Driver caught using cell phone jamming device
myfoxny.com
myfoxny.com
What if there's actually a legitimate need to use a cell phone like a big car accident.
Or all the data connectivity some devices need for navigation.
If you want to jam signals jam it on your farm/house but keep it out of public range.
Don't know about you, but I am orders of magnitude more dangerous when I'm uncertain about where I'm going.
Also, good luck if you're in an accident as no-one nearby can call the emergency services.
http://tbo.com/news/business/fcc-seffner-man-was-using-cell-...
"When Hillsborough County Sheriffs deputies stopped the SUV, their own two-way radios were jammed."
Assuming the driver was using a wavebubble, it's likely that it would jam police radios as well (depending on configuration).
Regardless, jammers can be narrow-band or wide-band depending on the goal. The device in the article sounds to be wide-band, but that doesn't define the entire category.
Too much of the public simply aren't responsible about driving and there doesn't seem to be any good way to identify and prevent or penalize them for it.
There are accidents where even seconds matter and the effects of the jamming can mean the difference between life and death or even simply a shift in the a victim's odds. Or consider emergency services whose radios were affected: maybe paramedics were radioing in status updates to a hospital, or perhaps police officers were in the middle of receiving an Amber alert. Or, imagine that he's injured in an accident himself. He, and anyone else potentially injured in such an accident, are potentially at risk because people can't notify 911. If he's lucky, he's able to turn it off. If he's unlucky, and is incapacitated or otherwise unable to turn it off, well, that's quite the problem now, isn't it?
I hate dreaming up hypotheticals, but this story practically demands it. His actions were no less selfish than someone else's texting while driving.
What I think he's saying is that he's got sympathy for what drove the guy to go to these idiotic lengths - the fact that a large number of drivers give pretty much no thought to safety by using their phones when they drive.
On my daily 5 minute walk from the bus to work, I will typically see upwards of a dozen drivers staring at their phones, presumably either reading or writing a message, whilst they are moving - ranging from people inching along in slow moving traffic in places that pedestrians could easily (and legally) be crossing, to ones doing 30mph+ in free flowing traffic or even pulling away from the lights based presumably on nothing more than seeing out of the corner of their eye that the car in front has started moving. I've fairly regularly seen cars meandering quite a long way through red lights simply because the driver was clearly paying no attention to what was happening on the road in front of them.
More than a few years ago, I was a manager at a hotel. As such there were several days each month when I had the emergency pager (yep, pager). The only time I ever got a 911 on the darn thing was while I was in the middle of a movie. I've never booked out of a movie theater so fast! I called back to the hotel to find out a fire alarm in a crawl space had triggered.
In the end it was just a loose wire in the actual alarm system, but obviously we didn't know it at the time. And thankfully, the movie staff had seen me in my haste, so when I returned several hours later, they were kind enough to let me watch the next showing of the movie for free.
We also miraculously managed to live without plumbing and electricity. That doesn't mean that life isn't a lot better with it.
I have family who work in health care. They spend a lot of their time at home, on call. Back in the landline days, they were tied to their phone. They literally couldn't take the dog for a walk around the block, lest they'd miss a call. Today, thanks to mobile phones, they can run errands and even go to the movies.
The problem isn't cellphones, the problem is that some people are assholes and movie theaters are too meek to enforce a no-asshole policy. If people were routinely ejected from theatres for being disruptive people would behave better.
Well, except for the people who actually, literally died because the doctor who could have saved them couldn't be reached in time.
Doctors on call had pagers before anyone else had even heard of them, much less cellphones. Are you actually taking the position that barring surgeons and other emergency personnel from, not just entering, but coming anywhere near a movie theater is a reasonable solution to the problem of the occasional jerk disrupting your entertainment?
Every payphone I've ever seen in my lifetime has been removed.
Broadcasting to jam is illegal. It is not illegal to build a room in which cellphones do not work, nor should it be.
My apartment has worse reception than that (I can make calls from my sunroom, nowhere else).
Also, these access points pair with your device and don't provide bandwidth to other random devices, so at least you're not providing free backhaul for random passersby.
