it should benefit the general population at the cost of the individual who was reckless or aggressively selfish.

> An illegal action which causes harm to (many) others should come at a cost.

> I would also apply this to idiots on the road who create enormous accidents.

That automatically incurs a large cost. The automatic cost is so large that there's no conceivable benefit to imposing another, formalized cost.

Most drivers do not take their driving job seriously. We all should. As soon as we are near other drivers, our small mistakes can have big consequences. If penalties were measured by cost, driving accidents would be much more expensive. The result would be an overall increase in insurance costs and (probably) seriousness applied to driving.

But when you drive down the road, you will see people talking or texting, doing makeup, talking to passengers (with their heads turned toward the passenger, as if that's necessary!), and so on.

Small stupid mistakes cost a lot of time and materials, and sometimes physical harm.

> If penalties were measured by cost, driving accidents would be much more expensive.

This just isn't true. Almost all of the cost of an accident falls on the people in the accident. Where that's just one person, no system is necessary to put that cost on him, because it's already there. Where there are multiple parties involved, the existing system already puts all of the cost on the driver determined to be at fault.

Costs to third parties are a negligible part of the cost of accidents, much too small to be worth considering at all.

> An illegal action which causes harm to (many) others should come at a cost.

Peak irony here, considering why he was doing it. Protecting his children from social media harm. Were anyone at big tech companies ever jailed for the myriad ways they harmed the society and countless individuals? No?

It's batshit crazy how the HN crowd always gives ideologically aligned tech corporations infinite benefit of doubt while applying this keyboard-warrior-tough stance to individuals - often for somewhat equivalent infractions.

He isn't in trouble for blocking his kids' access to social media. He's in trouble for blocking his neighbors' access to emergency services.

Social media execs certainly are creating harm, often knowingly. But that doesn't justify blowing up your nearest AT&T building.

Possible penalties are 34k euros and/or 6 months in jail. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet.

That being said, could people with more experience in jamming chime in here? How likely is it that he was actually jamming his teenagers' phones and not something else? The hardware we see in the picture seems extremely overkill for that task, I expected the smaller AliExpress jammers.

I agree, if the only goal was to restrict his children's internet usage their are much cheaper and practical solutions like you know taking away the phone if they can't use it responsibly.

I think this is an excuse that happens to make good headlines and he had other goals in mind.

You don't even need to take away their phones; in iOS there's this function called "Screen Time" where you can declare limits on kids' phones, like "no more than two hours per day, and nothing at all after 21:00, except for Music.app". There's also analytics (how much time was spent over past week, with what apps) and a way for the kid to ask for more time. I'm sure Android provides similar functionality too.

Presumably the media article is sensationalizing the story a bit. Given the spectrum analyzer screenshot in the article, the jammer in question was flooding the 850 Mhz area spectrum with wave noise, jamming LTE/5G internet access in a localized area in the town.

I would assume that the cellular provider probably was called by numerous customers in the local area asking why their cellular access was going down, and they deployed a spectrum analyzer to troubleshoot the issue. This is common - interference from everything from misbehaving power supplies to leaky TV cables can cause interference that cellular engineers troubleshoot all the time. Once they noticed a jammer was being used they contacted law enforcement.

The real problem here is that these jammers will also deny phone access (read: 911 / 112) and can also jam public safety communications radios which also sometimes operate in the same spectrum.

> How likely is it that he was actually jamming his teenagers' phones and not something else?

We know for sure this isn't the case. If it were, then nobody would have found out and he would have gotten away with it.

The father IS NOT facing jail time for "keeping his kids offline at night." He's facing jail time for preventing others in a nearby town from accessing the internet. It doesn't appear that was the father's intent, but that's what he did.

Exactly. If you kill someone while driving drunk, you'll go to jail even though you didn't mean to. This is the exact same principle.

So for parents of phone-using-age kids, what is your tactic for healthily limiting screen time? Behavioral, technological, etc… As the father of a 2 1/2 year-old, I’d love to hear suggestions, even though this scenario for me is a few years down the road.

