Rudeness No Excuse

J.J. Jackson* | November 21, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2 — One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was “blabbing away” into her phone.
“She was using the word ‘like’ all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.

“She kept talking into her phone for about 30 seconds before she realized there was no one listening on the other end,” he said. His reaction when he first discovered he could wield such power? “Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.”

…

The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.

…

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

Like it or not, you do not have a right to arbitrarily shut down someone else’s conversation. Places of business have the right to limit the use of cell phones and ask people to calm down but just because you are annoyed by it doesn’t mean you have the right to break the law.

One of these days one of these “vigilantes” (which they are not because vigilantes enforce actual laws when the authorities will not and not arbitrary standards) who think it is their right to enforce laws that don’t exist for their own benefit are going to use their jammer to silence an emergency call or something else very important and get in a lot of trouble. And if someone dies because of it I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

The New York times has just aided and abetted a criminal by not reporting him and his illegal activity. Nothing new for them though. The Times has a history of acting as a rogue agent.

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