The police who stopped him had their radios jammed during the interaction; so I'm not particularly sympathetic to the title's artificial framing:
> Fined $48k for using a jammer to keep commuters from using phones while driving
The person jammed 911, both on and off the freeway every single work-day for months. They also jammed legal usage of mobile devices on the freeway and in the surrounding area. They were rightfully fined, and if it discourages others then so much the better.
On-star and similar automatic incident reporting. Presumably he drove past first responders at the scene of an accident and jammed their communication. Construction zone flaggers typically use radios to coordinate traffic.
Not to mention I'm not even sure how that's supposed to be safer? The distracted drivers are now more distracted trying to figure out why their isn't working and people who weren't distracted listining to Spotify are now looking at their phones actively as well. Dude was literally making a bubble of people messing with their phones around him while he drives
Maybe $48k is a bit much, but this is so obviously a crazy thing to do.
Passengers are allowed to use their phones and your jammer won't discriminate. People can take hands-free calls and your jammer won't discriminate. Pedestrians can use their phones and your jammer won't discriminate. People who have broken down might want to call the AA. And so on.
I don't know if it's fair to say he intentionally disrupted emergency communications.
He unintentionally disrupted emergency communications in the course of intentionally disrupting ordinary people's communications.
I doubt he ever thought "I've got a good idea, I'll disrupt emergency communications".
He did a thing, on purpose, that had a side-effect of disrupting emergency communications. I don't know whether you'd say that qualifies as "intentional".
If it qualifies as intentional, are we saying that all possible unintended consequences are de facto intentions? Or only in this case?
It’s the legal definition of intentional. If you intentionally perform an act that reasonably can foresee an outcome, then it is by definition intentional.
If you rob a liquor store while armed and accidentally discharge your weapon - it’s an intentional murder. Doesn’t matter if you went in there thinking the gun was unloaded or if you told your friend in writing before you went in that you had no intention of hurting anyone.
Unintentional would be he had a jammer for hobbyist use and it somehow turned on by itself while it was being transported in his backpack. If he pressed the power button in an intentional manner and reasonably knew the outcome of what a jammer does it is intentional behavior.
He may not have had the explicit goal of disrupting emergency communication, but he absolutely knew he was doing so and intentionally performed the act anyways.
> He may not have had the explicit goal of disrupting emergency communication, but he absolutely knew he was doing so
How could you prove that though? They could absolutely claim ignorance and be right, they might not have known... but it's still illegal and they'll still be punished. As the saying goes... "ignorance of the law is no excuse."
What I'd really like to know though, is the history of how/why it became that way.
Who got to decide that everyone must be presumed to know all the laws at all times, and why?
How is it fair that we expect everyone to know all applicable laws?
I realize that claiming ignorance would just lead to widespread abuse, but at the same time I don't think it's fair because laws are massively complex and ever-changing... no single person can reasonably be expected to know it all.
You could claim ignorance that you had no idea what the box in your bag was, and thought it was a radiotherapy device that had health benefits or something. If you could then prove that you bought it from a website advertising it as such and had a true belief you had no idea it jammed communications in any manner then you’d have a case of an unintentional act.
Here the guy bought a jammer that has exactly one use - jamming communications. He then presumably brought it with him on purpose and intentionally hit the power button to turn it on.
It’s not really a borderline case like some things could be.
It’s roughly the same as shooting at someone you hate who happens to be in a crowd and hitting a bystander on accident. It’s still an intentional act and you would be guilty of intentional murder of some type if they died.
“Mr. Humphreys admitted to the agents that he purchased, owned, and used the device to block cell phone communications of nearby drivers for 16 to 24 months.”
Even if he claimed ignorance, it’s not a good defense when you’ve been doing this for close to two years
He intentionally disrupted all communications including, but not limited to, emergency ones. In process he tried to unilaterally control a public resource based on his own authoritarian view of what is "good" vs "bad". He is lucky he is not in jail.
you're responsible for understanding the ramifications of things you do if a reasonable person should recognize those ramifications.
any reasonable person would have known they were interrupting emergency services. not a lawyer, but surely something akin to gross negligence would apply?
Maybe saying something like this would make things clearer:
> His directed intention was to disrupt communication. He did not explicitly target EMS calls, however, his actions impacted EMS communications because of his intentions to disrupt communications.
Example:
If I poison the water for a city, my directed intention may be, "to lower pollution in the region". I am not specifically targeting children, however, a consequence of my intentions of poisoning the water will cause the death of children.
