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Industry-Wide Smartphone "Kill Switch" Closer To Reality
mpicpp (3454017) writes "The 'kill switch,' a system for remotely disabling smartphones and wiping their data, will become standard in 2015, according to a pledge backed by most of the mobile world's major players. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, along with the five biggest cellular carriers in the United States, are among those that have signed on to a voluntary program announced Tuesday by the industry's largest trade group. All smartphones manufactured for sale in the United States after July 2015 must have the technology, according to the program from CTIA. Advocates say the feature would deter thieves from taking mobile devices by rendering phones useless while allowing people to protect personal information if their phone is lost or stolen. Its proponents include law enforcement officials concerned about the rising problem of smartphone theft."
Now they won't need to backdoor devices when they want to erase evidence.
They cant realistically kill the line ( "you cant stop the signal" ), but if you disable every access device known to man it would have the same effect... Killing every phone ( and soon tablets ) in one swoop would go a long way towards that goal.
This also gets around adhoc and private mesh networks that the feds have no real access to control.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One step closer to reality.
This whole idea is unnecessary if the wireless carriers would just set up a database of stolen IMEI information. And while ESNs can be wiped, if a questionable ESN is discovered, like all zeros you can block the phone from being provisioned. If you did that stolen cell phones would be worth zero and we wouldn't have to introduce another tool that can be used by governments to lock us out of communicating. With mobile traffic increasing faster than any other sector on the Internet, this gives the governments of the world an effective Internet Kill Switch.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
...I'd love a Smartphone kill switch, oh sweet...the revenge!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Whatever they do, I hope they make the disablement reversible, for those who think they've had their phone stolen, only to find that it was just misplaced - or if the phone is later recovered from the thief.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
What would the govt of some place like Egypt have given for a phone kill switch?
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Just because no carrier will provide a cellular signal to a smartphone doesn't mean it's useless on the black market. Is it really that hard for a thief to fence an iPhone as if it were an iPod touch?
"and wiping their data"... Yes, I can understand why police would want the ability to remotely wipe the data - data would include all those "awkward" videos of police that keep getting on youtube. Back to the pre-Rodney King days where it was just the upstanding policeman's word against the nefarious 'criminal' trying to slander him.
We can't have the citizens able to record the police now, can we?
besides, the police can monitor themselves
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/04/09/1545251/la-police-officers-suspected-of-tampering-with-their-monitoring-systems
Idle speculation, but if people can exploit the *entire* Target POS system across the nation, it doesn't seem farfetched to imagine it would be possible to engage a carrier-wide (or multi-carrier) attack to wipe/deactivate countless phones at once via kill-switch.
Of course, if we are imagining a breach of the carrier, then an attack could cause a wide scale DoS even today. A mass kill-switching would just make it harder to restore service once the breach had been terminated.
When someone else controls your stuff, it's not your stuff. Look at Germany's gold! Where is it? It's in the US. They want it back, it's supposed to be on its way over... slowly. Net result, it's not Germany's gold. And if this tech makes it into our phones? Yeah, same thing. We "give up" our phones in order to prevent them from being stolen. Nice trade.
If the government or the phone company has it, then it is not okay.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Or, authoritarian governments who don't like protesters organizing trigger the kill switch in a town where an ongoing protest is occurring anyone unlucky enough to be around when it happens no longer has a smartphone and cannot tweet/facebook/etc any longer.
Some protesters could have older phones without the kill switch. So, the more appropriate method is to ask (nicely, or send some guys with guns) the cell service providers to shut down all towers in the required area. This method works on all phones.
Cellphones are short range devices - if the government wants to, it can shut all of them down. Same with the internet.
What you need is a satellite phone and ham radio if you want to evade the government's attempts to silence you, for a while anyway.
From my interpretation of what's actually in the CITA program, this is no different than what's currently available in Apple's Find My iPhone capability. Allow the user to remotely lock (i.e. set a PIN) or wipe a device, and remove the pin and/or /restore the device if it's recovered.
It seems to me that all the armchair conspiracy theorists here are over-reacting.
So, someone, other than the owner, will be able to remotely disable and wipe a smartphone? Yeah, that can't possibly go wrong.