A car driving around is a secret dead zone that punishes you for being nearby, even if you're not transgressing any social norms or traffic laws. Sitting on a park bench nearby? Hell, even being a passenger in a vehicle? That's the problem - he's being an indiscriminate vigilante.
That said, I totally agree with you on your main point. This is often a counter argument when people suggest that mobile devices should be disabled when the car is in motion (which isn't necessarily the same thing as jamming). Often, when I'm driving, my wife is looking up directions or letting a family member know that we're near.
As for the babysitter, deal with it. If you're not contactable for 90 minutes, you're not contactable for 90 minutes. This perma-connectivity is an entirely new phenomenon, and there's no absolute need for it. Essentially this argument is saying that the parent's inability to deal with lack of connectivity is a convenience which trumps the general theatre-going public's convenience of not having people talking on the phone, or who light up the people behind them because they're bored with the movie and are playing online.
Being uncontactable for a short period is not the horror that it's made out to be in these arguments. The good old argument that someone can't sit through a lecture without connectivity "in case Auntie Mabel dies", but of course it's just a cover for having phone access for other things. If one were to believe the excuses that get trotted out, you'd be forgiven for thinking that human mortality had skyrocketed since the public acceptance of mobile phones :)
On a different note, me and my friend and his wife went to see Roger Waters perform The Wall a couple years back. The tickets said "No photography", but the band was very careful to say "When you take photos, please make sure the flash on your cameras is off. There are effects during our production that camera flashes will disrupt." I'm paraphrasing, but they were projecting video on the bricks that were assembled onstage as part of the performance. Sure enough, not minutes into the first set, flash flash flash flash flash.
My friends were taking photos. I made sure not to look over at them.
It would seem letting people have a signal doesn't have to be a problem.
I think your definition of "disruption" may not be entirely reasonable. It's one thing if someone is sitting there having a chat during the movie, but if a person quietly getting up and excusing themselves (in response to an unheard vibration in their pocket) is unacceptable, then we're going have to ban anyone who sits down to a three-and-a-half-hour film with a Jumbo Big Gulp from the concession counter.
If a movie theatre did in fact install jammers each parent concerned about their kid (yea, it's probably not a true emergency, but subjective perception matters) or each doctor (I'm thinking more about delivering babies, which can mean being on call for weeks at a time, than an ER doctor) might choose to skip the movie. The end result is that that the theatre will likely take a hit on their profits. That's not a compelling reason to invest in installing a jammer.
The whole "we survived just fine without constant connectivity" argument is flawed. Yea, we did a lot of things without modern technology. We got along fine without movies, driving to the movies, mobile phones, the Internet, or arguing on the Internet about the need for mobile phone access during a movie.
Have another read of my comment, and you'll see in the middle of it that I'm saying that it's an argument of conveniences. It's convenient for a parent to have instant connectivity in case the babysitter calls, just as it's convenient for the audience to enjoy the movie they paid for without distractions. You say the theatre would take a financial hit for installing blocking devices, yet the more common trope is that the major annoyance in a theatre is people on phones - you could just as easily argue that they'd get a financial benefit from it. Doctors specifically on-call to deliver babies aren't much of a market segment to a movie theatre.
You clearly have no perspective.
I'd prefer my next trauma surgeon can relax and take in half a movie before he is called in on his pager to try and save my life, of which I have one that will be entirely in his hands. I don't give a fuck if you miss a couple of minutes of a movie that cost you $15 or even if it meant myself never being able to go into a movie theater again.
What's so wrong with having places that can only be attended by people who are fine with nobody will be able to reach them? Businesses don't have to serve everybody; in fact, selling exactly that escapism--that only people in certain classes and professions can afford the time to experience--is exactly the business model theatres. It is also the business model of cruise-lines and travel agencies.
If a trauma surgeon wants to see a movie, they can wait for it to come out on Netflix. Just so: if a trauma surgeon wants to go to the beach and sip mai-tais, they can find a public one within an hour's drive of the hospital.
(Note that this is all assuming that being on-call is a sensible thing to have in society. We really need to get ourselves enough employed doctors that we can guarantee we'll only need some of them at any given time, so the rest can actually stay home and sleep.)