This fellow intentionally took a disruptive action. The consequences of those directed disruptions may have caused (had caused?) catastrophic consequences - that is part of why what he did was illegal. In breaking that law, he became culpable for the outcome for all of the harm caused, targeted or otherwise. Ultimately, it was an intention which presupposed, "My personal opinion supersedes all others." It's an self-centered obscenity without regard to others.
and they were doing that indiscriminate jamming as they drove around for two years.
if op is trying to cast someone making up rules in their head and going vigilante to enforce it on everyone else out of some sense of self-righteous indignation as some sort of heroic action the government is unfairly attacking, I doubt they're going to find many friendly to their perspective.
The *FCC* is a regulatory agency, and many regulations have criminal penalties for violating them. The SEC for example has sent many people to prison. Fines can also be criminal penalties, not just civil.
Driving to work yesterday I was almost side swiped on the parkway by a driver who was weaving and swerving because he was staring down at his phone as if he was the only person driving on the road at 45 MPH.
What was this person thinking?
So yeah, I don't agree with indiscriminately jamming everyone's phone but I get it. Driving in some areas is like navigating a lord of the flies playground.
A person driving along looking at their phone instead of the road is doing a stupid thing too but I don't think that in any way absolves doing a stupid thing in response.
Both are stupid but one has a much higher chance of causing injury or death. I see this all the time including other forms of reckless driving which has exploded since CVOID. It has to stop but no one seems to want to do anything.
The charitable explanation is probably that they weren't thinking much. That they had a skill set to allow them to do this quickly and easily.
If I had the idea to do this I'd have to think about and work on it so long that they obvious reasons why it's not such a great idea would probably occur to me.
Either that or when an idea occurs to me I'm never so hyperfocused on it that I won't take a step back and stop asking myself if I can but if I should at some point early in the process.
It is such a techie mindset to see a social problem with a technology and craft an even cruder technological solution to that problem, without thinking of the second order effects. As drivers on cell phones get jammed, they will be even more distracted trying to redial and figure out what is going on. This man made the roads less safe, not more.
I guess I don't see the big deal. Am I old (or am I an anarchist)?
I guess I drove for close to three decades before cell phones and I seemed to do fine without them. We listened to the radio. So, no, I suppose it doesn't seem crazy to me.
Clearly it would be ideal if it could discriminate—people distracted by their phones—but of course it cannot.
And in those days you had affordances which no longer exist, such as AA Call Boxes on the side of the road. If you get into an accident today, you are expected to have a phone to call for help. That can literally be the difference between life or death, jamming communications can cause people to die.
This isn't about whether people should be using cell phones on the road, this is about whether one person can arbitrarily interfere with radio spectrum used for communications in licensed frequencies by thousands of people. Obviously, by federal law, they cannot.
There are many other important or essential services that get disrupted by the jammer, like emergency services/911, police, private business communications, general internet data for everyone, etc. There's a very good reason this is illegal and it has nothing to do with keeping people off their phones in their cars.
It is much, way too much. I wouldn’t mind this penalty if other obnoxious behaviour is equally investigated and punished, but I can think of plenty of way more obnoxious things to do that would never trigger even a reaction from law enforcement.
The real crime here, as usual, is that he inconvenienced a corporation. Had someone been obnoxiously interfering (in general - not radio-specific) with an individual or small business nothing will happen.
No, he inconvenienced every day potentially thousands of consumers of a company's service, which includes first responders.
And think about the direct effect. Yes driving using a cell phone is dangerous. But do you really think cell phone addicted drivers will be MORE attentive when their signal starts to go in and out depending on their proximity to this driver? They will just give up? No, they will be more frustrated, looking at their phones more to see what is wrong, trying to redial, becoming even more of a risk to themselves and others.
It's interesting that he did this to stop people from using phones while driving, but he ended up creating a bigger public safety hazard by jamming emergency comms.
From a liability perspective if that jammer had blocked a 911 call during a nearby accident his exposure would have been far higher than just the $48k FCC fine. Federal preemption on signal jamming is one of the few areas where the hammer drops consistently hard.
We have standards, called laws, for how we use shared resources. The fine is about $60/day. Feels low to me to be honest. The actions described could have easily contributed to death via disruption of emergency services.
He was incredibly lucky. Assuming there was no other criminal penalties, he screwed up royally and gets off with a fine he will be able to pay and a life that was not destroyed by the federal government.
Absolutely. If I'm driving and using my cellphone (in a legal or illegal manner), and the network is suddenly screwed up, I'll probably be more distracted since I'm trying to solve the "problem" with my phone in addition to driving.
Using a phone when driving is completely legal, as long as it is hands free. Most modern cars have bluetooth for that.
And I agree, someone could become distracted. For example, some cars don't show signal strength on the dash, one might pull a phone out of pocket to investigate.
> Using a phone when driving is completely legal, as long as it is hands free.
This is not universally true, and as a matter of policy, it should not be true -- making phone calls while driving is distracting, whether you are holding the phone in your hands or not.
