Zone of Silence

By: Erico Guizzo

Invented for an MIT thesis, a gizmo defends against cellphone chatter
Limor Fried got the idea when a friend with whom she was eating dinner
broke off their conversation to answer her cellphone. Fried got mad.
Then she got even, in the way a graduate student at the MIT Media
Laboratory, very well might. She built a gadget.
She calls it the Wave Bubble because it creates a cellphone-free
bubble of silence 4 meters in diameter. It does so by jamming the
phones' radio-frequency bands with a junk signal of a few milliwatts.
She's not the first to make a cellphone jammer. They are for sale over
the Internet as well as on the streets of New York and other big
cities. Restaurants, hospitals, and schools reportedly have been
buying them. In the United States, however, Federal Communications
Commission regulations forbid using or even making a frequency jammer.
And although enforcement has been lax to nonexistent, an FCC spokesman
says the agency has begun to notify infringers of the rule that they
could be fined and even jailed.
The widespread interest in jammers suggests an unslaked need that
legal and technical refinements may one day allow legitimate companies
to satisfy. The process is already under way in other countries.
Brazil and Spain use jammers in prisons. Japan allows them in concert
halls. In India, legislators have actually hung them on the walls of
Parliament. France has authorized jammers in movie theaters as long as
they don't block emergency calls, even though no technology has
achieved that degree of discrimination.
Fried says she isn't sure that the FCC rules forbid her from building
her own jammer. In any case, she says, the rules say nothing against
documenting in detail how to make one, as she has done, at
http://www.mit.edu/~ladyada/thesis.pdf (13.6 mb download).
Fried made the Wave Bubble for her master's thesis, "Social Defense
Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming Our Personal Space," which argues
that electronic devices increasingly distract and annoy people and
that the electronics industry has had little incentive to address the
problem. She concludes that citizens must therefore explore methods of
self-defense.
Against television she has built Media-Sensitive Glasses, which darken
their lenses upon detecting the characteristic 59.94-hertz flicker of
a TV set. Perhaps it's not a very practical solution, as the wearer
wouldn't be able to see other things, but Fried is making an almost
artistic statement, not laying out a business plan.
It took her two months of work to design, prototype, and test the Wave
Bubble. The parts cost less than US $100, and she says she thinks she
could get that sum down to $70 by using cheaper components.
The device works by generating a range of voltages in a circuit that
tunes an oscillator. This voltage-controlled oscillator's amplified
output, in turn, spews out signals between 800 megahertz and 2.5
gigahertz, a range wide enough to cover the bands for CDMA and GSM
cellphones, radio frequency identification tags, Wi-Fi networks, and
the Global Positioning System.
"I tried it out on people around the lab, and it worked pretty well,"
she says.
Some call Fried's device a blunt instrument. "I believe that there are
better ways of expressing one's artistic values than disrupting the
safety and well-being of others," says Steve Mann, an electrical
engineering professor at the University of Toronto and an MIT alum
himself. Mann says the jammer could disable critical devices, such as
health-monitoring equipment, or perhaps one of his inventions, EyeTap,
a wearable device that projects information into the user's eye.
But again, the Wave Bubble was meant to provoke thought, and in that
role it seems to have succeeded. Fried says that when employees of the
cellphone giants Motorola and Nokia visited the Media Lab, they showed
great interest in the gadget. One employee from Samsung even wondered
out loud about incorporating its technology into a cellphone that
could make calls while blocking those of nearby phones. Now we're
talking! Or not.