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Federal Smartphone Kill-Switch Legislation Proposed
alphadogg writes "Pressure on the cellphone industry to introduce technology that could disable stolen smartphones has intensified with the introduction of proposed federal legislation that would mandate such a system. Senate bill 2032, 'The Smartphone Prevention Act,' was introduced to the U.S. Senate this week by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. The bill promises technology that allows consumers to remotely wipe personal data from their smartphones and render them inoperable. But how that will be accomplished is currently unclear. The full text of the bill was not immediately available and the offices of Klobuchar and the bill's co-sponsors were all shut down Thursday due to snow in Washington, D.C."
This technology will be co-opted and otherwise downright available to the TLA government agencies.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But if it really is called the 'Smartphone Prevention Act', that would pretty much say everything needed about this government, wouldn't it?
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
If I can brick my phone over the air, so can THEY, and I don't trust THEM.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Just like the remote kill switch that was proposed in cars. This is a solution looking for a problem, and more over it's a solution that's ripe for abuse.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
As others have stated, this is exactly how Apple's iCloud lock works. If the owner of the device remotely locks it or it is factory reset through iTunes, it will be useless except for displaying a screen prompting for the owner's Apple ID and password. So far, all it has really accomplished is giving some extra headache to businesses that accept phone trade-ins and slightly lowering the value of lost/stolen iDevices on eBay. We also already have a national IMEI blacklist, which mostly seems to have succeeded only in increasing the number of scam artists re-selling unusable phones to gullible people (in most cases, they're generally not stolen - the sleazy cell phone companies here in the US are happy to block a phone's serial number if the phone was associated with a service contract or handset financing plan and the previous owner defaulted on it).
Besides, what's to stop a thief from taking a page out of the trade-in services' books and simply demanding you turn off/sign out of your phone's remote kill switch feature? If they're threatening someone at gun/knife point, it's not exactly like the victim would have much choice in the matter.
If people are being robbed, your city has a crime problem that needs to be solved with good, old fashioned police work.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Sounds like the law is going too far the other way, it's giving the government complete control over your antenna equipped devices.
And we're the suckers who pay good money for the ability to be tracked, spied on, etc... "They" should be paying us.
Will this be activated by simply logging into someone else's, oops. I mean, _MY_ Apple/Google account and filling out a form? No reason why. Just wondering.
Do a blacklist instead. Phone on the blacklist? Don't allow it on the network (and call the cops). A kill switch invites abuse more than an industry blacklist might.
A not so smart Act to kill phones. That's how I interpret this.
By installi9ng special government software, that there is even a question how shows how fucking retarded this country has become.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The federal government has no legal authority to mandate this technology.
Could be anything from insurrection, a terrorist attack, a plague, to a Christoph Dornier type manhunt. A hacker would certainly find it entertaining to disable their targets cell phones. remember the movie the Net, Enemy of the State, Swordfish, or a dozen others. The only person who should be able to disable a phone should be the owner of the phone, and law enforcement with the owners permission; or a court order identifying the specific phone to be disabled.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
It's spurred mostly by the fact that AT&T and T-Mobile have been sand-bagging, claiming GSM/SIM's don't allow for black-listing. The utility of Sprint and Verizon's blacklists is predicated on the "SIM" being integral to a CDMA phone; they can limit access to their networks to phones locked to their networks. The proliferation of phones containing GSM, CDMA and LTE hardware regardless of the carrier's network, opens the distinct possibility of a stolen phone being unlocked/jailbroken/rooted and re-used on a different carrier, rendering even Sprint and Verizon's blacklist useless.
This law is looking to have all the carriers actually implement a lost/stolen black-list, and to further have communication between the carriers, so that a black-listed phone can't be re-used on anybody's network. This sounds like something that could (and should) be implemented in response to market forces. The proliferation of passive anti-theft systems in late model cars provides a good model. There's no legal requirement for car-makers to implement RFID-encoded key-fobs, yet they are nearly ubiquitous and have massively reduced theft of vehicles so equipped.
so if they are found to be breaking the law or any misconduct they find their phones wont work, their computers wont have internet access, their credit cards wont work, their automobiles wont start and they have to ask a police officer to take them to jail until their transgression is cleared up
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What will the reaction be when someone has their phone seized by the police and then wipe it remotely?
