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Text-messaging is driving teens to distraction and horrific accidents on the road. But a 73-year-old law prevents Americans from installing a solution in their vehicles.
An epidemic of teens text-messaging while driving is causing a rash of accidents and deaths nationwide.

Yet while cellphone jamming technology would be a simple and available remedy, an arcane law from the 1930s is preventing any business in the United States from selling or even advertising the solution.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is the government agency in charge of regulating the airwaves, has established severe penalties for cellphone jamming – a law written in 1934 to primarily protect radio and television broadcasters from the pirating of their airwaves.

If anyone is caught with a cellphone jammer in their car today, they could face an $11,000 fine and a one-year jail term. Although no one has been fined or jailed, the law still deters cellphone jammers from being sold -- and developed -- openly in the U.S.
The FCC argument is that the 1934 law exists because commercial enterprises have purchased the rights to the spectrum that they broadcast or transmit signals over; jamming those signals is a akin to property theft.

"The law protects the carriers right to protect their interests -- obviously text messaging is a rising profit center. But it fails to protect the innocent drivers on the road who are at risk because of this widespread activity," says Ed Smith, senior crime analyst for the Delray Beach Police Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, in an interview October 14, 2007.

Cell phones operate by sending signals along a range of the electromagnetic spectrum reserved for their use. In the United States, that part typically is measured as either 800 or 1,900 megahertz.

If lawmakers could see past the 1934 law, the physics of jamming a cell phone is actually quite simple, experts says. All a cell-phone jamming device needs to do is broadcast a signal on those same frequencies – 800 or 1,900 megahertz -- and it will interfere with any devices trying to transmit in that range.

The net effect for a cell-phone user? The phone's screen will simply indicate that no signal is available.

One company in the United Kingdom, Iceberg Systems, is already beta-testing a new technology that will remotely turn off the cameras in cellphones – a technology that could be easily applied to text-messaging as well, according to company officials.

Called Safe Haven, the product combines hardware transmitters with a small piece of control software loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated when the handset is out of range.

"Once you're in a wireless privacy zone, there is the opportunity to look at other functionality that may be disabled or controlled," said Patrick Snow, managing director of Iceberg Systems.
In other words, in an automobile, the technology could deactivate the text-messaging functionality in the cellphone -- in the same way it's capable of deactivating the camera.

Some states are attempting to outlaw text-messaging in automobiles. But bans may not be enough. As everyone knows, the laws don't prevent people from driving and drinking with a blood-alcohol level over .08 either.

“Besides, there's an enormous enforcement issue too," says Smith. "It's important that the states begin the process of banning text messaging in cars. But we need a technology to actually prevent text messages from flowing in and out of a vehicle. That would be the most effective solution.”

Today nearly 50 percent of teens surveyed in a 2007 AAA and Seventeen magazine study indicated they text-message while driving. "It's already a huge problem, and it's only going to get worse," Smith says.