The FCC has great fun giving out 5- and 6-digit fines. They're pretty reasonable about it too. If it's an honest mistake or misunderstanding, a first time, or you're under some financial hardship no- or readuced-fines are common.
If you willfully continue to violate, especially if you've been warned, huge and or daily fines are common.
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Equipment is regulated and you can't sell things that break regulations. If fining the retailer isn't effective or possible, they use the financial system against you and threaten the payment processor.
All of these fines are adequate to pay for enforcement.
When it comes down to it, many of the threats which might annoy the public could just as easily be threats to national security with slight tweaks to frequency. With that, there's no problem getting continued support for enforcement all the way from the top.
It sounds like Obama put some really competent people at the FCC. Just look at what happened with net neutrality, the head of the FCC is now one of its big champions.
Politics aside, it's not every day that you get to appreciate what a government agency is doing like this.
The government is staffed by people and the vast majority of it does work well and has real flexibility on a case-by-case basis. What you hear about are the problem cases: the NSA, the FBI, abusive police, mandatory minimums. What you don't hear about is everything else.
The news _should_ be about informing and educating people about the current state of the world, including the parts that are working well. Why does obsessing over crime and inflating the importance of celebrity and politician have to dominate the news?
Because it's what people pay for. Unless a news outlet is publicly-funded (NPR, the BBC), they all eventually face a choice: give the people what they want, or go out of business.
This is the wrong way to think about it. It's not what you pay for because almost nobody is actually making a choice to pay for it.
It's what they think you want. They're all trying to sell what they believe has the broadest appeal which happens to be vapid, emotionally charged shit. The thing is, when everyone is selling the most broadly appealing product, the whole market consumes less.[1]
I personally consume very little because it has such little value to me. There are quite a few like me for various reasons.
I can imagine a public or private entity that goes around and fines people that do not switch off bad equipment and fine the manufacturer (or bar them from doing business in the country).
Ham Radio operators or clubs will often track down rogue radio operators or significant sources of noise, like arcing power lines and report the source to the power company or FCC.
The manufacturer is often nearly impossible to find, and they're not doing business in the country, some enterprising ebay power seller is.
Baby monitors, wireless yard cameras etc are often absolute garbage from an RF point of view, and sold with brand names such as "best for baby". Good luck trying to nail that company.
The FCC's mandate isn't to stop everyone everywhere in the world from producing crap $5 baby monitors that spew noise on the whole spectrum. Their mandate is to keep those crap baby monitors out of the US and off US markets. Which they can do relatively easily; even if the manufacturer is hiding behind seven proxies, twelve shell companies and sourcing from two dozen countries, those baby monitors still had to get into the US at a particular port of entry, had to be sold by someone who had the ability to take payments from and arrange delivery to people in the US, etc., and that's going to point to someone the FCC can happily issue big fines to, discouraging them from continuing to import/sell the devices.
There are literally dozens of sites you can buy cell jammers from, pay with PayPal and get it in the mail a few weeks later. The mail is really not checked for this kind of violation very often.
Who are you going to sue if I order a cell jammer from a China or Hong Kong based company and your own governmental postal service delivers it to me? How about if it's just a crappy or malfunctioning device that leaks and I have no knowledge of it?
It's a very difficult thing to police... almost approaching war on drugs territory.
The fine and jail time apply to the person operating the jammer. By the way, these "dozens of sites" are all too happy to turn over purchase records to law enforcement if asked.
As for "it's a very difficult thing to police", a jammer is a transmitter, one that's powerful enough to drown out the signals it's designed to jam. Turning one on is like turning on a giant flashing billboard saying "ARREST ME" over your head; it's easy to follow the jamming signal back to the source with the right equipment, which, of course, the FCC and similar agencies have plenty of.
> Who are you going to sue if I order a cell jammer from a China or Hong Kong based company and your own governmental postal service delivers it to me?
