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Hack Your Phone, Go to Jail
thodu writes: "This bill [Mobile Telephones (Re-Programming)] in the UK aims to make it illegal for anyone to change a GSM phone's IMEI number. Though the intention in this case is seemingly for the good (to track and prevent stolen phones from being used), the line between legitimate mods and illegal hacks is increasingly becoming blurred. What next - a bill to disallow modifying your PC ?"
Do you know of any, because I sure don't.
Why shouldn't something that only serves theives (as far as I can see) be illegal?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
While I generally don't agree with restrictions on the use of hardware I buy, this is a special case. The law is intended to reduce the amount of phone-thefts in the UK (the phones are then reprogrammed and re-sold). There is currently a huge problem with phone theft over here which is driven by the fact it's so simple to give a stolen phone a new identity, so I don't think this legislation is over the top...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
No this is not the case with this law. There are no legit uses for hacking mobile phones. There are a huge number of people who do this (I think there was an article on the bbc website a while back but I am too lazy to look it up for referencing). This should indeed be stopped and it is nice to see a very focused bill instead of something that would do something stupid like outlaw EPROM burners altogether.
I don't mean to troll here, but isn't this similar to laws against removing VIN (vehicle id numbers) and serial numbers from high-cost goods in the US?
Of course, if this law extends to prohibit other modification of the phone that interferes with fair use, I suppose that's different....
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Just to know they can.
There are honest people who just like to tinker.
If altered MAC addresses are criminalized, only criminals wil have altered MAC addresses.
Mobile phone theft is a real problem in the UK, and has caused violent crime to rise sharply over the past year. Understandably, politicians and police in the UK are concerned, and are trying their hardest to stop the problem.
The UK telecoms operators have mobilised their SIM management systems to allow them to disable mobile phones according to the ID on the phone; previously only one or two of them did this.
Now saying this; I don't see how this Bill will do anything to stop the situation. The phones are stolen already, and are in the hands of the criminals. No doubt they have a stack of them in a warehousr; anything else just isnt' profitable. Anyone who thinks the piddling little threat of extra jail time that this Bill adds will stop the bad guys from modifying the phones are out of their heads. Do they really believe that the criminals care what this Bill says?
Its nothing but a quick headline grab, something for grining-Blair to point at and say "We're doing something about it, look!" and then allows him to get back to inventing rating schemes for various shitty public services, and cutting funding to the police forces.
The real answer is simply to pay the police more, recruit more, and put them out on the streets where they can stop the phones being stolen in the first place. Like that'll ever happen.
What ever happened to using already existing laws? If it's already illegal to sell stolen phones (which I assume, perhaps incorrectly that it is), why do you need an additional law covering this? This reminds me of the added penelty of using a computer to commit a crime. If the hardware is mine, it should be mine to do with as I please. Arrest me for selling a stolen phone, not changing a few bits on equipmetn I already own.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Sorry, but I have no problems with this kind of law.
When your mobile phone gets stolen, all mobile phone operators who are enforce IMEI-based disabling will disallow phone calls. (Not all of them do this...)
This reduces the incentive to steal a mobile phone immensly.
It can have some unpleasant consequences though: some years ago, a batch of Nokia mobile phones was stolen, all of them with the same IMEI number. Those phones eventually ended up in stores, where they were, legally, bought by consumers.
Unavoidably, one of those phone got stolen and that IMEI number got blocked. As a result, thousands of people ended up with a disabled phone. Nokia refused to do anything about it, since they can be hold responsible for phone that were bought through 'grey' channels.
I asked the cops the same thing when they took my sawed-ff shotgun and ruger 10-22 that I converted into a full-auto... :P
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
Why would a person other than a thief want to change this?
The approach of illegalising things that have a potential "bad" use just because nobody can come straight out with a "good" use will end in disaster.
Defrauding telephone companies is already illegal. If some the telephone companies don't want this heppening then they should put it in their contracts. There is no need for new legislation.
The only reason this is happening IMO is to tie in with the RIP bill amendments that the UK government have already tried to rush through (thankfully, the changed were met with sufficient resistance to delay for a while)
The government wants to be able to track and record everyones movement by their mobile phone. And of course this ability will prevent all future terrorist attacks and rid the country of crime. Everyone will he happy and all will rejoice.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
I love it how people avoid any REAL discussion of events and possibilites by simply calling someone PARANOID.
10 years ago would you call someone paranoid if you were told that companies would market products that were implanted into your childrens skin so you could track them.
10 years ago would brand a person paranoid if your were told congress was debating a bill to allow companies to hack private citizens.
10 years ago would you call me paraniod if I told you people would be threatened with criminal penalities for reporting security bugs in software.
Debate, don't just label people.
Whatever happened to the idea that when you buy something it's yours to do as you please?
That right doesn't actually exist. For example, I can buy a gun and ammunition, but that doesn't give me the right to fire in any direction that I please. The question is better approached from a perspective of individual freedom versus collective good.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
There is a difference between this law and what you are talking about. You can modify your car completely but can you change your VIN number or license plate number with out notifying the proper authorities? No. This law isn?t any different.
It is, since the registration of VINs and other vehicle identifying numbers is handled by a government agency. If the bill set up something like the DVLA then the car analogy would hold. Instead the bill hands specific power to the manufactures, private (and foreign owned) businesses. It would be as if car makers were in charge of car registrations...
If you chopped off the chasis number on a car you own, it doesn't hurt anyone but yourself.. Why should you go to jail for that?
