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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.
It's a Techdirt headline.
He's lucky there wasn't an emergency and that his device did not interfere with a 911 call. This is reckless behavior, and he already knew the seriousness of this crime because of the prior conviction.
By the way, are you allowed to have a beer on the Chicago public transit? If so, that's fantastic!
There are no good guys in this story. He's a dick for blocking other people's services. The government are being ridiculous in charging him with felonies and holding hundreds of thousands in fines over his head, and people having loud animated conversations on their cell phones in crowded public spaces are rude.
If he did what he is accused of then he is guilty of disturbing the peace. He should be punished accordingly. He's not guilty of intercepting people's cell calls and recording their conversations with a sting-ray device. He didn't bring down the local power sub-station. He did the equivalent of loudly disrupting a public meeting. Proportionality is an important concept, and we've lost track of it.
People just don't talk on their phones in the trains excepting the actual emergency call. It's considered rude and people respect that. Too bad people in the USA can't think of others before their own selfish needs. This would be a non-issue if people were actually polite. Hell, people who kill themselves in Japan actually have the courtesy to take their shoes off before jumping in front of a train so others will know it's intentional and not an accident. Thinking of others until the end.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
....for taking it out to flip a stupid switch.
Smart would have been to be on a call himself, and meanwhile in his pocket flip the switch, then act all annoyed and pissed like everyone else.
BTW where could I buy one?
-Styopa
"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.
They hit the passenger assistance alarm?
A pair of Quiet Comfort noise cancelling headphones would have been a better idea, especially since he had been caught with a jammer before.
Must not have been paying attention in kindergarten when they discussed making good choices.
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?
...who thinks that this guy was doing a service to all riders who also consider inconsiderate cell phone talkers to be boorish? When I'm forced into close proximity (train, restaurant, etc.), I should not be forced to listen to your over-loud end of a phone conversation just because your mother never taught you anything about proper decorum in such situations.
Unless you've ever lived in a big city and commuted regularly by train, you wouldn't be aware of how silent riders are in rush hour, especially morning rush hour when the trains and stations are most crowded. A single person making small talk on their phone annoys everyone.
The mistake this guy made was running his jammer continuously. If you have jammer and want to target one person on a cell phone, you only have to momentarily switch on the jammer when the other end of the call is talking. When the rider is chatting, you leave the jammer off, when the other end is talking, you turn it on. Within 30 seconds, the caller will give up. Using this approach, your jammer is only on for a few seconds at a time.
I work alongside someone who has permission to keep his mobile phone on his desk in an office which is otherwise meant to be a no-mobile zone. He's waiting for a transplant and if an organ match comes available he needs to know right away so he can get to the hospital and start getting prepped for the operation immediately. Someone using a jammer for their convenience could result in him dying before he can get treated.
911 calls from cell phones on public transit are relatively rare. But many of us use the data links on our smart phones to check our schedules for connections for other buses or for trains. Many of us in high demand work also respond to text based alerts during lengthy commutes. We're not loud, we're not speaking on the cell phones, and it's much safer to do this on public transit than it is to drive home and have to pull off the road to handle an alert. So it sounds like he's interfering with people who are being responsible and safe, as well as those who are rude.
In Ontario, Canada, the commuter rail system (GO) has designated "quiet cars" where speaking and electronic noises is not allowed:
* http://www.gotransit.com/public/en/travelling/quietzone.aspx
Perhaps something similar is needed in Chicago.
I don't know how long these devices need to be on to be effective as disrupting cell phones, but the descriptions of their use implies that you flip the switch and it pretty much instantly disrupts calls.
I would think the "safer" method of using a jammer would not be to turn the thing on and leave it on (thus leaving you exposed to detection), but to have some kind of pulse mode where it comes on for the minimum amount of time necessary to disrupt calls. Of course, people will think it's just a normal dropped call, so have a time that causes it to pulse on again for 5 seconds 30-60 seconds later to kill off calls that people re-establish.
Ideally you would determine the ideal pulse frequency and repetition to just convince people that the phone network isn't working and have them give up. My thought is that after about 5 iterations of this, a lot of people would simply give up and assume there was some network disruption. There's probably some optimal repeat pattern necessary to keep the most persistent from retrying, like a one-off pulse every 10-15 minutes or some kind of 30 minute period where there's an exponential backoff on repeated pulses.
The "positive" benefit would be that it would be a lot kinder to people just using data, since the interruptions would be pretty brief for them. I would also think it would be a lot harder to track, especially if it allowed the device to remain completely off for long periods of time. And I think it would be a lot harder to reach the conclusion that a jammer was even being used because there would a lot less obvious evidence of a long pattern of loss of signal. And the battery would last longer.
I am extremely sympathetic to this guy. I'd like to myself have the technology to shut down annoying people doing annoying things. Unfortunately, I am also sympathetic to the fact that this is illegal, and it's illegal for good reason, and he should go to jail. If he'd only done it once, he should just get a warning: but this isn't the first time, and he should go to jail
The guy is a jerkwad and deserves to get reamed for this. If he would have kept it hid, he would have had his quiet-time and nobody (there) would have known who to blame.
,,,,,
I am making a mental note of this incident tho: if I am somewhere similar and my phone (and everyone else's) appears to be dead, then Imma going to pull out my phone, pretend to call somebody and just keep on talking like normal.
Perhaps this demonstrates consumer interest in offering signal free cars? Add a physical 'in case of emergency' phone for 911 calls if need be.
Chicagoan Arrested For Using Cell-phone Jammer To Make Subway Commute Tolerable For Himself at the Expense of Everyone Around Him
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