If this person had not continuously operated the jammer along the same route, at the same time every day for years, they probably wouldn't have ever been caught.
I didn't read TFA but I bet the guy got caught because he told his brother and 10 other people. The kind of person who does this is that same guy who doesn't own a TV and never seems to shut up about it.
That being said, I can't count the number of times I've passed someone who's going dangerously slow and drifting in their lane, only to see them staring down at their phone. If Humphreys only ran the device for about 30 seconds whenever he saw someone on their phone, he'd probably have gotten away with it for a lot longer.
I would also be highly skeptical that the jammer would actually prevent someone in the moment from ceasing to look down at their phone anymore, since 1. most phone operations aren't so heavily dependent on an active internet connection e.g. messages will come in whenever they come in, and 2. having no connection could actually cause them to look even more at the phone, to try to figure out why it's not working or retry whatever they're doing.
I of course agree with him being guilty, but cars should be prohibited from allowing loud speakers. Also, independently, phones should be prohibited from using speakers at all when in the vicinity of several other phones.
...sounds about right? Is this supposed to be an injustice? You can't unilaterally shut down a public resource like RF sectiona because you've decided to be the Batman clearing the streets of hands-free cellphone users.
I spend time in the "third world" where they honk all the time and don't care about road laws (i.e. lane lines are merely suggestions, no requirement to buckle your seat belt), non existent road law enforcement.
It's amazing. Every type of vehicle shares the road in relative harmony. It's the ultimate "mixed use/complete streets" liberal wet dream of transportation infrastructure. It maximizes the utility of the roads. There's also far fewer lifted trucks and similar which harms the visibility of the highly alert drivers.
Everyone is still on their phones, but because they are used to a far more chaotic roads, they pay FAR better attention. Furthermore, the average health is infinitely better (almost no obesity), so even their 80 year old grandmas are far healthier and thus more fit to drive.
Unironically deregulate the roads. We need to radically increase speed limits, significantly reduce penalties for meme stuff "i.e. california stopping at stop signs", and yes go after "do-gooders" who think that risking jamming ambulances is worth getting their "slightly safer roads"
Unironically, put Tullock's spike in every car.
Traffic cops are road marauders/parasites. Many tickets shouldn't exist. And no, I don't have any driving tickets.
Tell us the country and I'm pretty sure the traffic nerds here (me included) will come back and show you how what you perceived as harmony is actually a place with shockingly high per-capita traffic fatality rates.
> Traffic cops are road marauders/parasites.
I do agree with this, but mostly because better road design and cameras can completely eliminate the need for traffic cops.
> where they honk all the time and don't care about road laws (i.e. lane lines are merely suggestions, no requirement to buckle your seat belt), non existent road law enforcement.
This sort of comment occurs on almost any conversation that touches on road safety. A ridiculous "where there is chaos it is actually safer!" bit of nonsense.
Absolutely, unequivocally destroyed by actual metrics. These "chaos" places like India have absolutely atrocious road safety, with hundreds of thousands of deaths yearly. They only look good per capita because of the relative rarity of vehicles and miles driven, but driving is a perilously dangerous activity there and in similar countries.
The bit about obesity is just doubly weird nonsense.
> significantly reduce penalties for meme stuff "i.e. california stopping at stop signs"
That's not a meme. Rolling a stop sign is failing to obey a traffic control device at the expense of everybody around you. I've almost been hit multiple times as a pedestrian, cyclist, and motorcyclist by ignorant drivers pulling such shenanigans.
If you think that encouraging people to run stop signs is a good idea while harboring contempt for this guy then your worldview is, charitably speaking, inconsistent to the point of absurdity.
Hero. So tired of seeing drivers swerve around at deadly speeds on the highway while they play around on their phones. I would contribute to a Gofundme to help this guy pay off the $48k.
2. Do you really think cell phone addicted drivers will be MORE attentive when their signal starts to go in and out depending on their proximity to this driver? No, they will be more frustrated, looking at their phones more to see what is wrong, trying to redial....
I agree that this guy was an idiot, and generally speaking that's a somewhat fine argument against vigilantism, but I also have witnessed the complete inability of the justice system in the several countries I've lived in to handle even the barest minimum of enforcement of the law.
When I lived in California, I would every single day, stop cars from making illegal right turns across a bike lane when bicyclists have right of way. Me biking forward and blocking the right turn on, signaling with my strobe, could be seen as a form of vigilantism, but if I didn't do it, inevitably I would have seen a bicyclist get run over on one of my commutes.
Unless, maybe you have some clear personal definition that separates vigilantism from direct action/
Doesn't sound like you were breaking the law there. If you aggressively tailgated or were harassing drivers who didn't follow the law or your expectations, that road rage is vigiliantism.
If you publicly shame an alleged criminal within your free speech rights, you're not a vigilante. If you cross into harassment or stalking in your attempt to take the law into your own hands, that's a vigilante.
