Imagine the following scenario. You’re getting ready for bed at your house in the countryside. Surrounded mostly by forests and farms, it’s very quiet, very peaceful. Suddenly, as you turn out the lights and enjoy the fact that it’s actually dark out here away from the lights of the city, you hear a pounding from downstairs. Somebody is attempting to break into your home.
Now, depending on the sort of person you are, you probably have one of several reactions. You might anxiously go to the window and attempt to see exactly what is going on. You might desperately look around for a flashlight and a baseball bat. You might grab the AR-15 from your closet while thinking, “Finally! About time I got some use out of this bad boy!”
Signal jammers gained notoriety in South Africa for their use in raids on isolated farms.
Regardless of which path you take, there is one thing you would almost certainly do before going downstairs to confront your would-be assailants: You call 911. Normally, you would call, hear the dispatcher on the other end, tell him what is going on and where, and then be told that police are on the way. Not this time.
This time, you hear an error tone. Call failed. You dial again. Same thing. You grab your other phone (you have a work phone in this scenario; just go with it). Same thing. Error tone. Call failed. Unfortunately for you, the five men breaking into your house are using a signal jammer. Nobody is coming to help you.
What is a signal jammer? Well, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It jams signals. Basically, it disrupts the signal between a device and the thing that device is attempting to connect to. It does this by emitting a stronger radio frequency on the same frequency band: 700-2100 MHz for cellular, 1.575 GHz for GPS, etc. A good jammer doesn’t just block one of these options; it blocks all of them. So before you ask: No, your Wi-Fi call is not getting through. If it’s still a bit confusing, think of it like this: You’re standing in a room, and your friend is at the other end of the room. You open your mouth to ask where he’d like to go for dinner, but just as the words leave your mouth, the guy in the middle of the room starts yelling about the new Taylor Swift album at the top of his lungs. It’s something like that.
Before we get back to the dramatic story unfolding at your country estate, you might be wondering where these things came from, what they are generally used for, and maybe most of all how you can get your hands on one.
Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Signal jammers came about in WWII, mostly for disrupting enemy radio transmissions. They continued to develop after the war and are now used to counter radio, radar, and other such things in military applications. Law enforcement uses them for preventing remote-activated bombs, as well as securing important locations. As to the last question, they are strictly illegal for civilian use under the Communications Act of 1934 (Section 302(b), in case you were wondering). The given reason for this prohibition on privately owned signal jammers is simple. It’s illegal to disrupt transmissions outside military and law enforcement; signal jammers exist for the sole purpose of disrupting transmissions; so they are illegal. Now, just as with other illegal items (AR-15s in New York City, for example), the fact that signal jammers are illegal doesn’t mean that nobody outside the military and police have them, which brings us back to the situation at your country estate.
The men breaking into your house are not police or military; they are members of an organized crime network. They have developed the strategy of sending small groups of armed men to break into isolated homes, while using signal jammers to prevent the homeowner from calling for help. Fortunately for you, this strategy does not really exist in the United States, so this situation is more hypothetical. Unfortunately, this strategy has been widely used in South Africa, is used increasingly in Mexico, and could start to become more common in America.
Signal jammers gained notoriety in South Africa for their use in raids on isolated farms. Criminal gangs, using sophisticated jamming equipment, have carried out horrific attacks on Afrikaner farmers, who often use radio to communicate and assist one another. In Mexico, cartels use these jammers to do things like block the GPS signals of stolen trucks. Along the U.S. southern border, they use jammers to counteract Border Patrol assets like drones and radar. If these organizations continue to expand their operations within the United States, we will see an increased use of signal jammers and sophisticated crime within our borders.
Solutions to high-tech crime are fairly simple. Signal jammers specifically can be tracked to some degree by spectrum analyzers, RF detectors, or the network-monitoring software employed by cellular providers. Precise tracking with any sort of efficiency is quite difficult, though. The real solution is to crack down on foreign criminal organizations operating on American soil. Tech such as signal jammers is very expensive and highly regulated. It generally requires powerful criminal networks and a certain amount of government corruption for these devices to become a danger to most people. President Trump has taken a step in the right direction with his recent executive order, but nobody knows just how many foreign criminals are already in our country, thanks to the Biden administration. Maybe keep that AR-15 loaded, just in case.
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