Thing is, I just can't think of a single scenario where the rights of the many to enjoy uninterrupted entertainment in every theater outweigh the rights of everyone else to be in constant communication with whomever they chose to, for whatever reason they chose to. Regardless if they are a surgeon, parent, or just a loud douchebag in a movie theater.
So until these faraday cage theaters start popping up, if you want the movie theater without the rest of civilization, you'll just have to take a generator and projector to a National Park or start it yourself.
Seriously, get some perspective here.
As for perspective, you are right that life-and-death on-call people should be using pagers rather than phones, but you completely miss the point that you can get pagers that work on a higher frequency than the phone system. Your precious trauma surgeon can still have a pager that works in a theatre while disallowing phone use, since Faraday cages can be tuned to work on different frequencies. Pagers should be used because a pager service comes with a guaranteed SLA, and SMS services do not.
And frankly, I don't give a fuck about your ignorance, just don't use it to angrily insult me when I've done nothing to you.
That said, making calls to emergency services, if you have to run outside to make that call, you've lost 30 seconds or a couple minutes. And you can't follow their directions in aiding the person because you're outside, and the victim(s) are inside. That's assuming it's not an attacker who would prevent you from leaving in the first place.
Is this really such a pandemic in the US these days?
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/05/woman-k...
[2] http://chartsbin.com/view/32k -- I'm assuming this is accurate
Like you say, it's a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but I always admire a good hack.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safet...
Edit: https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/MeasuringC... Don't talk to passengers folks! (like that's going to happen)
Fiddling with a phone is probably the most dangerous of phone related activities while driving, though. Looking and reading off the screen (texts), pushing capacitive spots on the screen to interact with it (changing songs), and so on.
Police most likely want eyes on the road, as even passive attention to the road is better than eyes completely off it.
[edit: replaced "be singing" with "stop singing" since that's what I meant to say]
It also mentioned that young children can cause dangerous distractions because they lack the knowledge to know when the driving has gotten tough.
As for the phone, they're also the hands that will affect my phone if we need to change settings on GPS or music or whatever, because they understand the safety precautions.
So, what you say makes sense at least anecdotally and mentally.
[1] http://responsibility.org/sites/default/files/files/AIDF%20R...
As a teenager, it was amusing to watch another car go zipping past us on the highway and then see their brake lights come on right after Nathan would hit the button.
Start making sure that insurance companies have no payouts if the driver's phone was on X amount of time before the accident. That way they pay for their own damage, and the damage done to everyone around them. Regardless if they were "at fault" using conventional reasoning.
How about another one: Require all vehicles to install cell phone tethers that have the driver's registered sim card in it. Disable it during the drive. Mandate it's installation, and penalize people that break it, even more so if they were in an accident.
Almost ALL problems have a technical/legislative solution for them. The only real problem is that no one has either the resolve, balls, lawyers, political backing, or money to implement/require those technical/legislative solutions. So all we get are half-asses solutions with selective (and sometimes biased) enforcement by the police/courts.
Still waiting to hear practical solutions, because the ones you gave thus far don't cut it in the real world, IMO.
I like using my phone (responsibly, in a dashboard mount) as a network-connected mapping/GPS device. If I'm heading to an event with a guest and running late, I like being able to ask a passenger to quickly use my phone to call ahead and let them know, etc, etc.
I'm all for attempts to keep people off their phones while they are driving (even when using a hands-free system, because there is quite a bit of evidence that just removing the button-pushing part doesn't help), but there are a lot of perfectly valid use cases that would be destroyed by either of your solutions.
That's because the real world is developing self driving cars, and they are relatively boring: there is no revenge in that, and they won't save the world.
Further investment in public transport is one part of a solution (and has other benefits) but another part should be reducing the "always available" expectation.
Phone calls are almost always a huge intrusion. I'd rather they act, rather than a ringing phone, as more of an "x needs to speak with you, initiate call when convenient" alert. Then if they become unavailable, they can set a time or wait until your "ready" signal is active and contact you.
Let's just ban cars altogether and everyone can walk everywhere they need to go. Not only would it be much safer for everyone in the short-term but the exercise would improve long term health as well.
No, let's just ban human-driven cars altogether. This is actually a good solution. Can't wait until the day it becomes reality.
