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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."
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.
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
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.
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 !