Deciding who can and can't use a mobile phone? That's part of the monopoly of violence that defines the government's exclusive power, just like imprisonment.
3. Just imagine being in a car accident, and some idiot in the vicinity didn't realize why traffic is slow, and takes multiple minutes to shutdown their jammer. Or is unable because they're the other party involved in the accident.
Seconds count for 911 calls, but really your odds are already bad if calling about...a heart attack. There's one study about non-runners having heart attacks during marathons due to road closures [0]. If they had a heart attack that day, they were 15% more likely to die within a month. Not good, but it's not that bad.
Going full SV utilitarian, I'm curious what's the net change in accidents between
(1) texting
(2) no texting?
I've read that texting is the equivalent of having 2 beers. Even "hands free" is distracting. I continue to see people sucked into their phones and oblivious that they're operating a 4,000+ pound machine.
>Well, you're picking extremes when AFAIK, it'll put the average person at the legal limit.
>One beer will start to impair you.
Thank you for illustrating exactly the problem. Impairment is a binary in colloquial usage. Statistically no average-median-ish person has ever been impaired in the colonial sense by one average beer. Any everyone knows this. Two average beers applied to an average person won't get you to the legal limit without aggravating circumstances (i.e. zero time to metabolize + empty stomach, or perhaps conflicting medication).
I will be the first to admit you can give a bunch of people one beer and detect statistically significant difference vs a control group or you can give one person one beer many times and evaluate against a baseline and detect a statistically significant difference. But statistical difference does not "impairment" in the colloquial sense make. And everyone knows this based on their own observed life experience, even people without experience should be able to deduce this by observing how the world behaves for if what you say were true, the way things work would be very different.
And by using the term impairment to describe/quantify the impact of one beer and then re-using that term in contexts where it may overload with the colloquial more binary usage the upper bound of what "one beer" is such that one beer at the top end may equal two or three at the low end.
So now we nor does any casual reader know if texting is equivalent in danger to two "real beers", which almost makes it sound not bad for how distracting it seems to be, or if it's equivalent in danger to two "paternalism beers" in which case it's pretty seriously dangerous.
And this key word overloading problem seems to be endemic to all manner of issues these days.
The "good/neutral/bad" DND axis implies moral intent, not necessarily outcome. A stupid person doing something insane for a reasoning that is generally understood to be morally good can be seen as "chaotic good." Hence why a lawful good Paladin can maintain their lawful good status, and their divinely derived abilities, even when they're doing things we may consider evil, like executing a youth for breaking a law, so long as the Paladin (and the divine entity) strongly believe that it's for the greater good of the law and society.
In this case, the guy thought he was preventing people from using their phones while driving, which is a good thing, but he was too dumb to realize it would have negative consequences apparently.
The police who stopped him had their radios jammed during the interaction; so I'm not particularly sympathetic to the title's artificial framing:
> Fined $48k for using a jammer to keep commuters from using phones while driving
The person jammed 911, both on and off the freeway every single work-day for months. They also jammed legal usage of mobile devices on the freeway and in the surrounding area. They were rightfully fined, and if it discourages others then so much the better.
911, emergency alerts, cloud linked epilepsy and diabetes monitors.
He got off lightly for 48k imo.
On-star and similar automatic incident reporting. Presumably he drove past first responders at the scene of an accident and jammed their communication. Construction zone flaggers typically use radios to coordinate traffic.
I agree, 48k is light.
And there's nothing wrong with passengers using phones. In fact often most people in the car are not the driver...
I have no sympathy for the guilty party, but the title is correctly indicating his intentions, despite the larger and manifold effects he had.
Not to mention I'm not even sure how that's supposed to be safer? The distracted drivers are now more distracted trying to figure out why their isn't working and people who weren't distracted listining to Spotify are now looking at their phones actively as well. Dude was literally making a bubble of people messing with their phones around him while he drives
Maybe $48k is a bit much, but this is so obviously a crazy thing to do.
Passengers are allowed to use their phones and your jammer won't discriminate. People can take hands-free calls and your jammer won't discriminate. Pedestrians can use their phones and your jammer won't discriminate. People who have broken down might want to call the AA. And so on.
What was this person thinking?
$48k is cheap. He's lucky he didn't get jail time especially for intentionally disrupting emergency communications like 911 service.
I don't know if it's fair to say he intentionally disrupted emergency communications.
He unintentionally disrupted emergency communications in the course of intentionally disrupting ordinary people's communications.
I doubt he ever thought "I've got a good idea, I'll disrupt emergency communications".
He did a thing, on purpose, that had a side-effect of disrupting emergency communications. I don't know whether you'd say that qualifies as "intentional".
