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Ban Sale of Mini Mobiles, Says Justice Minister (cnet.com)
Online retail companies should ban the sale of mini mobile phones designed to be smuggled into prisons, said justice secretary David Lidington on Monday. From a report: Often marketed as "Beat the Boss phones", the tiny feature phones can be bought for around $25 to $40 online on sites including Amazon, Ebay and Gumtree. On the inside, they can change hands for up to $670. The phones, which can be as small as lipsticks, are popular with prison inmates due to their discreet size and lack of metal, which allows them to beat metal detectors. Mobile phones are banned in prisons, in part because they allow inmates to continue criminal activities while they're locked up. But around 20,000 phones and SIM cards were seized by prison guards in 2016, with mini mobiles making up around a third of these.
But the real reason is the prison telephone company monopoly. That's a gravy train they do not want stopped.
Why do they do it in countries without prison telephone monopolies?
This. It's relatively trivial to prevent unauthorized cell phone communications out of prisons. They don't even need jammers, just a ring of femtocells that forward the traffic of whitelisted cell phones, and isolate and triangulate phones with IMEIs not on the whitelist.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Here's an idea, stop allowing stuff to be smuggled into prisons.
Most contraband is brought in by the guards. So who is going to watch the watchers?
Or do random sweeps for them
So who is going to run the sweep? The guards?
Your simplistic solutions are all based on the presumption that there are "good people" working in the prisons. Some employees may start off good, but they rarely stay that way.
Here's a better solution: Stop locking up so many people. Find more appropriate forms of punishment, such as wearing an ankle tracker while cleaning bedpans in nursing homes. Prison is expensive and often just hardens people to a life of crime.
Why aren't they allowed to use jammers?
Run a cell. Mobile phones don't do end-to-end encryption for calls, they are encrypted to the cell site, but are then not encrypted past that. This is how Stingray works: you run a small cell, phones connect to it, and you record the calls that they make. Do the same in prisons. You'll then be able to get complete records of all calls made by inmates.
For added fun, you can MITM all TLS connections over the data network and block anything that you can't MITM.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ok, my wife is an ex-prison guard, and, believe me, prisoners do conduct criminal activity from their cells with their phones. It's so bad in California that correctional officers have to drive "evasion" routes when going to or leaving the prison, are required to carry a gun for self-protection, and are not allowed to wear uniforms outside the prison. The reason is that inmates manage their "peeps" outside the prison to follow, harass, blackmail and extort prison employees.
As a placement counselor, she also dealt with lots of inbound cases of perps convicted of doing bad things for inmates. It's real, and, given conjugal visits where Mama brings in mini phones hidden in, shall we say "personal" locations, it's impossible to stop.
The government has also tried to implement cell phone blockers on prison grounds, but this was shot down for constitutional reasons.