In the meantime, maybe the society should start approaching driving cars the way they approach flying airplanes? That is, actually train the people operating the vehicle. Current driving license exams are a joke, and people still complain they're too difficult.
Every day large chunks of the world's population are able to drive safely to their destinations. We have illustrated an ability to do this year after year and yet there's this idea that the best solution to stopping accidents is to ban humans from the equation.
I agree with your thoughts on properly training people on how to drive a car - Western countries that have better driving training and safer cars score far better in deaths per 100k motor vehicles than poorer countries and this is something that can still be improved on. That I was able to get a manual license (in Australia) without needing to demonstrate a hill start to my tester is a complete joke.
I'm not saying that self-driving cars are a bad thing - I would happily set my car to autopilot while I cruise down the highway and eat lunch or take a phone call. I'd love the additional safety of having a system that can brake perfectly for me if I'm about to crash. Being able to take a tight park because I can just get out and then watch my car go into the space? Awesome.
However, to completely ban humans is going too far. Sure, be much harsher on those at fault in accidents where they've disabled a safety feature that could have provably stopped the accident. But don't take the "a few people are bad so let's stop everyone" approach to something that we've already demonstrated a high level of competency at.
Yes and no. The accident rate would I think be viewed as completely unacceptable in almost any other activity.
Perhaps it would make you feel better to know that here in America, there is no distinction of licenses for a manual transmission. You can pass in an automatic and then drive whatever you want. So not only do you not have to demonstrate a hill start, you don't even have to know how to know how to use the clutch at all!
This being said, I trained and passed in a manual car, and have driven an auto since. I at least know what the clutch is supposed to do, but I'm not exactly practised :)
The fines for using your phone while driving are high and there are frequently advertising campaigns about it, but I still routinely see people (especially 16-45yo women) texting or calling in traffic.
And the training (and reassessment) in flying aeroplanes is ongoing, unlike most countries approach to driver education.
I passed my driving test(s) 20 years ago and since then there's been a huge number of changes in technology, laws, road layout, etc and yet my license is valid for another 30+ years.
Few people can pay for repairs out of their own pockets. Are we going to garnish their wages or place a lien on their assets? Great, the repair will be paid for after the next car gets traded-in. The end result will be victims paying for it themselves, whether directly or through their insurance carriers.
Uninsured and even underinsured drivers create significant externalities that are shifted onto their victims. The last thing in the world we need to do is effectively create more of the little bastards.
There are many situations that it is necessary that I can know when someone has called or messaged me while I am driving, under which circumstances I need to pull over to the side of the road to respond/acknowledge the call/message. Cell phones these days are sometimes necessary, and there are situations where it is absolutely necessary that people respond to them, as long as it is done in a safe way, ie. pulling off the road somewhere that it is safe to do so.
You can restrict people from answering or responding to phones in certain situations (ie. driving), but there is absolutely no situation where you can restrict people from having them on or being alerted to them. In the case of movie theaters or even driving, a vibrate in my pocket is enough to satisfy this requirement, but by no means do I respond to it without putting myself into a safe situation, or a situation where I won't disrupt people, before doing so.
The problem with coming up with solutions to problems is that you need to also think about all the possible repercussions of said solution.
Legislative solutions should only be considered as a last resort, not the first option. Pretty much all laws that I can think of come with unintended consequences, and sometimes create larger problems than they solve. Top examples: alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs.
Also, as you yourself pointed out, enforcement is a big issue requiring a lot of resources and placing a lot of responsibility (and also authority, that maybe they shouldn't have) on the police.
I agree with you. I'm not one to advocate more laws or more state as I'm an anarcho-capitalist. But the point I was trying to make is that if people really wanted the state to fix this problem, it would be. Either through more laws, incentives, education, technology, whatever. (Side note: this assumes the state 100% does what the general public wants.)
Your insurance company will happily sue you for the payout and more if you were acting tortuously at the time of the accident. The purpose of insurance isn't to protect the driver, it's to protect the victim of an accident ("There's money and you'll get it").
> Require all vehicles to install cell phone tethers that have the driver's registered sim card in it
I have 1-3 mobile phones on me most times and share around 7 SIM cards between them. Also, what about cars with more than one driver?