If it qualifies as intentional, are we saying that all possible unintended consequences are de facto intentions? Or only in this case?
It’s the legal definition of intentional. If you intentionally perform an act that reasonably can foresee an outcome, then it is by definition intentional.
If you rob a liquor store while armed and accidentally discharge your weapon - it’s an intentional murder. Doesn’t matter if you went in there thinking the gun was unloaded or if you told your friend in writing before you went in that you had no intention of hurting anyone.
Unintentional would be he had a jammer for hobbyist use and it somehow turned on by itself while it was being transported in his backpack. If he pressed the power button in an intentional manner and reasonably knew the outcome of what a jammer does it is intentional behavior.
He may not have had the explicit goal of disrupting emergency communication, but he absolutely knew he was doing so and intentionally performed the act anyways.
> He may not have had the explicit goal of disrupting emergency communication, but he absolutely knew he was doing so
How could you prove that though? They could absolutely claim ignorance and be right, they might not have known... but it's still illegal and they'll still be punished. As the saying goes... "ignorance of the law is no excuse."
What I'd really like to know though, is the history of how/why it became that way.
Who got to decide that everyone must be presumed to know all the laws at all times, and why?
How is it fair that we expect everyone to know all applicable laws?
I realize that claiming ignorance would just lead to widespread abuse, but at the same time I don't think it's fair because laws are massively complex and ever-changing... no single person can reasonably be expected to know it all.
You could claim ignorance that you had no idea what the box in your bag was, and thought it was a radiotherapy device that had health benefits or something. If you could then prove that you bought it from a website advertising it as such and had a true belief you had no idea it jammed communications in any manner then you’d have a case of an unintentional act.
Here the guy bought a jammer that has exactly one use - jamming communications. He then presumably brought it with him on purpose and intentionally hit the power button to turn it on.
It’s not really a borderline case like some things could be.
It’s roughly the same as shooting at someone you hate who happens to be in a crowd and hitting a bystander on accident. It’s still an intentional act and you would be guilty of intentional murder of some type if they died.
> How could you prove that though?
This is uncomplicated. You ask him the question and he answers. The judge or jury decides whether he is telling the truth.
> How could you prove that though?
In the FCC link:
“Mr. Humphreys admitted to the agents that he purchased, owned, and used the device to block cell phone communications of nearby drivers for 16 to 24 months.”
Even if he claimed ignorance, it’s not a good defense when you’ve been doing this for close to two years
He intentionally disrupted all communications including, but not limited to, emergency ones. In process he tried to unilaterally control a public resource based on his own authoritarian view of what is "good" vs "bad". He is lucky he is not in jail.
Hence the low fine and the lack of a jail sentence.
And yes, penalty for unintended consequences are a thing. Involuntary manslaughter, property damage caused by DWI, etc.
at a certain point indifference is depraved enough to be indistinguishable from malice. there's entire bodies of law about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder
you're responsible for understanding the ramifications of things you do if a reasonable person should recognize those ramifications.
any reasonable person would have known they were interrupting emergency services. not a lawyer, but surely something akin to gross negligence would apply?
Certainly it was negligent.
Maybe saying something like this would make things clearer:
> His directed intention was to disrupt communication. He did not explicitly target EMS calls, however, his actions impacted EMS communications because of his intentions to disrupt communications.
Example:
If I poison the water for a city, my directed intention may be, "to lower pollution in the region". I am not specifically targeting children, however, a consequence of my intentions of poisoning the water will cause the death of children.
This fellow intentionally took a disruptive action. The consequences of those directed disruptions may have caused (had caused?) catastrophic consequences - that is part of why what he did was illegal. In breaking that law, he became culpable for the outcome for all of the harm caused, targeted or otherwise. Ultimately, it was an intention which presupposed, "My personal opinion supersedes all others." It's an self-centered obscenity without regard to others.
and they were doing that indiscriminate jamming as they drove around for two years.
if op is trying to cast someone making up rules in their head and going vigilante to enforce it on everyone else out of some sense of self-righteous indignation as some sort of heroic action the government is unfairly attacking, I doubt they're going to find many friendly to their perspective.
> What was this person thinking?
Indignant, short-sighted self-righteousness; and from the looks of it several other people here are feeling the same.
[flagged]
$48k is too little. This would have disrupted 911 emergency calls and first responders on the highway. That's jail time.
FTC is a civil law enforcement agency, not a criminal one
The *FCC* is a regulatory agency, and many regulations have criminal penalties for violating them. The SEC for example has sent many people to prison. Fines can also be criminal penalties, not just civil.
> What was this person thinking?
Driving to work yesterday I was almost side swiped on the parkway by a driver who was weaving and swerving because he was staring down at his phone as if he was the only person driving on the road at 45 MPH.
What was this person thinking?