The law should say that simply doing this mod isn't illegal, but that it is sufficient grounds for a search warrant/wire tap/other investigative methods. After all, the IMEI was put in specifically to fight theft and cloning. It seems reasonable to assume that anyone changing it is probably going to do something illegal with it.
Nope, no sig
That wouldn't help since these are stolen phones, and people who steal phones rarely go to the phone company and sign a contract.
Stealing things is against the law. Handling stolen goods is against the law. Passing off stolen goods as not stolen is against the law. There looks to be plenty of applicable criminal law here.
Indeed the text of the bill specifically states "There will be minimal resource implications for the criminal justice agencies - the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the courts and the Prison Service - to investigate, enforce, prosecute and process the cases through the courts and to accommodate convicted offenders given a custodial sentence. The number of cases prosecuted under this new offence are likely to be relatively small in number," In which case the whole thing starts to look like a waste of time.
Same can be said for the phone, as long as you never use the phone on the public airwaves or try to sell it you're fine. So you just need to shield your house and sit in your basement and talk to your self. Nobody will ever care about what you did to your phone.
Xaotik Designs
Well, you do hurt someone, namely the society at large (i.e. taxpayers). The reason the number is there is because it makes it easier for law-enforcement to track the car. It can be used to detect theft, fraud, and several other things. And that saves us (the public) a lot of money.
On the other hand, there's the issue of privacy. We don't want a unique identifiable number on every kind of goods. However, cars do deserve special care, for a number of reasons. First of all, they are pretty expensive, compared to most other things people tend to own, so it's important to track them for that reason. Secondly, they are easy to steal, and easy to transport, so it's more important to be able to identify them than e.g. houses (which can generally be identified by their location). Third, driving a car is not for everybody, it requires a license, for both the driver and the car (a license plate). Having a SSN number for the driver, and a chassis number for the car , helps prevent fraud in this case as well.
It is possible to be for chassis number legislation, but against IMEI number legislation. Cellphones aren't especially expensive, and doesn't require a special license to use (Hell, in Norway where I live, we you can buy both the phone and a phone-card anonymously (pay cash at the dealer, no registration)).
On the other hand, personally I don't see much wrong about making it illegal to change IMEI numbers either. It is (I believe) a real problem, and it is unlikely to make any trouble for most anybody (I can't think of a single reason why you would want to do that, and those I've seen so far in the discussion doesn't seem like something anyone would do). And if you had a legitimate reason, I'm sure you could ask for a permit!
It's not that hard. The link in the story is to the explanatory notes. The actual bill is here.
On a topical note, all the griping about "Why shouldn't I be allowed to..." is just slippery slope hysterics.
If you actually want to build a 'phone from components, then you can do whatever the hell you like with it, because you're the "manufacturer". However, if you want to buy a 'phone and then screw around with the identifier on it, you're doing something no different from changing the VIN number on a car. There's only one reason why you'd have to do that: to enable fraud. You can argue "But I own it and I just wanna", but in both cases that's simply an argument that principles are always more important than pragmatics and that nothing should be illegal if there's no direct, immediate victim. The law has to strike a balance between freedom and the probability that an act has a criminal purpose. In this case, it's overwhelmingly likely that an actual crime with an actual victim is involved.
The point of this bill is to enable prosecution of workshops set up to change IMEI's on stolen 'phones. It's a real problem, and it's part of a crime with a real victim, usually on the receiving end of violence. There's actually a very reasonable clause in here that protects equipment that merely could be used to change an IMEI: "The clause makes it clear that the offences are committed only if the person intends to use the equipment or allow it to be used for the purposes of making an unauthorised change to the IMEI number, or knows that the person to whom he supplies it or offers to supply it intends to use it or allow it to be used for that purpose." The prosecution has to show intent, so don't throw a hissy fit just because you've built an IMEI programmer for your self built IMEI 'phone. Not that anyone here has or intends to build such a 'phone.
Still not seeing it? Consider your next car purchase. You inspect the car, note the VIN number, do an HPI check, and it looks clean. Two weeks later, the police turn up and tell you that you're driving a stolen car and you have to return it to the rightful owner. You're completely out of pocket. This happens all the time. Now, how would you feel if you found that the garage that sold you the car had modified the VIN number and documentation, and that this wasn't illegal? And that it wasn't illegal because of the high principled argument that once they'd bought the car, they could do anything they damn well liked to it? Would you be pissed off? I think so. So, do you think that should it be legal to modify VIN numbers? If not, why should it be legal to modify IMEI numbers?
This is a balanced, reasonable, useful bill, and all the shrieking and Chicken Littling doesn't make it otherwise.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Speaking as someone who used to work in the engineering department of a telecommunications company...
Many telecomms networks are relatively vulnerable to rogue devices. The companies who run the networks put everything they're going to let on their network through amazingly rigorous testing before it's allowed out into the field, because they are aware of this problem, but there is little else they can do to prevent it that is cost effective. The time it took me to make every possible type of call to every possible combination of other units on the network with a new device (which multiplies up to several thousand call types) and verify that every single one worked correctly is negligible compared to the down-time and loss of customer satisfaction caused when a device goes wrong and starts effectively spamming your network and using up all your bandwidth.
Sometimes, the rogue devices are simply phones that have broken, or a change near a base station that's interfering with things. Other times, it's some smart-ass hobbyist who thought he was being clever, and who takes out a whole region of the network for the morning while an on-call team of engineers sorts out the mess.
Guess how high an opinion I hold of people who like to tinker with publicly accessible services just to know they can? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.