Cell Jamming Company Plans Series of Demonstrations Across the U.S.

Melamed said his company will ask Congress next year to approve legislation clearing the way for companies like his to sell the equipment to other prisons nationwide. Melamed said he had been on the phone Monday with about a dozen congressional offices explaining the technology. Among the witnesses of Friday’s demo was a staffer for Sen. Jim DeMint, R.-S.C. “When the cat’s out of the bag, you've got a wave of people locking onto it and finding out how big the problem is and how shocking,” Melamed said.

Corrections officials in other states, including Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, have expressed interest in similar demonstrations, Melamed said. “We're hoping to do this demonstration across the country,” he said. “If the FCC asks me to do a test I will show them the same thing.”

CTIA President Steve Largent called South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) asking him to scuttle the test, sources said. “The wireless industry would like more than anything to prevent incarcerated individuals from making wireless calls. However, the use of jammers is both unlawful and wrong-headed,” the CTIA said in a statement Monday. “CellAntenna has blatantly violated a federal law and they should suffer the consequences.” Numerous “legal” alternatives are available to prisons, “including cellphone sniffing dogs, cellphone detection and location technologies, and other measures,” said the CTIA.

During Friday’s test, Melamed flipped a switch on a box the size of a briefcase in an auditorium at the prison, killing all cell signals inside the room, though people could still make calls in the hallway, according to press accounts. Melamed also demonstrated that the radios carried by guards were not affected.

Melamed said CellAntenna sells the equipment to prison systems around the world but cannot do so in the U.S., though he said in-prison cellphones are a major problem in the country. South Carolina officials say they confiscate more than 1,000 handsets per year in one prison alone, he said. A phone sells for $500 to $700 on the black market inside most prisons and is used on average by more than 50 inmates, he said. Because of their value, inmates have gone to great lengths to import them, even having outsiders launch them over prison walls.

Melamed countered CTIA arguments that jammers could affect cellphone use outside prison walls, saying the technology is surgical (CD Nov 21 p5). “I don’t know which engineers they have working for them [at the CTIA] but they didn’t go to the same schools I went to,” he said. “We know precisely how to stop signals at the wall. We do it constantly. It’s unbelievable they would provide such misinformation to the public.”

Melamed also said searching for handsets is often difficult, since they're sometimes smuggled in body cavities. Training guards or bringing in specially trained dogs to sniff for phones is expensive and requires “invasive” examinations of prisoners, he said.

Meanwhile, Melamed urged the FCC to seek comment on a petition the company filed in June 2007 asking the agency to change its rules to allow state and local law enforcement to employ jamming equipment to disarm and disable remotely controlled improvised explosive devices. “Recognizing that the responsible use of RF jamming devices is an effective tool in the fight against Terrorism, several state and local law enforcement agencies have contacted the Petitioner to explore the purchase of RF jamming devices for law enforcement purposes,” the petition said.