The last few generations know it well: if something is wrong, at school or elsewhere, the first to fall is the Wi-Fi router. The whole of society in the last twenty years has been radically and rapidly changed by the ever closer relationship with the internet, and it is therefore normal that the youngest, grown up against this background, are used to spending a lot of time online, especially from smartphones.
When a parent wants to strike, then, he is on the safe side: no internet. And that’s what happened in France, in Messanges, a village of a thousand souls and brisk in the Landes department of New Aquitaine. The problem is that the father, to make sure that his children had no way of accessing the network, went down hard. And the result is incredible: for a whole week the whole country was offline from midnight to three in the morning. Evidently the problem, therefore, concerned the use of the internet at night.
ALL THE FAULT OF A JAMMER
The problem did not emerge immediately, probably due to the timetable and the small population of Messanges, which, moreover, it is easy to hypothesize is largely elderly, and therefore not very accustomed to both the small hours and the use of the network. A mobile telephone operator attracted the attention of the ANFR (Agence nationale des fréquences) to the affair. And from the investigations it emerged that the man was using a jammer, which is a frequency jammer.
AND NOW THE PUNISHMENT RISKS THE PAP
As stated in the statement released by the French agency, the father allegedly acted after searching the internet for advice on how to prevent their children from surfing the internet at night instead of sleeping:
The explanation was disconcerting simplicity: the jammer had been installed by his father to prevent his children from accessing the internet with their smartphone instead of falling asleep. His children had in fact become dependent on social networks and other applications, especially after the imprisonment imposed due to the pandemic emergency. After consulting various internet forums, the father decided that a jammer was the best solution to put an end to these excesses.
The man had no idea of the damage he would have caused to the entire community, and despite this at the end of the story he risks being the one who will suffer a more severe punishment: jammers are illegal devices in France (even in Italy the use constitutes a violation of the criminal code), and therefore the risk is that of one fine of up to 30,000 euros and of six months’ imprisonment.