So yeah, I don't agree with indiscriminately jamming everyone's phone but I get it. Driving in some areas is like navigating a lord of the flies playground.
A person driving along looking at their phone instead of the road is doing a stupid thing too but I don't think that in any way absolves doing a stupid thing in response.
Both are stupid but one has a much higher chance of causing injury or death. I see this all the time including other forms of reckless driving which has exploded since CVOID. It has to stop but no one seems to want to do anything.
Two wrongs don't make a right, bruv.
The charitable explanation is probably that they weren't thinking much. That they had a skill set to allow them to do this quickly and easily.
If I had the idea to do this I'd have to think about and work on it so long that they obvious reasons why it's not such a great idea would probably occur to me.
Either that or when an idea occurs to me I'm never so hyperfocused on it that I won't take a step back and stop asking myself if I can but if I should at some point early in the process.
It is such a techie mindset to see a social problem with a technology and craft an even cruder technological solution to that problem, without thinking of the second order effects. As drivers on cell phones get jammed, they will be even more distracted trying to redial and figure out what is going on. This man made the roads less safe, not more.
> What was this person thinking?
He was thinking he wasn't going to get caught.
I guess I don't see the big deal. Am I old (or am I an anarchist)?
I guess I drove for close to three decades before cell phones and I seemed to do fine without them. We listened to the radio. So, no, I suppose it doesn't seem crazy to me.
Clearly it would be ideal if it could discriminate—people distracted by their phones—but of course it cannot.
And in those days you had affordances which no longer exist, such as AA Call Boxes on the side of the road. If you get into an accident today, you are expected to have a phone to call for help. That can literally be the difference between life or death, jamming communications can cause people to die.
If you had a device that indiscriminately shut down cars around you, because people used to do fine with their horse and buggy, would that be okay?
He's imposing upon a common in a way that is taking that from everyone else - and, as noted, in a way that's potentially dangerous.
Given the popularity of r/fuckcars (as an example) it might be your straw-man argument is not such a reach, ha ha.
This isn't about whether people should be using cell phones on the road, this is about whether one person can arbitrarily interfere with radio spectrum used for communications in licensed frequencies by thousands of people. Obviously, by federal law, they cannot.
There are many other important or essential services that get disrupted by the jammer, like emergency services/911, police, private business communications, general internet data for everyone, etc. There's a very good reason this is illegal and it has nothing to do with keeping people off their phones in their cars.
It is much, way too much. I wouldn’t mind this penalty if other obnoxious behaviour is equally investigated and punished, but I can think of plenty of way more obnoxious things to do that would never trigger even a reaction from law enforcement.
The real crime here, as usual, is that he inconvenienced a corporation. Had someone been obnoxiously interfering (in general - not radio-specific) with an individual or small business nothing will happen.
No, he inconvenienced every day potentially thousands of consumers of a company's service, which includes first responders.
And think about the direct effect. Yes driving using a cell phone is dangerous. But do you really think cell phone addicted drivers will be MORE attentive when their signal starts to go in and out depending on their proximity to this driver? They will just give up? No, they will be more frustrated, looking at their phones more to see what is wrong, trying to redial, becoming even more of a risk to themselves and others.
This man made the roads less safe. Full stop.
Obnoxiousness isn’t the decisive factor in the creation and application of laws that you seem to think it is.
It's interesting that he did this to stop people from using phones while driving, but he ended up creating a bigger public safety hazard by jamming emergency comms. From a liability perspective if that jammer had blocked a 911 call during a nearby accident his exposure would have been far higher than just the $48k FCC fine. Federal preemption on signal jamming is one of the few areas where the hammer drops consistently hard.
it drops hard enough that, allegedly, aliexpress won't sell jammers anymore. Well, at least not as a device's express purpose.
We have standards, called laws, for how we use shared resources. The fine is about $60/day. Feels low to me to be honest. The actions described could have easily contributed to death via disruption of emergency services.
This is 12 years old…
He was incredibly lucky. Assuming there was no other criminal penalties, he screwed up royally and gets off with a fine he will be able to pay and a life that was not destroyed by the federal government.
Good point. The title needs “(2014)”.
Wouldn't issues with cellphone network make drivers even more likely to get distracted from the road?
I'm talking about in practice, not the theoretic world where no driver ever uses their phone.
Absolutely. If I'm driving and using my cellphone (in a legal or illegal manner), and the network is suddenly screwed up, I'll probably be more distracted since I'm trying to solve the "problem" with my phone in addition to driving.
Using a phone when driving is completely legal, as long as it is hands free. Most modern cars have bluetooth for that.
And I agree, someone could become distracted. For example, some cars don't show signal strength on the dash, one might pull a phone out of pocket to investigate.
> Using a phone when driving is completely legal, as long as it is hands free.
