Jamming Enforcement at FCC Picks Up
On April 9, FCC approved and released two Notices of Apparent Liability (NAL -- effectively fines) for use of cellular jammers. The one shown above was to Taylor Oilfield Manufacturing, Broussard, Louisiana for $126,000. The other was to The Supply Room, Inc., Oxford, Alabama for $144,000. OUCH!!!
(Now before you sell your stock in these companies your should know that FCC is always in a poor position to collect the full amount of such NALs from anyone able to hire an attorney unless the local US Attorney is really interested in getting fully involved. This can be problematical in many parts of the US.)
The NALs have the following text
Signal jamming devices operate by transmitting powerful radio signals that overpower,jam, or interfere with authorized communications. While these devices have been marketed withincreasing frequency over the Internet, with limited exception, they have no lawful use in the UnitedStates. (A footnote clarifies that federal agency use is a separate issue.)
Your blogger fully agrees that since FCC has never authorized any jamming, the import and use of such equipment is illegal. However, they also have the following text:
In order to protect the public and preserve unfettered access to emergency and other communications services, the Act generally prohibits the importation, use, marketing, manufacture, and sale of jammers.
This sentence is a more complicated issue and sounds more like CTIA’s interpretation of Section 333, the subject of CTIA’s 2007 petition that FCC has never acted on. (The petition also contained the issue of “cellular boosters” which was addressed and finally resolved in Docket 10-4 a few months ago.)
The issue of what Section 333 of the communications Act really means is also addressed in GTL’s July 2011 petition which is sitting without action in FCC’s petition “black hole”. Thus CTIA has repeatedly stated that Section 333 forbids FCC from even considering authorizing jamming in any context including nonfederal high security prisons. Somehow CTIA and NTIA have concluded this nonobvious reading of Section 333 does not affect NTIA at all. As GTL points out, this ignores the “inconvenient truth” that Section 305 only exempts federal use from Sections 301 and 303 of the Act and also that the analogous terms of 18 USC 1367, dealing with the special case of satellite jamming and passed contemporaneously with Section 333, explicitly excludes jamming by federal agencies while Section 333 is silent on special treatment of federal users.
But there is no question here that the new FCC NALs are consistent with the law.
Why were these 2 small private companies spending money on cellular jammers? Here is some explanation from the texts of the NALs:
The manager also claimed that Taylor Oilfield utilized the jamming devices to prevent its employees from using their cellular phones while working, apparently following a near miss industrial accident that allegedly was partially attributable to employee cell phone use.
The general manager also confirmed that Supply Room utilized the jamming devices to prevent its employees from using their cellular phones while working.
This is typical of the cellular industry’s lack of attention to the unintended consequences of its technology, In 2005 (the then existing) Motorola commissioned a study by Don Norman on “Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone: The Annoyance, Irritation, and Frustration of The Mobile Phone -- A Design Challenge”. Unfortunately today’s cellular industry doesn’t seem too interested in such issues. They do not view them as a “design challenge” rather as legal issues that must be acted on to help their industry.
From Comm Law Blog
All complex new technologies have unintended consequences. As cellular expands the unintended consequences of these systems are becoming more visible. Shouldn’t the cellular industry address those issues more in addition to demanding more spectrum and more jammer enforcement?
Observations on Cell Phone Carrier Policies Overseas
Having recently rented a cellphone in Japan and bought GSM SIM cards in France and UK for my cheap unblocked cellphone reserved for overseas use, one thing all 3 transactions had in common: personal identification was required.
The US is the outlier in the industrialized countries in allowing purchase and use of cellphones in general without any identification, a topic of recurring discussion here. While there are major societal reasons against imposing a strict identification requirement on all cellphone sales in the US at the moment, the unrestricted sale of bagfuls of prepaid cellphones at Walmart and other large retailers should raise some real questions. Anonymous prepaid cellphones are widely used in criminal acts as the communications media of choice and are feeding the contraband prison cellphone use problem.
While I sincerely hope that the US never has a cellphone-activated IED terrorist incident, the unrestricted availability of anonymous cellphones is a real risk factor.
We have previously written about the Japanese “manner mode”, an easy consistent way to silence all cell phones in Japan - by comparison there is no consistent way to silence all US market cell phones and the root cause of the Marimba/Mahler incident was that the user thought he had silenced the phone but had not realized that silencing all alarm modes was an extra step.
While discussing “manner mode” with a Japanese friend, he mentioned that Japanese cell phones also have “drive mode”. Curious, I Googled for an English manual for a Japanese cell phone and found one from KDDI, a major Japanese cellular carrier:
Note the following points that you would never hear from a US carrier:
- Do not use the cell phone while driving
- Be considerate of where you use the cell phone and how loudly you talk.
- Do not make calls in theaters, museums, libraries, and other similar places. Turn off power or turn on manner mode not to disturb others around you by ring tones.