If you're having to use technological means to block, rather than your authority, then you've already lost I think.

it's wild to me that so many people frame discussions about their kids in terms of "opponents that have to be defeated"

It's not a subject I'm terribly interested or familiar with, but parenting strategies from a distance sound extremely barbaric

Kids don't believe in authority.

Ehh... technology keeps getting more addictive, smaller, and always-online, but authority is roughly the same it always was.

I don't think we can be expected to fight a one-sided race forever. At some point you simply have to block the mind-virus games and websites which have been perfectly tailored to infect young minds.

I think there's a slight difference between 'I have to regulate their daytime use to the minute' or 'I'll shut off access after midnight because I see they are only staying up to do whatever online' - but as I don't have kids I only remember my own teenage self and maybe I was grown up enough to only go to bed slightly later and still got kinda enough sleep. My parents never had to use any technological measures, but they've also not used 'authority' a lot, per se.

First you have to establish what "healthy screen time" even means - something I imagine isn't quite so simple. The tactics for limiting screen usage to 1 hour a day seem likely to be different than limiting it to something like 5 hours a day.

I actually get a lot of mileage out of screen time for parenting. The system I've used (I say I because if it were up to my spouse, we'd have no system) is x minutes after meals, where x has increased as they've gotten older. This started as a way to get them to eat moderately healthy at regular intervals. So the weekly schedule is 3x minutes on weekend days, and 2x minutes on week days. The effect I'm going for is "put in the work, then enjoy the reward" as a general approach to life. Using screen time in this way let's me do it in a calm, non confrontational way.

This has a lot of consequences. Like they willingly get out of bed, get dressed, and eat breakfast so they can have screen time before school. After school it's finish homework, bathe, etc. In our house screen time is basically a given unless they do something to lose it. Sometimes when they argue constantly I'll say "No screen time, you can earn it back when I've heard you each say 5 nice things to the other" or something to that effect.

Our kids are accustomed to this, I've been super consistent since they were little. I do sometimes wonder if there are unforseen side effects that may be detrimental. Otherwise they seem to have done really well. Edit to add; ours don't have phones yet, I'll probably be leaning on iOS parental controls.

I tried to be like this, but consistency went out the door during COVID and daycare shutdown days when both of us also had to work.

The only detrimental effect I can think of is your kids not being accustomed to regulating their own behavior as they grow older (like say, turning 18 and going off to college if you don’t loosen the control before hand). But that is a normal parenting problem.

Just don't give them phones or tablets if possible until they are 16 or older. If you do, no Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok or anything that has a social aspect to it. Curate their internet experience with a Pihole. If they must use Youtube, make sure the account is in your control so you can view what they watch for correction.

Xfinity has an app that lets you create profiles (for each individual in your family, for example) and associate them with devices. You can set time boundaries and limits on the profiles. This is the smaller, tactical side of a bigger strategy which is…

Discuss boundaries with your kids. Explain why healthy balance of screen time is important. Enable them to take responsibility for their own time. This is a long-term play ;)

Setting aside the obvious solution of using the phone's parental controls or physically confiscating the phones each night…

1) Is there a way to arrange omnidirectional transmitters so the signal is much stronger inside a given volume than outside it? Maybe using constructive/destructive interference like a Fourier transform?

2) Wouldn't a directional antenna dish on the roof pointed down keep the signal from leaking out so much?

3) Do cellular companies provide consumers with an API or webpage to scrape that shows data usage in near-real-time so he could have set up an alert if his kids break the rule?

Re (1) and (2), remember jamming is illegal even on your own property. So even if those ideas did work, you'd just be helping him get away with committing a crime.

Right, something I learned from this thread.

I'm asking if there are ways to be more precise with radio emissions given omnidirectional antennae in the hypothetical case where the only restrictions are Mother Nature's, sort of like the question "can you arrange magnets to produce stable levitation?" (BTW: no unless they're electromagnets.)

Discussion from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30386852

> it happened every weeknight starting at midnight and ending at 3 AM

I'm rather surprised that it took them several days to become aware of it/find the jammer. It was my impression they'd catch on to something like that more quickly.

My take-away is that he was looking for a technical and realtively easy solution to the difficult and sometime painful parts of parenting. As an engineer I think there's a valuable lesson here.