The meme going around is that people are increasingly being mugged in major cities specifically for their smartphones. I don't know if that's real or not, but the cops in several places (SanFran, NYC, LA) are saying it is.
http://www.nclnet.org/technolo...
And dangerous. Just make IMEI be on read-only memory so that it is not over-written, and then, instead of rejecting stolen phones you can even pinpoint them and send a cop to pick them up along with the thief... All the technology is already there, the only problem is that there are no rules that make carriers tell you (or even the police) where your stolen phone is and who has it (in many countries SIM cards are not anonymous by law).
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
That article is an excellent example of the complete absence of usable statistics. "Involve a cell phone" is very different from "mugged for their cell phone". Thefts are up 40%... from what? 10 people to 14 people? Of those 1.6 million people who had their handsets stolen last year, how many had their handsets stolen in the commission of a robbery where they took everything? How many were a purse snatching which happened to include a cell phone? In other words, is the real issue that criminals are targeting cell phones, or is it that more people have cell phones than at any time in the country's history, which would necessitate an increase in having them stolen?
I could probably make a case that most muggings involve theft of driver's licenses. Does this mean that thieves are targeting driver's licenses, or is it because the card is usually kept in the same wallet or pocketbook as the cash and credit cards?
Stolen iphones can be sold for "upwards of" $2K. What's the median? What's the volume? Is this a real problem?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Damm right. Cops beat a pregnant woman in the street and shoot her 6 year old son. Blood splatters everywhere, woman is screaming while cop is on top of her and choking her to death. Civilians are filming the important police work with their cell phones. Officer X picks up his radio and calls in 'Dispatch, need a 10-09'. A few seconds later the dispatcher comes back with '10-09 is confirmed'.
All the dispatcher did was click on the current incident tab on her screen and then on the 10-09 button, but under the hood the backend application sent a command to a hub that connects all cell networks. That command included the officer's exact location. Each cell network in turn received the request and then proceeded to determine what phones were within a 300ft radius of the officer's location 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after the timestamp in the request. The software doing that queued purge requests to a message queue with an application on the other end that communicates with the individual device agents on the cell phone. The device agents received the purge command and the mobile phones locked up for about a minute while the purge was underway. Those that were smart enough to turn off their phones were surprised when their phones were wiped the next day when the application again picked their purge-request off the message queue and passed it on to the device agent.
While all this was underway, also another application running in a data center somewhere in Utah received the same information and increased individual security risk scores on all individuals involved.
The woman ended up giving birth in prison, charged with assaulting police officers with deadly intent and a slew of other charges. Her child will grow up in a foster home. The people who were bystanders had their phones wiped and no further action was taken against them.
All except for one person who had been protesting police brutality for a number of years. He was on a watch list. When the police department automatically received an NCIC message from that data center in Utah advising them of his presence at the scene they knocked one evening at his door. He didn't open, so they kicked in the door and shot him in the face.
So, the more appropriate method is to ask (nicely, or send some guys with guns) the cell service providers to shut down all towers in the required area.
They are not going to do that because a cell tower covers a lot more area than any protest.
Consider the protest in Nevada recently over the Bundy Ranch cattle being taken by armed federal agents. If you shut down cell access for that group, you are shutting down cell access for a potentially very large area of I-15. That's just not going to happen.
The reason why the kill switch would be used is that it cuts off video/image feeds from newer devices, the older phones that still might work would not be as much of a concern. As long as the government can prevent video and images escaping real time they have a lot more latitude in dealing with civilians.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is how liberty dies ... with thunderous applause.
This will be abused. This will be used to shut down protests and stifle dissent. This will get hacked.
There's no way this toy ends up in the hands of anybody without eventually becoming a Really Bad Thing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Any way to disable that feature? I am not to worried about phone theft myself mostly because I get the cheaper smart phones and not an iPhone or other really popular models. So how would I disable having my phone disabled remote because I just don't want that crap on my device.
I only read here about possible abuses of the government of this system. But what out the following scenario: I get arrested and the cops seize my phone. Some buddy non the lookout sees this and bricks/formats my phone so the cops don't get to see my contact list and textsecure messages. Wouldn't the government demand an undo option for themselves? Of course they'll sell it as "you got your phone back and want to use it again".