If you’ve ever sat down and said to yourself, “I still did more research because I didn’t want to do anything that was illegal” you may well have already reached the point where it’s time to make yourself a cup of tea and have a nice lie down.
From experience, that’s the kind of thing said in a movie shortly before terrifying melty spiders from another dimension climb through the terrifying melty spider portal you just opened in your basement.
The consequences may be a little less dramatic in real life, but you’ll probably end up hiding in a toilet anyway.
A jammer is a gadget which stops a mobile device from receiving signals from base stations.
You may well have gone to an event where phones aren’t allowed and a jammer is in effect – if you couldn’t check out how many digital cows you’d milked in a Facebook game while listening to Beethoven’s Ninth, a jammer would likely be the reason why.
Think of a cellphone jammer as a bigger, nastier cousin of the TV remote jammer , which works by flooding common Infra-red frequencies used by remote controls with the IR equivalent of gibberish.
Step up to the plate, ex-pro wrestling teacher who wanted to make his distraction prone class a little more attentive – by taking a Jammer into school to foil the mobile munchkins once and for all. No more In-App Purchases for you, kids!
The problem isn’t so much local law enforcement, who he checked with to see if there were state laws against using a jammer (there weren’t). No, the problem are Federal laws and this FCC Enforcement Advisory which is filled with semi-terrifying “Don’t use one of these or else” type notices.
If you operate a jammer and get it horribly wrong, monetary penalties can exceed $100,000 per violation.
I think I’d rather just let everyone go back to their Facebook cow game, to be honest.
Things really took a wrong turn into “Please, make it stop” territory when someone from Verizon appeared at the school complaining about interrupted cellphone service. If there had been an emergency, it might have been all but impossible to call in police or a fire engine in a timely fashion.
As you might expect, this turn of events has not gone down well with the school and the teacher in question is now suspended.
He’d have been better off just Googling for some potential solutions to inattentiveness – wandering around a school with a piece of technology able to kill off communication signals isn’t really the greatest of ideas, and he’s now paying the price as a result.
This is one knock-down, drag-out affair where our intrepid former pro-wrestler should really have tapped out…
Christopher Boyd