This is not universally true, and as a matter of policy, it should not be true -- making phone calls while driving is distracting, whether you are holding the phone in your hands or not.
> Adopted: April 23, 2014 Released: April 29, 2014
Well, here's another fun one I guess, where a trucker wanted to disrupt his log keeper but ended up interfering with an airport: https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/Orders/2013/FCC-13-106A1.html
Florida man interferes with essential services and puts people's lives in danger. Sounds like a good reason for a hefty fine.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
2014
Should get some jailtime or he will do it again
If this person had not continuously operated the jammer along the same route, at the same time every day for years, they probably wouldn't have ever been caught.
I didn't read TFA but I bet the guy got caught because he told his brother and 10 other people. The kind of person who does this is that same guy who doesn't own a TV and never seems to shut up about it.
But that wasn't the agenda.
That being said, I can't count the number of times I've passed someone who's going dangerously slow and drifting in their lane, only to see them staring down at their phone. If Humphreys only ran the device for about 30 seconds whenever he saw someone on their phone, he'd probably have gotten away with it for a lot longer.
I would also be highly skeptical that the jammer would actually prevent someone in the moment from ceasing to look down at their phone anymore, since 1. most phone operations aren't so heavily dependent on an active internet connection e.g. messages will come in whenever they come in, and 2. having no connection could actually cause them to look even more at the phone, to try to figure out why it's not working or retry whatever they're doing.
well, it's illegal to use jammers, so.
I of course agree with him being guilty, but cars should be prohibited from allowing loud speakers. Also, independently, phones should be prohibited from using speakers at all when in the vicinity of several other phones.
this is from 12 years ago!
...sounds about right? Is this supposed to be an injustice? You can't unilaterally shut down a public resource like RF sectiona because you've decided to be the Batman clearing the streets of hands-free cellphone users.
Good.
I spend time in the "third world" where they honk all the time and don't care about road laws (i.e. lane lines are merely suggestions, no requirement to buckle your seat belt), non existent road law enforcement.
It's amazing. Every type of vehicle shares the road in relative harmony. It's the ultimate "mixed use/complete streets" liberal wet dream of transportation infrastructure. It maximizes the utility of the roads. There's also far fewer lifted trucks and similar which harms the visibility of the highly alert drivers.
Everyone is still on their phones, but because they are used to a far more chaotic roads, they pay FAR better attention. Furthermore, the average health is infinitely better (almost no obesity), so even their 80 year old grandmas are far healthier and thus more fit to drive.
Unironically deregulate the roads. We need to radically increase speed limits, significantly reduce penalties for meme stuff "i.e. california stopping at stop signs", and yes go after "do-gooders" who think that risking jamming ambulances is worth getting their "slightly safer roads"
Unironically, put Tullock's spike in every car.
Traffic cops are road marauders/parasites. Many tickets shouldn't exist. And no, I don't have any driving tickets.
Tell us the country and I'm pretty sure the traffic nerds here (me included) will come back and show you how what you perceived as harmony is actually a place with shockingly high per-capita traffic fatality rates.
> Traffic cops are road marauders/parasites.
I do agree with this, but mostly because better road design and cameras can completely eliminate the need for traffic cops.
Don't need to be a nerd, 5 secs google search: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...
> where they honk all the time and don't care about road laws (i.e. lane lines are merely suggestions, no requirement to buckle your seat belt), non existent road law enforcement.
that sounds like Los Angeles to me...
This comment seems entirely tangential to the article.
What? I am living in one of these places right now. The rate of road deaths is vastly higher than even in the USA. This is not a good model.
Charlie Kirk was literally in the middle of talking about the need to accept "taking one for the team" when he "took one for the team".
Similar principle here.
This sort of comment occurs on almost any conversation that touches on road safety. A ridiculous "where there is chaos it is actually safer!" bit of nonsense.
Absolutely, unequivocally destroyed by actual metrics. These "chaos" places like India have absolutely atrocious road safety, with hundreds of thousands of deaths yearly. They only look good per capita because of the relative rarity of vehicles and miles driven, but driving is a perilously dangerous activity there and in similar countries.
The bit about obesity is just doubly weird nonsense.
> significantly reduce penalties for meme stuff "i.e. california stopping at stop signs"
That's not a meme. Rolling a stop sign is failing to obey a traffic control device at the expense of everybody around you. I've almost been hit multiple times as a pedestrian, cyclist, and motorcyclist by ignorant drivers pulling such shenanigans.
If you think that encouraging people to run stop signs is a good idea while harboring contempt for this guy then your worldview is, charitably speaking, inconsistent to the point of absurdity.
Hero. So tired of seeing drivers swerve around at deadly speeds on the highway while they play around on their phones. I would contribute to a Gofundme to help this guy pay off the $48k.
