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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.
Very uaseful for law enforcement to kill the smartphones of anyone they consider problematic, like leaders of streets protests or occupy movements.
@de_machina
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
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
...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.
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.
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.
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
If it was stolen from you, then how is it that you have it to sell?
Big ol' Whoo-
Hey! That fucker stole the rest of my whoosh!
Damn you, Princeofcups!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
I just wonder if kill switches will help the matter, or if iPhones will just be parted out. Just the screen is $175, and that is on eBay because Apple doesn't have replacements yet. The other components will also be useful, be it the rest of the case, speaker, battery, etc.
Even if the device is completely and utterly bricked, either by a remote erase command (and not able to be activated due to needing the AppleID), or via the GSM/LTE network, the fence who gets the phone will be able to make at least $200 from each stolen device, perhaps far more. There are a lot of iPhone screen repair shops, and one can never know for sure if the screen was purchased from an honest source, or if the screen came from a request reinforced with a knife at the throat. At the right price, the customer wouldn't care. Plus, there are no serial numbers on screens either.
I really do not think blocking iPhones will make a dent in theft. It sure didn't lower the amount of thefts when Apple put in the iOS 7 feature where part of activation was entering in the old AppleID.
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.
Pretty much. There's a lot of muggings and thefts (I believe the majority) done solely to grab the victim's cel phone. The thieves don't care about cash (not enough of it these days to be worth it) or credit cards (too easily traced), but ditch the SIM card and a modern smartphone's worth several hundred dollars in a package that fits conveniently in a pocket. They're also hard for the police to trace quickly: most people don't know their phone's IMEI, and by the time they go to the carrier and have the carrier report it the phone's probably in the hands of an unwitting phone-store customer who has no clue it was stolen.
The only way to stop this is to make it so that a stolen phone's useless and the fences and phone stores know it. Right now the phone stores don't worry too much about questionable merchandise because the cops can't prove the store knew it was stolen and the phones are still usable so they won't suffer any backlash from customers. Fences will take the phones because they know they can launder them and sell them. The kill switch changes the calculus: phone stores and other resellers know they're the ones who'll catch the flak when phones they sold start getting bricked because they were stolen, that'll make it too costly for them to take a chance on questionable merchandise. Fences won't take them if there's no market for the fence to sell them off to. And the muggers will quickly stop targeting stuff once their fences won't give them any money for it.
Here's an idea, just stay out of my way, State of California, thanks.
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
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...