Grounded Israeli Teen: I Was Home – GPS Showed Me At Friend’s Because Of Russian Jamming

The Ukraine crisis, has made the situation tense enough that his parents are primed to believe anything about Russian capabilities and intentions.

Kiryat Bialik, March 10 – A local adolescent expressed relief today that Putin’s forces have been disrupting geolocation service in the region as part of their operations in and around Syria, because such disruptions have allowed him to evade parental monitoring of his mobile device while they have ordered him confined to the house as a disciplinary measure.

Mor Bar-Giora, 15, gloated Thursday that Russian GPS jamming has served him well in the last several days. “They have no idea,” he chuckled. “All because I planted the seeds a couple of days ago when I sent them a link about the Russians and told them my friends were all complaining about geolocation showing them in the wrong places. Even showed them some doctored screenshots. Now they don’t trust the reports they get about my device, and I can skip out to hang with my buddies and play video games.”

“I do have to be careful,” he acknowledged. “I’m good at getting back into the apartment without making a sound, but that runs the risk of chancing on someone who should be asleep but isn’t. So I can’t do this every night. I have to make sure I’m around at mealtimes and that I’m seeing going to school and coming home at more or less the right time, and to get my chores done, but that’s easy. It’s probably wrong to be happy about the Ukraine crisis, but it’s definitely made the situation tense enough that my parents are primed to believe anything about Russian capabilities and intentions.”

At least one of Bar-Giora’s friends has exploited the Russian jamming pretext for more extensive naughtiness. “Oh, [redacted] has taken this to the next level,” he whispered. “He knows how to disable the monitoring software his parents installed on his phone, so he does that for whatever stretch of time he feels necessary, then reactivates it, and blames the Russkies for the gap in tracking. As long as he mixes it up a bit and varies the timing and duration of the ‘outages,’ they won’t get suspicious. He can do that because his phone model isn’t totally compatible with the app, but I can’t, unfortunately. But he’s been using that ‘down time’ to look for workarounds for my situation, and we’ll see what happens when he finds a solution. It’ll help me far beyond my current ‘grounded’ status.”

Bar-Giora’s parents, Amalya and Dan, conceded awareness that their son has circumvented their controls, but that they no longer possess the patience or will to get into fights about anything anymore.

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