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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
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.
Somehow Dice can keep people on staff to do an interface rewrite that nobody wants, and yet they can't find somebody to proofread a dozen paragraphs of text per day.
The mistake is in the original article as well (actual name is of course the "Smartphone Theft Prevention Act"), but that doesn't excuse the /. editors for not engaging their brains.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.