Can you hear me now? Maybe not, as officials look to jam smuggled cell phones in prison
Earlier this year, federal authorities recounted how a Dominican drug trafficker was able to use a contraband mobile phone smuggled into a New Jersey prison to execute a vicious revenge plot against an ex-girlfriend.
Omar Adonis Guzman-Martinez, a Dominican national, was listening on the phone as a hired gunman shot the his girlfriend's new boyfriend in the back of the head, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But the U.S. Justice Department on Friday said a test of so-called "micro-jamming technology" conducted at the Federal Correctional Institution at Cumberland, Md., may soon make such secreted prison cell phones all but useless.
Data from the test, conducted in January by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, showed that the micro-jammer's signal disrupted commercial wireless signals inside a prison cell. That meant that if any cellphones were operating inside the test area, they would have been rendered inoperable.
Yet further away, at between 20 to 100 feet outside the prison cell, the micro-jammer signals did not affect commercial wireless signals. Officials added that cellphones were fully operable when standing even a few feet from the cell's window. ===== rest:
Dannyb would ask the obvious question as to just how cell phones get through prison walls...
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]