- Do not use the cell phone on a street where you might interrupt the flow of pedestrians.
- Move to area where you will not inconvenience others on trains or in hotel lobbies.
- Refrain from talking in a loud voice.
- Turn off your cell phone or put it in Drive Mode while driving,
While not all readers would agree with all the suggestions in the KDDI manual, I hope many will agree that the US cell phone industry should try some of these ideas to reduce the social friction from today’s cell phone use.
Late in my travels I visited France where I purchased a SIM card from SFR - a major carrier for my minimalist GSM unblocked phone (purchased in Singapore several years ago for about $20). I received with the SIM card a copy of “Mon Mobile et Ma Santé” (My cellphone and my health), a flyer from la Fédération Française des Télécoms, the French trade association of both wireless and wireline carriers, effectively the CTIA counterpart. The content of the brochure is basically the text of the FFT cellphone/health web page. Included is the following text:
Il est conseillé aux femmes enceintes d’éloigner le téléphone du ventre et aux adolescents de l’éloigner du bas ventre.
Without formal qualifications as a French translator (and open to feedback on this topic), let me translate this as
It is advisable for pregnant women to keep mobile phones away from the abdomen and teens away from the lower abdomen.
The brochure also advises costumers to use the cellphone to preferably in areas of good reception since the cell phone reduces transmit power automatically in such places and thus reduces your exposure to radiation. It adds that that is places where the reception is 4-5 bars the phone’s transmissions are weakest and so is your exposure to RF.
The FFT website, but not the brochure they publish, advises
Which I translate asL’utilisateur peut aussi choisir un modèle de téléphone mobile à faible DAS, ce qui lui permet de réduire le niveau maximal de son exposition aux ondes radio.”
The user can also select a phone model low SAR, which reduces the maximum level of exposure to radio waves.
Readers may recall that this point is in contention in the ongoing CTIA/San Francisco litigation and is a point strongly disputed by the US cell phone industry.
I hope readers in the US market will find these observations of foreign cellphone markets thought provoking and starting asking questions about whether US carriers should adopt some of the policies in use in other countries.
Telecom Policy Lessons from the War on Drugs: Controlling GPS & Cellular Jammers
A New York Times editorial today on telephone calling rates for prison inmates was the immediate stimulus for this post
After nearly a decade of delay, the Federal Communications Commission is finally focusing on the private telephone companies that charge outrageously high rates for the calls that many of the nation’s 1.6 million prison inmates make to stay in contact with their families.
The commissioners are considering a proposal to seek public comment on prison phone regulation. They need to act to end the burdensome charges that can make a single phone call from prison as expensive as an entire month of home phone service. Prison calls are so expensive because inmates must place them through independent companies that pay the state corrections departments a “commission,” essentially a legal kickback. A 15 minute call can cost a family as much as $17. For struggling families who want to keep in touch with loved ones behind bars, this can sometimes mean choosing between a phone call and putting food on the table.
Readers may recall that your blogger helped the South Carolina Department of Corrections on the contraband cell phone in prison issue. South Carolina is unusual among states in that state law prohibits high prices on calling rates for inmates - the original “captive audience”. But most other states do exactly what NYT is talking about!
I recall a meeting with a high FCC official on the prison cell phone issue and mentioned as an aside that FCC had jurisdiction over the pay phone in prison issue. He expressed total surprise! So while FCC has a page entitled “Hang Up on High Public Pay Phone Rates”, it has taken a hands off approach to the rates charged to people with no ability to “make a choice”. While you may think prisoners deserve this as part of their punishment, there are direct side effects that impact all of society:
- Studies have shown that inmates who maintain family ties are less likely to slide into recidivism and the resulting large costs for society.
- Since the cost of illicit cell phone use is much less than the exorbitant rates charges by “legitimate” prison phone suppliers, there is a large “demand pull” for contraband cellphones in prisons. While much of the use may be benign family contact, the non supervised aspect of this telecom leads to uses such as continuing illegal activities while imprisoned and even ordering murders!
Thus the action that NYT reports that FCC is considering will reduce the demand for contraband cell phones in prisons and will thus improve public safety and lower the need for both prison jamming systems and the “managed access” preferred by the cellular industry that is probably not affordable to state and local governments. I hope that the cellular establishment can see that actively supporting this proposal is also in their interest for these reasons as it will reduce the demand for cell phone jammers.
Demand Reduction for GPS and Cellular Jammers
GPS and cellular jammers are a growing problem. While FCC has an Enforcement Advisory on this issue and the Enforcement Bureau has issues some Notices of Apparent Liability (fines), there has been no criminal prosecution for violation of Section 302(b) of the Communications Act. It is unclear if this is due to lack of interest at FCC in pressuring DOJ for such prosecution or lack of interest in DOJ. As one who was involved in several criminal prosecutions during my “exile” period in EB’s predecessor in the late 1980s, this lack of prosecution is puzzling.
