Parish Priests Jam Cell Phones in Churches

Three Cheers and a round of beers (make them Caronas) to the gutsy, high-tech clergy of four Catholic churches (Sacred Heart, The Rosario, San Juan Bosco and Our Lady Queen of the Angels) in Monterrey, Mexico!

They became so disgusted with cell phones interrupting their Holy Masses and sacerdotal rites that they installed cell phone jammers there to silence them. With one at the church entrance and another hidden near the altar, sacred silence was finally restored.

The Padres are jamming cell phone signals with Israeli-made transmitters (an Israeli company, Netline, first introduced them in 1998), the kind used to protect embassies and presidential motorcades from bugs and bombs detonated by phone. Such jammers are legal to purchase in Mexico and the US, but illegal to use.* Mexico's Federal Telecommunications Commission has declined official comment on the issue, and it has taken no action against the parishes, although officials privately note that the churches are breaking the law.

* Except for Israel, Japan and India, cell phone jammers remain illegal in most developed countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Switzerland, and Australia. In the U.S., the use of cell phone jammers is illegal without a license and carries a penalty of $11,000 per day.

However, despite such laws, new technology recently introduced by scientists in Japan could possibly be implemented legally in the United States under Section 302 of the Federal Communications Act: Hideo Oka and other electronic engineers at Iwate University in Morioka, Japan, built wood-based panels that absorb radio frequencies. The panels contain nickel-zinc ferrite, which blocks cell phones' electromagnetic waves. Oka says hardware stores will soon sell these wood panels.

Cell Phone Use is ALWAYS PROHIBITED in Medical Areas and where ever CARDIAC PACE MAKERS would be disrupted.

The RC priests explained that the devices work only inside their sanctuaries: The $1,500 jammers are boxes about the size of walkie-talkies. The physics of jamming a cell phone are actually quite simple. Cell phones operate by sending signals along a range of the electromagnetic spectrum reserved for their use. (In the U.S. that part typically is measured as either 800 or 1,900 megahertz; in Europe it's usually 900 or 1,800 megahertz.) All a cell-phone jamming device needs to do is broadcast a signal on those same frequencies, and it will interfere with any devices trying to transmit in that range.

....As churchgoers walk into the church the devices overwhelm the phones with electronic noise. Within a few minutes, the phones show "no signal." Incoming calls don't ring and calls are bounced to the phones' voice mail. Odds are most parishioners won't even notice that their phones are being jammed. They'll just assume that they're in a dead spot — and pray instead.

The plague of wild cell phones is worse in Mexico because most churches there are old, stone sanctuaries with booming acoustics. Almost two-thirds of telephone subscribers in Mexico use cell phones, according to the International Telecommunications Union.

In the United States, cell phone jammers are supposed to be used only by security honchos, embassies, the military, the Secret Service, bomb squads and police, who use the devices to isolate hostage-takers. Mexico also uses them in prisons to block smuggled cell phones. But manufacturers of the devices say many jammers are being sold under the table. One company, Global Gadget, even sells one disguised as a cell phone.

Our U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is presently working on "WolfPack", a small device that can be parachuted on enemy lands in order to both monitor and jam their conversations. The device is only four inches wide and weighs about six pounds.

("Jamming" is already a viable reality in Japan. "The Wave Wall", by a company called Medic Inc., is a cigarette-sized transceiver with a 20-foot jamming radius. It's a pricey $480, but cafes, theaters, and high-end restaurants are already using such devices to keep the peace.)

Great going, Padres. You're my kind of hombres and brother priests. (As also is the "Pistol Packing Padre" below.) There's nothing sinful or anti-social about your passive jamming (shielding) counter measures. I think that you have every right to enforce proper reverence and etiquette within your closed worship space**. It's a shame that the obvious need for such devices has become wider than good manners. But why didn't we think of this up North?

** The cell phone industry objects to the use of jammers, claiming that the airwaves are public property and jammers violate the rights of cell phone users. However, the issue for us is less about legality and more about social responsibility. Doctors, firemen and police officers, etc. all rely on wireless radios to send and receive emergency signals. If we knowingly and willingly block these types of signals -- especially after 9-11 -- we may be interfering with their ability to save lives. So consider notifying your parishioners, patrons, clients, customers, etc. to switch over to vibration mode instead.

Now can some geek out there please invent a "jammer" to silence the amplified sub-woofers of mobile "boom boxes" -- the ones you feel thumping inside your chest and head 8-10 blocks before you even hear them? They bombard us here in NYC every few minutes all hours of the day & nite. Those sound waves are even more obtrusive then cell phones and more harmful then the radiation emitted by such jammers. (I often fantasize about being a stealth "sniper" using a high radio frequency ray guy to explode the massive speakers of those car stereos.)

Beam us up, Scottie.