Jamming a signal wonât stop conveniently at the prison walls, so the first 999 call that canât get through would make heads roll. No-oneâs gonna make that decision.
I want a valve-powered mobile phone. On a steam gurney.
Perhaps if they were to ban all technological development, these kinds of embarrassing situations can be avoided in the future.
This is a British Isle for British people, weâll have no telephones here!
You know what, letâs forget all that and go straight to whitelisting. People are allowed to possess clothes, food, prescribed medication, and an iPhone registered with an NSA-compliant provider. Oh, and a car. Letâs make that mandatory.
Because of course all prisoners need car keys.
Guess the best way to stop prisoners using cell phones is for each prison to have itâs own cell tower.
As it would provide the strongest signal, all calls from the prison would be routed through it.
This tower would have a white list of staff memberâs mobile phone numbers/IMEI which would be the only number to be connected.
Prisoners could smuggle their illegal phones in as much as they like, all they will be able to do is play snake.
I can only conclude that the UK Serious Crime Agency dislikes competition from independent UK Petty Crime operatorsâŚ
Yeah, I wonder if it vibrates.
I hope youâre right, but I fear youâre wrong. In 2011, the BART in San Francisco unilaterally turned off phone service in their stations to impede a peaceful protest. Two years later, Washington is âdebatingâ whether that was legal, but itâs likely to become the norm while the rest of us debate.
To an engineer thereâs a difference between jamming a signal and turning off a tower, but not to the demonstrators.
That sounds like the system the Maryland state prisons are going to use. They call it âmanaged accessâ.
First off, weâre talking about the UK, so FCC rules donât apply.
And secondly, you donât actually need to jam the radios. There are at least a couple of different options for handling this. Since the buildings themselves tend to be solid concrete or stone structures, thereâs probably a lot of passively acquired radio interference already. You might only need to add structural pieces to hamper connectivity in some of the open spaces. Could that be achieved with a Faraday-cage roof over open spaces that lets in sunlight and fresh air but not radio signals? I suspect it could.
Another thing is to do follow the BART police example: just turn off the cell tower(s) that serve that space, or rather in the case of a prison, donât have one in the first place. That would not interfere with walkie talkie radios at all. The issue of that being possibly illegal is specific to the public space of a transit station. Even in the US, legality would certainly be different when considering an incarceration facility. In the UK, I get the sense that the authorities arenât nearly so squeamish.
I believe that cell phone jamming equipment is used in some places for safety purposes, though. Hospitals, for instance, where cell phones can interfere with some equipment.
I merely proposed the FCC as an example âeven in the USâ of RF-regulatory-entities-that-hate-jamming. Ofcom, in the UK, and the ITUâs Radio Regulations are similarly humorless.
As for passive RF-blocking architecture, thatâs perfectly legal; but not trivial to retrofit, or to extend to an entire prison facility. Even fancy corporate architecture tends to result in poor reception amusingly often; but âpoorâ and ânoneâ are pretty different things.
And killing cell towers is certainly an option; but (unlike a train station, which has dedicated repeaters and very good RF isolation) most prisons are near at least some actual telco customers, and their towers, and those customers will be Not Happy if their towers are disabled.
The main difference is that a subway station has excellent RF isolation, so he who controls the local repeater/microcell (probably the manager of the facility) can always just cut the power.
Unless a prison is way in the sticks, though, itâll be covered by one or more towers that the telco put up to serve customers they actually care about(or at least want to retain for further abuse), and the facility operators wonât have anything to turn off. Doesnât make BART any less sinister; but itâs architecturally a rather different situation.
I imagine that the way it was supposed to work is that visitors would be searched for phones, but not for car keys. Of course, the way around that is just to not let them bring car keys in.
Or some triangulation equipment, to locate them? Works in other government buildings.
From the BBC article:
âIn this case Soca assisted the prison service and the National
Trading Standards e-Crime Centre by issuing an alert to car
manufacturers and online retailers earlier this year to make them
aware of the issue so they can consider taking copyright infringement
action against those selling these phones.â
SOCA donât currently have a legal way to get rid of the phones, so they try to invoke the copyright angle?
The guy with a sight based problem that keeps him from driving strongly disagrees with that last notion on account of being personally useless without an included driver. See thatâs the problem with voting, being the minority in an issue and not having your needs addressed.
Because copyright law is supreme over all else. I would turn this idea into a sci-fi story, except that no matter how outrageous, reality would render it obsolete before it could be published.