But let’s also ask why do people want cellular and/or GPS jammers? They aren’t cheap, typically costing a few hundred dollars and have been driven somewhat underground so you can’t exactly buy them at Radio Shack.
While hotels might have a profit motive to jam cell phones and force guests to use overpriced (and under regulated) phones in hotel rooms, I do not recall a case involving hotel jamming of guest cell phones in recent memory. I suspect that the main motivation for cell phone jamming is that some cell phone use is obnoxious and disruptive to others.
The Mahler/Marimba Moment
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The cellular establishment seems to have zero interest in addressing this “harmony” issue and just wants more jammer enforcement from FCC - which is as futile as drug enforcement without demand side reduction. But the cellular industry is an “800 lb. gorilla” in Washington that wants to throw its weight around and FCC, always a very political agency, likes to tell people “what they want to hear”.
On the GPS side, I was amused to read few months ago about a new euphemism “personal privacy devices” e.g. GPS jammers. Here’s how a GPS industry publication introduces the topic:
The name comes from the fact that the primary market for these devices consists of people who fear being tracked or monitored by GNSS in their vehicles.
Freight and delivery trucks, in particular, are now commonly monitored by their dispatch centers using GNSS and a communications link. This has significantly changed the working environment of truck drivers over the last decade, some of whom resent the resulting loss of independence. The 21st century has experienced an increasing fear of governmental or corporate surveillance and an attendant loss of personal privacy.
As one result of this, ordinary citizens may attempt to protect themselves from such surveillance, including the use of PPDs, without understanding the consequences of the measures they take. Stolen vehicles or vehicles involved in illegal activities are other examples of potential PPD sources.
But like the cell industry, the GPS industry sees the solution to the problem as purely enforcement on the “supply side”. And just like in the War on Drugs, this one sided approach is doomed to failure.
Note the line “ ordinary citizens may attempt to protect themselves from such surveillance”. Is protecting oneself from intrusive surveillance such an unreasonable goal? (Yes, I am a “card carrying ACLU member”.) Perhaps the GPS establishment should do some soul search here and see if they can try to separate the safety critical navigation functions of GPS from the intrusive functions of GPS. For example, does law enforcement use of GPS have to be focused on the main civil L1 frequency or is that just a convenient way for the FBI to use cheaper equipment without counting the resulting inevitable economic “externalities”.
GPS technology has many miraculous uses in our society from the ubiquitous car mapping systems to many systems than enhance public safety including increasing use by FAA to decrease cost and increase the effectiveness of its aircraft navigation systems. But if much of the public associates GPS with privacy intrusions there will be inevitable spectrum conflict. It would be nice to view enforcement as the sole answer. It isn’t.
Sen. Grassley: Your Recent "Marimba Moment" Was Not All Your Fault - Your friends in the Cellular Industry Made It Inevitable
In January, this blog had a post entitled “Is the Cellular Industry ‘Tone Deaf’ ”? It described a 1/12/12 New York Philharmonic concert of Mahler’s 9th Symphony that was interrupted by an iPhone Marimba ringtone from a front row seat.
At the time I wrote:
The cell phone industry is united against legalizing jamming, but seems unable to do anything about antisocial cell phone usage that inevitably leads to interest by concert halls and restaurants in cellular jamming. As previously stated here, French national law explicitly permits cellular jamming in concert halls. While jamming in such urban locations inevitably will cause other problems and is thus a bad idea (as opposed to jamming in isolated maximum security prisons where the geometry is very different), there seems to have been little interest in the cellular industry in alternative approaches to minimize the antisocial aspects of cell phone use.
The cell phone industry is usually a positive contributor to US society and the US economy. But it continues to have some blind spots as outlined in the previous New Year's Resolutions post here. Maybe it should address them? Maybe FCC leadership should politely point out these issues from time to time and mention the possible impact of neglect?
In my New Year’s Resolutions for the Cellular Industry post I wrote
That post’s 7 issues attracted NO inquiries from the cellular industry which apparently is focusing all its efforts on its appetite for spectrum, not social harmony resulting from its products and services. (In fairness one high CTIA official did reply to an e-mail from me about the post and seemed puzzled why people had trouble turning off their ringers.)2. Social harmony and cell phone use. Does the cellular industry ever wonder why the public rose up in force against the Docket 04-435 proposals to allow cellphones in airplanes or why there is a market for (presently) illegal cell phone jammers? The reason is that there is a lot of obnoxious cellphone use in this country! Airplanes are one of the few places without it and the public outcry was to preserve that. There is an interesting essay by Don Norman that was prepared for a 2005 Motorola Research Visionary Board meeting entitled “Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone: The Annoyance, Irritation, and Frustration of The Mobile Phone -- A Design Challenge” that starts off with the quote “Nearly one in three (30%) adults say the cell phone is the invention they most hate but cannot live without”.
