Mexican Government To Document Cell Phone Use

Alyssey writes "The Mexican government wants to have a database to track every cellphone number in the country (in Spanish, Google translation) and whom it belongs to. They want to tie in the CURP (Unique Registration Population Code in Spanish, like the Social Security Number in the US) with cellphone numbers. If Mexicans don't send in their number and CURP via SMS before April 10, 2010, their cellphone number will be blocked. The new law was published back in February and is going into effect now."

Comments

Lots of transient workers

[gringofrijolero]

here where I live. I just pay them a hundred pesos to buy a chip for me. He'll be leaving town in a few months, and I got my phone. Repeat as needed. With a legitimate name and my phone is stolen, lots of luck defending yourself against false accusations here. Luckily the old system of "justice" is still in place. Una mordidita para las polis y ya.

Stupid Laws, more stupid implementations.

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Mexico and I can tell you that one of the intentions of the law is to reduce the crimes that use cellphones to coordinate and execute (like kidnappings and drug deals).

The problem with this is the implementation, the law clearly specifies that your cellphone provider must take an ID and your fingerprint, but the most popular provider Telcel lets you register sending a SMS with your name and birth date. Essentially rendering the registration useless.

Re:This will solve which problem again?

[biggknifeparty]

It's because of the kidnapping crisis. Cell phones are used to negotiate ransoms. This will just likely push criminals to move to VOIP out on stolen wifi connections.

Re:Prepaid phones.

[xtracto]

If I recall correctly you do not need any type of identification to get a prepaid telephone in Mexico. It is just a matter of going to your Telcel shop at the corner of the street (there are more of those than there are cantinas) and buy a chip with "100 pesos tiempo aire".

Funny that they provide a link to the Milenio paper... I believe that "El Universal" ( which has the article here) is better.

Now, for those very paranoid slashdotters, note that one of the reasons they are doing this is because given the lack of such identification records, mobile phones are heavily used in blackmailing.

That happened to my brother once, he was studying in Mexico City and he got a call which went like this:
After the phone rang and he answered a shouting voice said:

"Hey we got your brother, and we will kill him unless you comply with our desires"

After that, a voice in the background of the telephone shouted as if he was the "captured" brother "please please, help me, please don't leave me"

In the "heat" of the moment, my brother shout my name "Pedro, are you ok?" [not my real name of course].

Of course with that information the criminals continued with their tale, telling him that yes they had "Pedro" and they were going to hurt him blah blah...

My brother just hung up the telephone and called my mother (who lives in another state)... Fortunately for us, I have been living *outside* Mexico for the last 5 years... therefore I could not have been trapped in Mexico City...

My brother wrote me an email telling me to ask me to mail back just to be shure I was OK, I called him that afternoon from the UK where I was living then.

There are countless of similar stories with such kind of social engineering. Of course not all the people are as "wise" as us, or they get blackmailed in the middle of some kind of crisis (money, family, etc) where the scenario of a kidnapped relative is very possible.

The issue until now (that the database is started) is that even if you had a caller-id and a number, you could not do anything with it because it would not be registered, or it will be faked. The current registry will require both an valid id (Mexican voting credential which is the national id) and a fingerprint.