> Almost ALL problems have a technical/legislative solution for them. The only real problem is that no one has either the resolve, balls, lawyers, political backing, or money to implement/require those technical/legislative solutions. So all we get are half-asses solutions with selective (and sometimes biased) enforcement by the police/courts.
Yeah, let's try totalitarianism again. This time we'll have the balls to get it right.
Now, of course. The victim should have their own insurance, if they're smart. So they are covered whether or not the reckless driver was insured, or his insurance pays out third parties for damage.
Of course, as one of the other posters mentioned above. "Poor reckless drivers won't be able to pay the victim, and this will hurt the victim." Well, I'm not an advocate of more-state, but if that's what tickles your fancy, then mandate insurance. Like, I asssume, they already do for third-party damage? I don't live in the US so I don't know about that.
"I have 1-3 mobile phones on me most times and share around 7 SIM cards between them. Also, what about cars with more than one driver?" Well you're an exception. And if you think that's a reasonable argument against my solution, then you obviously didn't read it in its entirety, or you didn't understand it. If it's the latter, then I'm sorry I failed you. My point is that no one really wants to fix this problem, they just want to appear to fix it. Because if they really wanted to fix it, it would be fixed with whatever draconian/weird/unique/ballsy solution works.
Even as current state, buses are far from usable, unless perhaps you are living in the heart of the city...
Examples: http://www.phonejammer.com/home.php?cat=249
Mods: I posted the link (which was the first google result for "cell phone jammer") just to show what the size and cost was. If it needs to be removed, please feel free to remove my comment in its entirety.
JIEDDO was generally trying to jam more than just cellphones, and wanted high assurance, and while they were in motion (so, you needed range).
Chapter 4 covers the DoS using a kid's wireless IM gadget
Also:
> "All users operated in the clear, but gave an indication that they believed they were operating in encrypted mode. In some cases, this involved one user explaining to another how to set the radio to encrypted mode, but actually described the procedure for setting it to clear mode."
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec11/tech/full_papers/C...
edit: I don't work for a wireless service provider, but I'm into amateur radio.
Or, come to think of it, if you know the transmitter goes down I-4 everyday, just sit by the side of the road with a receiver and watch signal strength. I-4 can be pretty crowded, but it shouldn't be hard to narrow it down as the signal gets stronger then starts to tail off.
If you're interesting in more details, Metageek makes similar gear for the Wi-Fi bands, which is probably more relevant/interesting for the HN crowd.
Ultimately it was the very serious approach the FCC takes that stopped me from really exploring it, even for fun. Everthing I'd read indicated that you'd be caught and fast, so I'm sort of surprised it took two years, even if it was on a highway.
But lord I still might push it whenever I'm at the grocery store and someone's doing a remote, live shopping list with their wife down every aisle.
I ask in a flippant way, just to highlight the incongruence, but I'm sincerely curious.
Yes. Hearing just one half is irritating, I think because I can't help expending brainpower on filling in the other side. A speakerphone conversation is much less annoying.
You just pulse them on every now and then. That drops all the calls. Keep doing it for a few minutes and people give up using their devices.
:shrug:
MetroPCS finally had enough of the interference on April 29, 2013 and informs the FCC. They determined the likely location and started monitoring the route starting May 7. By May 9 they figured out which car it was coming from and coordinated with the local sheriff's office to stop the car, interview the driver, and confiscate the jammer. It was the driver in question that said he'd been using it for two years and dug his own grave so to speak, I don't actually see anything that says they have evidence that he was using it for 24 months beyond what he said (although maybe MetroPCS can back that up).
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014...
All that said...
> But lord I still might push it whenever I'm at the grocery store and someone's doing a remote, live shopping list with their wife down every aisle.
My husband can be hopeless when he's shopping for groceries, go easy on him ;) There's a reason we use Instacart/Google Shopping Express and I'm the one usually shopping otherwise, but I appreciate any of his efforts to help me out.
It annoys me when people use cliches, for example, but I don't interpret that as giving me the right to cut out their tongues.
On June 14, 2013, agents from the Tampa Office tested the seized cell phone
jammer and confirmed that it was capable of jamming cellular and PCS
communications in at least three frequency bands: 821-968 MHz, 1800-2006 MHz,
and 2091-2180 MHz.