What is the industry doing about this? Are they trying to increase sidetone levels so people don’t shout when using cell phones? Are they trying to make it easier to switch the ringer to a vibrate only/ “manners mode” as in Japan where all carriers have voluntarily agreed that a press of the “#” key toggles the unit to and from vibrate only mode? Are they researching ways for theaters and restaurants where people really want a semblance of quiet to use Bluetooth or a similar link to switch phones automatically to vibrate only? Kudos to Motorola for inviting Dr. Norman to talk on this issue. How much of this type of dialogue is going on now in the industry?
Senator Grassley, don’t feel bad about the incident. These types of things happen all the time because there is no consistent simple way to turn off the ring tone of US cell phones as there is in Japan. The cellular industry is much too busy grabbing spectrum to care about such issues of “unintended consequences”. It feels it can use its position of political strength to stop the sale of cellular jammers which people use illegally in selfdefense of obnoxious cell phone use.
In order to keep this “clear bright line” on jamming in effect, the industry even fights the use of cell phone jammers in isolated prisons where they could be a cost-effective option to enhance public safety. But apparently the cellular industry has never learned from the War on Drugs: to defeat a serious contraband issue you must address BOTH supply and demand. FCC may go through the appearances of being active against the selling of cell phone jammers, but the small and dispirited Enforcement Bureau technical staff doesn’t stand a chance against Chinese Internet marketing unless the demand is moderated also.
Sen. Grassley, at least you handled your moment much better than Sen. McCain handled his a few years ago on the Senate floor:
Is the Cellular Industry "Tone Deaf"?
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Yesterday afternoon, a NYC area college classmate sent me a link to a post entitled “.Wild Night at Philharmonic After Phone Interruption” from the WQXR Blog.
Last night, in one of the quietest parts of the final movement of a gorgeous New York Philharmonic performance of Mahler's Ninth, a cell phone started ringing ... and ringing, and ringing, and ringing. Alan Gilbert, who was on the podium in Avery Fisher Hall, glared in the direction of the phone, but it kept right on going. Then, the music got louder, and we all assumed that whoever owned the phone had done something about it. But minutes later, when the music got softer again the phone was still going (an iPhone marimba ringtone, which sounds like this):
So Gilbert stopped the performance. He then turned around and indicated that the phone should be turned off. It continued. The conductor then said to the phone’s owner, who was sitting in the front, “You have a phone... Fine, we’ll wait.” And we did, with audience members standing up, pointing in the direction of the offender, and shouting things like “Throw him out!” When the phone was finally silenced, Gilbert turned to the audience to apologize.
As of the posting of this item here, the WQXR Blog had 159 comments on this event - not many praising the cellular industry. One of the comments (#322191) stated,
“It's about time someone took a stand on cellphone protocol. What is so hard about turning it off when requested at a concert. I'm surprised no one has invented a way to check for all cellphones turned on. BRAVO Mr. Gilbert!!!!! I applaud your actions!”
On December 27th, your blogger posted “Some Possible New Year's Resolutions for the Cellular Industry” which included “Social harmony and cell phone use” as item #2. This built on a February 2010 post entitled “Cellphones and Interpersonal Friction”. The 2/10 post, for example, described the Japanese “Manners Mode” built into every cell phone sold in Japan that makes it easy and uniform to disable ring tones - hit the # key! This was not a Japanese government mandate, rather a voluntary standard of the Japanese cell phone industry. Since basically the same suppliers market cell phones in Japan as in the US, one would think that it would be possible here also.
The cell phone industry is united against legalizing jamming, but seems unable to do anything about antisocial cell phone usage that inevitably leads to interest by concert halls and restaurants in cellular jamming. As previously stated here, French national law explicitly permits cellular jamming in concert halls. While jamming in such urban locations inevitably will cause other problems and is thus a bad idea (as opposed to jamming in isolated maximum security prisons where the geometry is very different), there seems to have been little interest in the cellular industry in alternative approaches to minimize the antisocial aspects of cell phone use.
The cell phone industry is usually a positive contributor to US society and the US economy. But it continues to have some blind spots as outlined in the previous New Year's Resolutions post here. Maybe it should address them? Maybe FCC leadership should politely point out these issues from time to time and mention the possible impact of neglect?
I have asked CTIA to comment on the “Mahler incident” and will promptly post any reply.
UPDATE
As you can see from the above YouTube video from a concert in Slovakia, the Mahler/marimba incident was not unique. We patiently await comment from the cellular industry about these incidents and what they are doing to decrease the incidence rate. We know the US cellular industry hates all jamming, any other ideas?
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