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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.
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.
This is already circumvented by the fact you can live-stream to the internet.
Tablets and Laptops will be included.
Your desktop is sure to follow.
Also... I believe when they say "wiped" they really mean "Locked", so that only law enforcement such as the NSA folks can get the secret keys from the phone company, required to decrypt the data
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.
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.