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Proposed California Law Would Mandate Smartphone Kill Switch
alphadogg writes "Kill-switch technology that can render a lost or stolen smartphone useless would become mandatory in California under a new bill that will be proposed to the state legislature in January. The bill will be introduced by Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat representing San Francisco and neighboring towns, and George Gascón, the district attorney for San Francisco. Gascón has been spearheading a push by major law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. for more to be done to prevent smartphone theft. The proposed law could reach well beyond the borders of California. Because of the difficulty and added cost of producing handsets solely for sale in California, it could serve to make kill-switch technology a standard feature on phones sold across the U.S."
It's amazing how these retards affect everything that is sold the in the US.
On the surface one might thing âoeThatâ(TM)s a great idea, it would make stolen phone useless!â
But beyond the idea that eventually hackers would find a path around such measures, it also opens the door to abuse by âoeLaw Enforcementâ, who are notoriously unable to police themselves from both breaking the law and abusing the privileges they have been given.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The crackers will figure out how to trigger the remote kill switch without your authorization, bricking thousands if not millions of phones.
Or the goobernmint will...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It has come to this.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Very uaseful for law enforcement to kill the smartphones of anyone they consider problematic, like leaders of streets protests or occupy movements.
@de_machina
I don't want to bother RTFA, so can someone tell me- in this future, will the user (cough *owner*) of the hardware have the option of disabling this functionality? Perhaps with some long code the user files away if they ever want to disable it, or throws away/shreds if they plan on never disabling it (and preventing all future owners from being able to disable it)?
We went a similar but different direction in Canada, rather than killing the phone there's a list of IMEIs for stolen phones, and all carriers will honour not allowing phones in the database on to their networks. Which this solution sounds little less onerous than re-engineering every handset OS to have this kill ability.
Also the phone doesn't actually have to be turned on to be blacklisted, how often will you send the "kill" pings out when stolen? Would a thief simply have to wait a few weeks until the heat dies down?
We have devices that register with networks when activated, isn't it far easier to wait for that event than to try and push a command to a phone that may never be turned on again?
Reference:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/stolen-phones-blacklist-launches-in-canada-1.1873674
What could go wrong?
Sent from my iPho
More likely to be abused by authorities/criminals. Surely what'd be better is when you see your phone's gone missing, log in to itunes/google and track it. Get a key to hand other to law enforcement to let them track it and have permission to do what's needed. They track it, find out who's currently got the phone, and arrest them or find out who they bought it from and arrest them.
Person who got phone stolen gets their phone back.
Person who stole it gets arrested, and often with other stolen items.
Thieves learn it's not worth stealing these phones as they'll get caught
People won't buy suspected stolen phones as they know they won't get to keep them
Longer term solution to fix the problem than kill switching them.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Kill yourself, Mark Leno.
No, you need to blame the idiots who are so cavalier with their phones. I'm amazed how many I find on trails or in the middle of roads.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I mean, is this a thing? Is cell phone theft so rampant and costly that mandatory kill switches are a viable solution?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Federal Communication Commision regulates cell phones. Federal law preempts state law. Any California law could be nulified by the FCC.
So, who has control over this "kill switch?"
Because if the answer is anything other than "you, the person who owns the device, and nobody else," then you can go ahead and shove that kill-switch up your corn-shooter.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I had millions of "KILL YOUR SMARTPHONE" bumper stickers ready to ship. Now what?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is going to put all those "Cash for Your Stolen Phone" places out of business. I guess we'll just have to make due with the "Cash for Your Stolen Gold" places.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
...but the foo cell phone contains a component, which violates one of our patents. Therefore we demand, that all foo cell phones are disabled immediately.
As usual, under the guise of "protecting consumers" or "it's for our own safety," government is giving itself a bit more power over the peasant class.
Imagine California passed another ill-conceived, over-reaching, meddlesome law ... and nobody obeyed it.
Imagine!
http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/iphone-thief-off-the-hook-due-to-privacy-laws/
Telus seems to ignore the blacklist, at least at this time.
Agreed! Add to the list car, laptop, stereo, television, tablet, shoe and cheeseburger manufacturers!
Demand a kill switch for any purchasable device which can be stolen... now where did I put my pen so I can write my Congressperson... wait it's gone! If only it had a kill switch!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
In Australia they just have a list of stolen phones distributed to the carriers, and they block the phone from network access based on the phone's IMEI.
What happens when a network is hacked and some hacker sends the kill signal to millions of smart phones?
There was an article about this less than a month ago in the huffington post... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/20/iphone-kill-switch_n_4308924.html
UPDATE PhoneList
SET KillPhoneIndicator = "Y"
Oops. Forgot the WHERE clause
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Dare I hope that this law will contain specific text prohibiting service providers from abusing this for contract issues or nonpayment? Naaaah, that would be asking too much of our corporate overlords and their paid^H^H^H^Helected cronies....
Plain stupid
In 3 years the phones will cost nothing so there will be no reason to steal a phone [*]
What will matters would be data on those phone.
Kill switch will be the perfect target for hackers/terrorists.