As someone who has used Cricket [they bundle Sprint and MetroPCS together] ... they couldn't care less about spotty reception within their given coverage map.
http://www.heero-pilot.eu/ressource/static/files/2013_12_09_...
It's not just humans that need to make emergency phone calls without being jammed.
This I find interesting and am curious what devices they had to obtain in order to accomplish this.
I used to work for a telco that, to this day, continues to have this very issue with _someone_ in a remote rural location. By the time the NOC can inform local law enforcement the jammer has left the area, seemingly impossible to track.
I'm thinking movie theaters or coffee shops that have huge signs "Your cell phone will not work in there. If you don't agree, don't come in", etc.
That's not to say that a movie theater or coffee shop couldn't passively attenuate cell phone signals with metallic paint or other equivalents to a giant Faraday cage. But ensuring that you're not being an ass with your radio transmissions is the FCC's specific task.
A passive faraday cage on your own property that's not open to the public probably isn't an issue. As far as size goes you would be subject to local building codes of course.
Once you get into active jamming however that requires you to transmit and to transmit you need a license from the FCC. The right to transmit anywhere in the US is under the FCC's jurisdiction and doesn't have anything to do with the landowner. It may seem strange to divorce airwave rights from property rights but it's not that different from water rights or mineral rights or airspace rights, which have a long legal history of being divorced from landowner rights.
When you open your faraday cage to the public it gets a little tricky too, because if a "licensee" has the legal right to be somewhere according to you and the legal right to transmit or receive according to the FCC then you can't really legally prevent them from doing both at the same time. This idea, which is called the "OTARD rule" in some situations, is interpreted to force landlords to allow tenants to install WiFi and satellite equipment on rented property for example.
There probably is an FCC rule that would prevent stores or movie theaters or similar public places from jamming via a Faraday cage, but since actively jamming is cheaper I am not aware of any actual instances of this type. So in that sense it's a test case, but I'm reasonably certain which way it would go.
It seems very much different to me, because all of those things have very obvious externalities for your neighbors. My example, where you build a faraday cage and test a signal jammer inside that cage, has no externalities (assuming a hypothetical perfect faraday cage). There would be no measurable signal an inch outside the faraday cage, and certainly none at your neighbor's property.
If you do it in a movie theater though, it presents a safety issue, and that's a negative externality.
You'll find out real quick if you screwed up your Faraday cage design, though.
If you have the right piece of paper you can push 100,000 watts. (Note, if you're pushing 100,000 watts, then you do need a clear big sign outlining the dangers of standing near a 100,000 watt microwave)
Passive (blocking signals using faraday cages) is fine.
Active (blocking signals by sending other signals) is very much not fine and will attract legal attention.
England is currently changing (or at least thinking of changing) the law to allow prisons to use cell-phone jammers. They can't do it at present.
The big issue (as described in the article) as that the chance of interfering with a legitimate emergency communications system is fairly high.
But if you want to know if I think it's wrong for us to have inequality in the form of non-universal applications of morality or "law", then I'll answer with Yes.
The one thing that will help reverse this trend will be self-driving cars.
That's actually another good argument for self-driving cars. The used-to-be-driver doesn't have to waste his/her time anymore during commute.
I understand the desire, and it makes a lot of sense; but ... it's just not going to happen :/
Most of the time, someone will come along and correct it (as happened here).
There has recently been a crackdown in China on people driving around with a device that can hack and spam cellphones.
I think the way it works is by spoofing a basestation.
It's range is short and it has to be kept on the move to avoid detection so the scammers drive it around busy areas all day.
I'll try to find more info if anyone is interested.
EDIT: reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/business/07jamming.html?_r...
There is disagreement about whether this actually happens in the US; seems to be more evidence for it in the UK.
I can't believe this is true, since such persistent, immobile jammers would be trivial to locate (and presumably would be -- cell providers track down problems as the OP's article attests), and hotels would have so much to lose from being caught, and so little to gain by doing it.
That is different from transmitting a signal to jam which is highly illegal.
Full signal strength but no calls.
Edit: may be illegal in your jurisdiction if you require a license to transmit on cell frequencies.