Slashdot Mirror
Chicagoan Arrested For Using Cell-phone Jammer To Make Subway Commute Tolerable (chicagotribune.com)
McGruber writes with this story from the Chicago Tribune: Last Fall, certified public accountant Dennis Nicholl boarded a Chicago subway train while carrying a plastic bag of Old Style beer. Nicholl popped open a beer and looked around the car, scowling as he saw another rider talking on a cellphone. He pulled out a black device from his pocket and switched it on. Commuters who had been talking on their phones went silent, checking their screens for the source of their dropped calls. On Tuesday, undercover officers arrested Nicholl. Cook County prosecutors and Chicago police allege he created his own personal 'quiet car' on the subway by using an illegal device he imported from China. He was charged with unlawful interference with a public utility, a felony. This is not the first time Nicholl has been charged with jamming cell calls. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in June 2009, according to court records. He was placed under court supervision for a year, and his equipment was confiscated and destroyed.
Chicagoan here - technically no booze allowed on the Chicago Transportation Authority (CTA) run vehicles which this guy was on, but I've never seen it enforced. You can drink to your hearts content on the Metra though, which heads out to the Chicago burbs, and is owned by the same parent organization as the CTA.
"Section 1050.7 ...
Disorderly conduct.
No person on or in any facility or conveyance shall:
(g) drink any alcoholic beverage or possess any opened or unsealed container of alcoholic beverage, except on premises duly licensed for the sale of alcoholic beverages, such as bars and restaurants;"
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The flaw with that argument is there is no way to predict the urgency of the other communications trying to use the frequencies being jammed during the time of the jamming. Pacemakers automatically call 9-1-1 in the event of heart failure; a crime victim could be calling the police. Those people have a licensed device and they have the right to use the airwaves according to the terms of the license.
This is not new, this is not some recent "loss of proportionality". The FCC's stance was published at the advent of radio telecommunications, long before cell phones existed, and has been very, very consistent for at least 80 years: the airwaves are a shared resource, and cooperation is vital to their ongoing utility; you will not deliberately deny others their licensed use of their frequencies, or Uncle Charlie will come down with his Very Big Hammer. And the hammer has always been big: 40 years ago the max fines were in the $10,000 range. Not even the Secret Service has official permission to jam frequencies around the president (although I suspect they have the equipment at the ready.)
John
The El in Chicago is LOUD. The Red Line and Blue Line especially, at least the parts underground. Maybe the Red gets quieter up North—I know the stop where he got on.
Outside the train, an over-passing El will stop conversation for a good 20 seconds or more. The Loop is quite loud, but the loudest stop is the Brown Line at Diversey. It's overhead, most of the support is painted steel, and there are brick buildings directly adjacent to the track on all four sides. It's a deafening echo-chamber.
The cell phone situation in London is much better, at least on the tube. Compared to Chicago's, that thing is VERY LOUD. The Regional trains, well, it's a mixed bag. But they do have a "Quiet Car" on many of the lines (no cell phones allowed).
Highly unlikely.
More likely, confiscated and given away during the monthly employee empound raffle.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
This was maybe true through the 1990's, but now it's just a well-worn joke that's not even relevant anymore.
The explosion of craft beer in the USA in the last 20-30 years has resulted in our beer being the real beer. Go to Canada these days, and you'll find most bars carry only beers from one giant distributor or the other: Anheuser-Busch-InBev (owns Labatt) or SABMiller (owns Molson). This is due to those companies saying "You want our beers? Fine, you just can't carry anyone else's. Including microbrews." All of their beers, of course, are light-colored water.
In the US, we no longer have that problem, and in NY's Penn Station, you can buy any one of a large number of IPA's, stouts, or whatever you want, and bring it on the train with you (as long as it's in a paper bag) regardless of color or alcohol content.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
I highly doubt it. The power of these jammers is low to start with not to mention he was inside a metal box. Maybe someone on a platform that they passed would have had a momentary signal drop but that's about it.
You seem to know a lot about these jammers. By the way, the windows in that metal box do just fine for letting those UHF signals out for the cell phones, they'll do the same for the jammer signal, which is also making it ot the cell towers, making you remarkably easy to trace.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think any place with a tram/train system for mass transit lets you drink (or don't enforce it) on the trains, Vancouver is the same way, so is Tokyo. So long as you're not peeing on the seat or something.
DC is pretty strict - even a candy bar can get you arrested. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Pacemakers automatically call 9-1-1 in the event of heart failure
No, they don't. Stop making shit up.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.