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Mexico Will Shut Down 25.9 Million Cell Phones
Several months ago, as a way to prevent the use of cellular phones in criminal activities, the government of Mexico started a program to require all phone owners to register cell phones in their own names. The registry associates each phone with the listed owner's Clave Unica de Registro de Poblacion (CURP) [CURP, in English], which is supposed to be a unique ID for every Mexican citizen. Now, as nanahuatzin writes,
Yesterday the timeline to register the cell phones expired, and there are
[approx 26] million cell phones yet unregistered (English translation of the Spanish original). While the procedure is simple, sending a text message with the CURP to a special number, most people do not want to register: some are wary of the uses to which the government will put the data; others did not understand or did not know the procedure. So far, only 69% have registered, most of them in the last few days, while the system to register has been oversaturated. So in an unprecedented move for any country, the Mexican government is announcing the shutdown of 25.9 million cell phone lines. Meanwhile, as a measure of protest, hundreds of people have registered their cell phones in the name of the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, to show how pointless is the registry."
I'm a little torn on this. I'm all for freedom of just about everything - but only in stable societies. I'm not too much of an idealist to believe military states don't also have their usefulness.
Considering the grip the drug cartels have on the balls of that place I'm not too terrible surprised though. As Mexico's next door neighbor I really can't blame them for trying new tactics to deal with this situation.
Things in Mexico have gotten bad lately especially along the boarder. This is killing their tourism industry which is a key component of their economy. Americas especially are fearful to visit, and the days of a weekend in Tijuana are all but over. The Mexican governemnt has failed time and time again to combat this problem, in no large part thanks to their massive curruption problem. Despite some material wealth I fear that Mexico is sliding into a true third-world economy. If the choice is between bribing cops/ possibly getting murdered and spending a few extra bucks to go to say Miami then the choice seems clear.
Meanwhile, as a measure of protest, hundreds of people have registered their cell phones in the name of the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, to show how pointless is the registry.
Wow. 25.9 million cell phones get turned off, and out of all of them, only a few hundred flip the government the finger to this useless piece of legislation? I'm disappointed.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
But what they're going through is really a civil war. And in the US, we took quite a few liberties with civil rights during our civil war.
Will it help? Maybe--it will at least require drug gangs to go to the trouble of stealing cell phones that only have useful lives of a few days
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Here = Greece. On June every unregistered cellphone number will be deactivated by the providers who are obligated to do so by the authorities. I wonder how this can halt criminality. They can just get accounts from other countries, can't they? Or, simpler, they can steal accounts from others and use them till they get reported. it will generate more illegality like stolen account information sales or customer databases hacking. And of course, there is the privacy issue and how the information will be treated by the providers.
If you steal a phone, it'll be blocked before you got to call your criminal contacts. However, if you take the owner along, you may have a few days before it's blocked. So instead of stopping the crime, this is a perfectly good excuse for abducting (and possibly killing) any person that could supply a phone.
Great move!
.sig: No such file or directory
Pretty shocking that so many countries are afraid of anonymous speech.
So, the stated goal is to prevent criminals from using cell phones. Since we are talking about criminals, what prevents them from registering under a stolen identity? Or what prevents them from stealing cell phones? Or what prevents them from paying $1000 to Juan (who earns $50/month) over there to register their cell phone in his name? I understand the desire, but it won't work (even if government corruption does not undermine the plan). It will become another pointless government bureaucracy.
linquendum tondere
Fascists don't make laws on the basis of whether or not it will work to solve a problem. Fascists make laws to control human behavior. It's as worthless as national ID cards with DNA built in. It's as worthless as the laws that make it a crime to possess certain drugs or information. These laws aren't designed to solve a problem, they are designed to control and regulate human behavior.
Usually these laws create even more problems or turn small problems into a big problem, which is then used as a convenient excuse to pass even more draconian fascist laws which give the government even more authority to regular behavior.
This process will not stop until we are all chipped government robots with no free will. That is the end goal/final solution of fascism.
Phone theft isn't even necessary, just go to a safehouse and use their phone. Or just pay a random individual $100 to use their phone for 10 minutes and I can pretty much guarantee if the price is right you'll find some individual somewhere who will let you make a call for $10 a minute.
In fact I'm sure most people on slashdot would accept that deal, and there would be no need to rob anyone.Of course when it's time to explain what happen to the police then of course the money isn't mentioned and it was a robbery.
Don't be naive. Criminals don't borrow nor pay for your phone. They take it.