- My question is: Can Slashdot be Slashdotted? -
This is already circumvented by the fact you can live-stream to the internet. Wipe the phone, crush it under a cop's boot-heel it won't help them 'cause it's stored and mirrored in a server in Amsterdam or wherever.
We really don't need another mechanism to prevent cell phone theft, we already have it. Each phone has a unique IMEI number associated with it. In most other countries if your phone is stolen, you report it and your carrier, along with all the other carriers, ban the IMEI number so the phone cannot be activated on any cellular network. This basically makes the phone useless.
We could easily implement this in the US, but the cell phone carriers refuse to do it. If I had to guess, the reason they don't want to do this is because if your phone gets stolen they get to sell you a brand new non-subsidized phone at full price, which makes them a lot of money. So why would they want to do anything that would help cut down on the number of stolen phones, since each one translates into more money for them?
So why should we set up a new system that can be potentially hacked and abused to wipe phone when all we have to do is to force the cellular carriers to ban the IMEI numbers of stolen phones?
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Why not laptops?
Why not cars?
Why not any of a thousand things that are stolen all the time.
I wouldn't mind this as much in cars or laptops. I'm pretty sure I could disable it if I wanted. But in a smartphone? How?
This whole thing gives me the creeps.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A bill to require mobile service providers and mobile device manufacturers to give consumers the ability to remotely delete data from mobile devices and render such devices inoperable. I'm not sure where this shorter title that is traversing the internet is coming from, it was never a submitted title for the bill.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So there's a definite public safety problem going on, with people getting mugged for their phones and what-not. For the record, I think this concern is what's driving this legislation. But there's definitely room for the Big Brother Let's Stop the Flash-Mob-esque City Square Filling Demonstrations appeal to the Kill Switch, so the government shouldn't have any access to it. Hell, ideally the carriers shouldn't either. Make it something only the customer can initiate.
The government doesn't need this law to do that so there is no conspiracy here.
The only thing that is going on is that cities are seeing a spike in muggings due to smartphones and they're trying to find a way to make a stolen phone worthless.
Rather than killing my phone, why not track the sucker so I can get it back? Leave "remote lock" and "remote kill" between me and my security provider (AVG anyone?).
The kill switch has its name, because now the mugger needs to kill the one who he stole the mobile phone from to make sure that he does not report it as stolen.
Wait until this legislation is approved, and measure again in 5 years whether gun point mugging has been reduced. Problem is, hackers and criminals will find overnight a way to circumvent this protection. So in the end, we won't be able to measure anything.
Only problem: none of those methods work if the thief's pulled the SIM out and done a factory reset so the phone's no longer associated with your accounts. Pulling the SIM at least will be one of the first things a thief will do if he's looking to fence the phone.
People start protesting their corporate government? Kill their phones. Permanently. How many of the rabble will protest if it costs them ~$200 a pop?
The question here is whether or not a coorporation would cooperate.
Is it really? Not in the US and I imagine not in the UK, Canada, or even Australia. At least judging from recent revelations of the close ties between telcoms and the governments.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
The ability to remote wipe a phone is not complicated. But ATT/Verizon/etc do not want to implement that feature since they make millions from selling us 'phone insurance products' to do these jobs at a premium.
Who needs a mobile oppression palace when you can turn off a malcontents ability to communicate?
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for quite a while.
Where government needs to be involved escapes me completely
The ONLY reason I can see for this OR "The Internet Kill Switch" would be to interrupt communications and coordination between Citizens in case of the government doing something untoward and wanting to isolate a group/town/region from communicating with the outside world
I try not to be a conspiracy nut... but sometimes the only reasonable answer isn't reasonable at all!