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.

Comments

Re:The Real Reason cellphones are banned in prison

[NettiWelho]

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?

Re:Maybe prisons should think about jammers?

[GameboyRMH]

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.

Re:How about...

[TheRaven64]

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.