You'd have to be doing fairly serious crime before adding abduction or murder to your rap sheet for the job becomes practical(and even if you are, it is probably cheaper to use corruption, or apply smaller quantities of violence more strategically. A nice fat "tip" to the guy making minimum wage to man the counter at Juan's Cellphone hut can probably get you a phone registered to anybody he has sold a phone to in the last couple of weeks, and no questions asked. If you do steal a phone, displaying your gun and informing the former owner "I will need this to be working for the next week. Should it stop, I'll be back to express my displeasure." almost certainly works 90% as well as just abducting the guy, while being far less conspicuous, and a rather less serious crime.)
There probably will be a tiny number of statistically nonrepresentative; but rather ghastly and mediagenic, cases of what you describe; but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of real criminal work will either be done within the time constraints of basic pickpocketing/mugging(grab the phone, you probably have at least half an hour before they notice it is gone/pull themselves together and get to another phone to start calling their telco and their bank and so forth), with theft+intimidation("I'll be taking this. Your story is that you 'lost' it and spent several days looking everywhere for it. If I hear otherwise, I'll be sure to tell your children, so to speak."), or with basic corruption(just as with IDs, there will probably be a large and fairly easily accessible market for phones registered to just about anybody, available at a modest premium over the underlying service contract).
The trouble with your comment is that it assumes that the measure will be even slightly effective.
The situation in Mexico is untenable, and threatens to get even zestier as time goes on. Something must be done.
However, not all "something"s are created equal, and choosing one that doesn't work doesn't count as doing something.
Borrowing someone's cell phone is probably the luckiest you'd get with a law like this. What if you are planning to do something dangerous? You're not gonna borrow a cell phone and have them remember asked, you might just kill them. Not to mention that this just creates a huge black market for faked phones/phone faking equipment. It seems like this isn't going to do much but create a more dangerous situation that feeds money to people doing illegal things. If someone is going to get caught because of this system, I'm sure they're stupid enough that they would have been caught anyway.
You'd have to be doing fairly serious crime before adding abduction or murder to your rap sheet for the job becomes practical(and even if you are, it is probably cheaper to use corruption, or apply smaller quantities of violence more strategically.
This action by the Mexican government is aimed directly at the cartels. They're in the "fairly serious" crime business. Abduction and murder are all in a day's work for the cartels. They murder police and judges on a regular basis and murder journalists who get too nosy on a semi-regular basis. Murdering someone for a cell phone would not be out of the question.
the real problem in mexico is corruption, but it's so embedded in their culture i can't ever see it changing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
please don't feed the trolls
weinersmith
If you doubt the corruption angle with drugs (which I guess is the basis of your reply, that that is "paranoid"? It's just data, man, look it up yourself, verification is a simple google search away, have at it, there have been tons of prosecuted cases over the years and all sorts of articles written about it, etc. Heck, read any article lately about the scene in mexico and they all mention how corrupt the government is there, and I sincerely doubt all this corruption magically stops exactly at the border.
Oh, if you are wondering or making an allusion, nope, don't smoke pot or do any other drugs other than cheap coffee and some cheap cigars. I rarely even take an aspirin.
I'm still in favor of legalizing it though, this prohibition "cure" just makes the situation much worse. The war on drugs was lost years ago, it will never work, and it has never been cost effective. Society is going to have to come up with something other than classifying some huge percentage of their population as criminals.
While you are right about how to get around it, your missing the long arm of the law point here.
Until now, if a cop stopped you, you gave him your ID and went on your way. Now he gets to look at the phone you are carrying to see if it's yours or not. What, it's registered to someone other then who is on your ID, you must be doing something wrong to have a phone with fake credentials. Off to jail you go until we can figure out what it is.
It's kind of like carrying a weapon but more prominent in society. If you are carrying a weapon without the proper credentials or the right to do so (this is Mexico), then you're automatically up to no good. The same goes for un-mis-registered phones now. The ancillary activities of some criminals are being used to harass all citizens in order to find potential criminals. Except now you can get a criminal record or record as a potential criminal by having a phone not registered to yourself.
I was just going to mod you down, but I think you're missing an important portion of this debate. Wouldn't the power companies give Americans conditions to meet before their power was shut off? Come on, I know it seems draconian to just disconnect their service but they were given an opportunity. One they ignored.
So, from where I'm looking, they have 100% success. They said "register with our system or we'll cut you off". And they're doing just that. Whether or not the registration system is broken doesn't give them any reason to ignore it and not expect consequences. Just because you disagree with the speed limit, does that give you any latitude with law enforcement?
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