Is there a phone case that blocks the phone from receiving any signal. Since my government in Canada has given itself dictatorial powers. Many Canadians might be now traced for peaceful protesting.

See https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/:

> At least in the frequency ranges I tested, two commercial Faraday pouches (the EDEC OffGrid and Mission Darkness Window pouches) yielded excellent performance sufficient to provide assurance of signal isolation under most real-world circumstances.

Thanks found a few option on Amazon under "faraday phone cage"

Yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413774

https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/

You can take the sim card out.

Still trackable through the IMEI number unfortunately. Faraday cages are the only answer.

Insufficient. The phone will still contact cell towers in order to maintain communication, because even a phone without a SIM can make a 911 call.

If you can remove the SIM, do that. If not, you could try wrapping the phone in two or three layers of aluminum foil, separating each layer by plastic wrap. YMMV.

I think the only safe way is to completely power off the device, or even better not to place it in a location where you want it to be detected at. For example do not carry it. Removing sim or turning on the airplane mode may not help because of various back doors, if any.

Since we already had the discussion about FCC regulations, society's downfall from phones, and advice on traumatizing your kids can I ask for an aside on the theory of justice?

What is even the point of jailing him? This dude is an idiot, like beyond ignorance of the law. Society gains nothing buy jailing a man who is clearly not a danger to anyone, didn't even realize his mistake, and has no chance whatsoever of re-offending. And if you're gonna jail someone to make an example / as a deterrent you could at least wait until you find someone who actually did it with the intent to harm.

Personal opinion without knowledge of the specific law: i hope he is fined reasonably(enough to inflict pain but not too much to put his family in hunger) on the condition that the next offense is jail. 34k is quite a lot even for a well of tech employee :/

That's pretty much where I'm at, this guy basically deserves the adult equivalent of writing "I'm sorry for taking down my city's cell service" 1000 times on a blackboard.

He was negligent with a dangerous technology. The device is illegal to operate and sell, for obvious pro-society reasons. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, because then anyone can feign ignorance, making all laws contingent on one's ability to pass as ignorant. Or the laws become contingent on how likely prosecutors, judges, and juries are willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the defendant, and people have all kinds of conscious and unconscious biases about who "seems trustworthy."

> making all laws contingent on one's ability to pass as ignorant

Courts already have to evaluate mens rea and judges who make sentencing decisions take ignorance into account.

> likely prosecutors, judges, and juries are willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the defendant

This is already how the law works.

> This is already how the law works.

You say that like it is a good thing.

People can fake being idiots, or aren't idiots but do overreaction-idiotic stuff for group-dynamics reasons so that's why the sentence should be possible.

Is this guy really an idiot? That's a job for a judge to determine - which is the human element that is supposed to be a counterpart to the code in a system of law.

How do you know that was really his intent? There are many other avenues for parental controls in iOS and Android, and many providers also offer this service. He chose the options that was not only illegal but one that would prevent his neighbors from using their phones, possibly during an emergency. He’s either dumb or he had other intentions in mind. But this is why we have the courts to decide these matters.

How is blocking everyone's 911 calls "clearly not a danger to anyone"? How is putting him in jail different from putting people who drive drunk in jail?

How is he an idiot when he just ran a signal jammer non maliciously? He had no schemes. Just because you don't care about the law bogeyman doesn't mean you're an idiot.

This story points out few things. First, this is a failure of parenting. He should have demanded his kids surrender their devices every evening. Did he not want the "conflict"? Dads had more backbone, when I was growing up.

Second, I think there should be licensed use available for low power jammers -- say, one that ranged only so far as the perimeter of a high school classroom. If that's not possible, then perhaps schools need to be refitted with chickenwire in the walls, like the old plaster walls of years ago.

> I think there should be licensed use available for low power jammers -- say, one that ranged only so far as the perimeter of a high school classroom. If that's not possible, then perhaps schools need to be refitted with chickenwire in the walls, like the old plaster walls of years ago.

I'd rather see the opposite. I think that our laws against jamming don't go far enough, and we need to move in the opposite direction. I want it to be illegal to have buildings that intentionally block cell signal.

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