Definetely a great idea to block emergency communications
1. Vigilantes are bad
2. Do you really think cell phone addicted drivers will be MORE attentive when their signal starts to go in and out depending on their proximity to this driver? No, they will be more frustrated, looking at their phones more to see what is wrong, trying to redial....
> 1. Vigilantes are bad
I agree that this guy was an idiot, and generally speaking that's a somewhat fine argument against vigilantism, but I also have witnessed the complete inability of the justice system in the several countries I've lived in to handle even the barest minimum of enforcement of the law.
When I lived in California, I would every single day, stop cars from making illegal right turns across a bike lane when bicyclists have right of way. Me biking forward and blocking the right turn on, signaling with my strobe, could be seen as a form of vigilantism, but if I didn't do it, inevitably I would have seen a bicyclist get run over on one of my commutes.
Unless, maybe you have some clear personal definition that separates vigilantism from direct action/
Doesn't sound like you were breaking the law there. If you aggressively tailgated or were harassing drivers who didn't follow the law or your expectations, that road rage is vigiliantism.
If you publicly shame an alleged criminal within your free speech rights, you're not a vigilante. If you cross into harassment or stalking in your attempt to take the law into your own hands, that's a vigilante.
Deciding who can and can't use a mobile phone? That's part of the monopoly of violence that defines the government's exclusive power, just like imprisonment.
Great points. To add:
3. Just imagine being in a car accident, and some idiot in the vicinity didn't realize why traffic is slow, and takes multiple minutes to shutdown their jammer. Or is unable because they're the other party involved in the accident.
This may be the epitome of chaotic-good in the modern world
Chaotic neutral, maybe. This is selfish self-righteousness.
Until someone has a heart attack and needs to call 911… these are super illegal for a reason!
Seconds count for 911 calls, but really your odds are already bad if calling about...a heart attack. There's one study about non-runners having heart attacks during marathons due to road closures [0]. If they had a heart attack that day, they were 15% more likely to die within a month. Not good, but it's not that bad.
Going full SV utilitarian, I'm curious what's the net change in accidents between
(1) texting
(2) no texting?
I've read that texting is the equivalent of having 2 beers. Even "hands free" is distracting. I continue to see people sucked into their phones and oblivious that they're operating a 4,000+ pound machine.
[0] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/marathon-risk-non-runners
>I've read that texting is the equivalent of having 2 beers
Is that supposed to be a lot, or a little?
We talking two 12oz coors lights for a 300lb career sailer or two 16oz quadruple IPAs for a 90lb nail salon tech?
Well, you're picking extremes when AFAIK, it'll put the average person at the legal limit.
One beer will start to impair you.
Everyone thinks they're light texting on the road. Just like people think they can drive drunk.
>Well, you're picking extremes when AFAIK, it'll put the average person at the legal limit.
>One beer will start to impair you.
Thank you for illustrating exactly the problem. Impairment is a binary in colloquial usage. Statistically no average-median-ish person has ever been impaired in the colonial sense by one average beer. Any everyone knows this. Two average beers applied to an average person won't get you to the legal limit without aggravating circumstances (i.e. zero time to metabolize + empty stomach, or perhaps conflicting medication).
I will be the first to admit you can give a bunch of people one beer and detect statistically significant difference vs a control group or you can give one person one beer many times and evaluate against a baseline and detect a statistically significant difference. But statistical difference does not "impairment" in the colloquial sense make. And everyone knows this based on their own observed life experience, even people without experience should be able to deduce this by observing how the world behaves for if what you say were true, the way things work would be very different.
And by using the term impairment to describe/quantify the impact of one beer and then re-using that term in contexts where it may overload with the colloquial more binary usage the upper bound of what "one beer" is such that one beer at the top end may equal two or three at the low end.
So now we nor does any casual reader know if texting is equivalent in danger to two "real beers", which almost makes it sound not bad for how distracting it seems to be, or if it's equivalent in danger to two "paternalism beers" in which case it's pretty seriously dangerous.
And this key word overloading problem seems to be endemic to all manner of issues these days.
The "good/neutral/bad" DND axis implies moral intent, not necessarily outcome. A stupid person doing something insane for a reasoning that is generally understood to be morally good can be seen as "chaotic good." Hence why a lawful good Paladin can maintain their lawful good status, and their divinely derived abilities, even when they're doing things we may consider evil, like executing a youth for breaking a law, so long as the Paladin (and the divine entity) strongly believe that it's for the greater good of the law and society.
In this case, the guy thought he was preventing people from using their phones while driving, which is a good thing, but he was too dumb to realize it would have negative consequences apparently.
Even then. Taking individual action to try and solve a systemic problem that results in a bad, unintended outcome is very on brand for Chaotic Good.
Its more chaotic-stupid Honestly the punishment should be harsher