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India Hanging Up On 25 Million Cell Phones
jvillain writes "India is about to pull the plug on 25 million cell phones in the name of fighting terrorism and fraud. 'The ban by India's Department of Telecommunications has been unfolding gradually since Oct. 6, 2008, six weeks before the attacks in Mumbai killed 173 people and wounded 308. A memo then directed service providers to cut off cellphone users whose devices didn't have a real IMEI — or unique identity number — in the interests of 'national security.' Since then, the move has picked up steam as a way to circumvent terrorists using black market, unregistered cellphones. The Mumbai attackers kept in touch with each other via cellphones and used GPS to pinpoint their attacks, which started Nov. 26, 2008, and went on for three days. The telecommunications department has issued warnings and deadlines through 2009 but has announced this one is for real, telling operators to block cellphones without valid IMEI numbers. Previously, it warned companies to stop importing them and customers to stop buying them.'"
IMEIs are not used at all in the call routing process, and are, ultimately, pretty easy to forge convincingly. Granted, this will stop everybody whose handsets have totally bogus IMEIs, but as long as the first 8 digits (type allocation code) and check digit are correct, then there's very little India can do without impacting legitimate customers.
GREAT idea.
You're doing it wrong.
Yeah, because that wouldn't suck for the 24,999,995 non-terrorists using these phones.
But in order to do that, they first need to buy a fake ID and steal a CC. This forces them to commit two extra acts of crime to meet their objective. These two extra crimes will result in more eye witnesses, more tracable cash flows, and higher chance of them getting caught by a security camera. The longer the trail they leave behind, the easier they are to trace.
Basically they are just forcing all their cellular networks to refuse connection to phones lacking IMEI numbers. ... It just means that people are going to have to pay for their phone calls or pay to call in their bomb threats. No more free rides.
It's not a free ride now. It just means that the subscriber (or his phone company) bought a cheap phone that didn't have a registered IMEI. (Think "phone universal serial number, sniffable from the phone network.)
Now maybe it was a stolen phone with the IMEI overwritten by a dummy. Or maybe it was a legit recycled phone with reflashed firmware that killed the IMEI ditto. Or maybe it was a new phone from a cheapscate company that didn't register/buy a block of IMEIs and install them in its products. But the customer is still buying the service and still identified by his "smart chip".
The IMEI is mainly about tracking the phone and has nothing to do with billing. (For instance: During Iraq War II the NSA mapped out the "terrorist networks" - pun intended - easily, from satellite surveillance, by traffic analysis - when somebody serving as a communications hub switched smartcards for each of his links but didn't realize that the IMEI, which stays with the phone, was also being recorded. Call goes in one smartcard ID and immediately a series to other phone numbers go out on other smartcards from the same phone: it's a gotcha. This hit the media after the opposition figured out that cellphones were a trap and switched to non-cellphone communication.)
Given that killing service to IMEI-less phones is part of a reaction to "terrorist attacks" it looks like India is willing to kill phone service to 25 million legit cellphone users in order to force its own opposition to chose between lower-tech communication and getting caught.
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Good sarcasm, Ohnoitsavram. But you've pegged it - the big ugly monster rearing its head here is the fact that governments do not, as a rule, treat truly free speech as necessarily being in their own best interests. Governments have been fighting with their governed populace over this bone for many, many years. Anytime some new way to communicate pops up, the battle starts up again.
Mind you, it can be a very real threat to an established government, and governments have fallen from it. Think "Samizdat".
It's also harder to govern when your message to the public is diluted by discussion before it's embedded in the public consciousness, and I'm sure this concept is not lost on those who walk the halls of power.
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