[*] Of course there still will be phone with a fruit logo on it that would still cost $$$$. But who cares ? If that matters we could force all vendors to adopt the same logo to confuse the thieves.
to quash dissent?
Is cell phone theft so rampant in california so they HAVE to step in with legislation? I don't get this.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
This would be a good way to kill any phone — not just a stolen one. The phone company could do this upon contract expiration, for example. Government will be able to do it to criminals on the run (or even to mere suspects)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
My phone could be stolen 5 times unrecovered and I still would not want this mandate.
To kill the phone of the people they dont like.
A mechanism that can kill cell phones, known to local police forces, and presumably to cellular service providers and probably others, might be very interesting to criminals and foreign powers, as a way to increase chaos and reduce response during a major crime or terrorist event. And you know that eventually the code or technique or whatever will eventually fall into criminal or enemy hands. It's too good a secret not to sell to someone. So, never mind trusting our government not to use this for nefarious purposes, we should also think about what nefarious people outside the government or belonging to some other government would do with it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Phone companies benefit from theft by now selling two contracts, not one, with the unlucky consumer (usually) eating the cost of supplying a phone to a "friend".
So instead of a kill switch, which government can abuse, how about fining phone companies who sign up stolen phones for participating in a stolen goods laundering racket?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Why not just mandate the carriers participate in international IMEI black lists?
It doesn't stop the phone working, just means it can't connect to the network.
Still has the effect of lowering the value of a stolen phone.
This is backwards. Kill it at the service provided not the actual phone. Since many phone have the sim built in (not removable) you can put them on a stolen list and block them.
You should also charge the parents of the criminals too, since they're the ones who gave birth to them. Without the parents there would be no criminal!
Also arrest the treasury, if they didn't issue all money, no one would steal it!
Now if you want to make it interesting, mandate that the case be made out of C4 and make the kill switch an actual kill switch! When someone in law enforcement pushes it, the user explodes! That'd make the daily commute a lot more interesting!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Here's an idea, just stay out of my way, State of California, thanks.
Like what, hand out traffic tickets to people going 56 in a 55 at the end of a downhill slope? You realize that theft of a $500 phone (in many areas) is considered a felony?
Every single cell phone has a unique ID code associated with it. Simply require the cell phone provider industry to create a shared database that would contain the this ID code of all stolen phones and make it illegal to activate a phone on this list.
The cell phone provider industry doesn't want to do this because a stolen phone means they might get a new service contract with the thief while selling the victim a new phone (which almost always extends the existing contract). Doing anything about stolen cell phones is lost revenue to them.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Clearly, since California is doing so well, they should export more of their genius ideas to the rest of us ...
It took me a few seconds to understand that GascA3n was not the real attorney's name, but just a botched ISO-8859-1 character.
They already have a scheme where they can lock out the IMEI of a phone that is reported stolen. However, they don't have any plan for returning that stolen phone to the original owner. It discourages cel phone theft, but also encourages having to buy a new phone.
If there is a law saying they have to lock it out, there should be a law saying that they have to take the phone back and return it to the original owner.
The problem is that the market for stolen phones is global.
While the blacklist may keep stolen phones from working in Australia, what about a phone stolen in Australia and taken to Indonesia or somewhere else? THAT network operator has to be able to blacklist IMEI numbers from elsewhere.
I can see some kind of agreement among first world countries to manage and accept a multinational blacklist to limit shipping stolen phones between countries (in Europe, America, AUNZ, Japan). But it's harder to see that kind of list being used or being effective (given bribery) in third world countries.
And then there's the reverse problem -- adding global blacklist entries in high risk countries. It's not hard to see getting a text message telling you to accept a charge or make a payment to keep your phone from being blacklisted. Even though your home carrier may be able easily remove you from the blacklist, you may have to go into the store in person to verify you physically own the phone. You could argue that only the carrier with an account associated with a specific IMEI can blacklist it, but now you've just made it impossible to third-party unlock a phone from a carrier.
I think there's probably a device-specific way to brick phones in a way that is recoverable but too difficult to bypass by resale-oriented hackers so that should a phone get bricked accidentally the phone manufacturer could unbrick it with proper documentation (and should be required to do so free of charge).
The law, as I understand it, is to allow the authority, to issue a command to render a particular smartphone totally unusable.
However, the same law could be misused by the authority as well (think of what NSA is doing, for example) - instead of killing a smartphone that has been reported stolen, the authority could issue a kill command to smartphones that are being used by "dissidents", cutting off their communication lines.
Do not ever forget that inside the NSA datacenter they have all the information of who is using what phone, who calls whom and when and how often and where they call from, etc.
Right now, without the KILL SWITCH, all they could do is to LISTEN IN to the communications of people. With KILL SWITCH, they could kill off all the communication channels of the anti-NSA people, and render them totally unable to communicate with the world.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
1. Steal a phone
2. Put it into airplane mode (android and iphone both allow this without unlocking)
3. Spend any time needed to defuse the bricking feature...
Nevermind IMEI blacklists and such ... deleting my private data after a theft would be nice.
And yes, such a rule is ripe for abuse, and so is probably not a good idea in general.