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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.
... fuck off, and do your job?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
They'll be half that size in a couple years. And then half as small again a few years after that. Why fight a battle you already know you're going to lose?
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
This was about British prisons?
I mean, "Justice Minister" was a pretty solid clue they weren't talking American prisons, but we'd like enough info in TFS to know where the problem is appearing, at least....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'd honestly love something that's light, unbreakable (no glass touch screen, just plastic display), and fits in any of my pockets easily. I don't need smartphone functionality most of the time.
As far as prison phone monopolies, I have no idea whether the British (what this article is about) have them or not.
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.
This is about the UK, which has a per-capita incarceration rate 10-20% that of the USA. Though it was subject to the same "tough on crime" trends in the 1990s as the US, unfortunately, so the rate is 50-60% higher than it should be.
Why aren't they allowed to use jammers?
plotting jail breaks
That's it. Once Apple hears of this, there'll be a shitstorm.
Ezekiel 23:20
No, not "beat the boss". Beat the B.O.S.S., as in Bodily Orifice Security Scanner, a chair-type scanner used in U.K. prisons to find contraband smuggled up peoples' bums. https://boingboing.net/2017/02...
You could prevent prisoners from using cellphones in the slammer by installing in-house jammers. Or you could ban small phones in the entire country and hope that it would be easier to keep this specific technology out of an island with thousands of miles of coastline, numerous airports and a domestic capability to make devices like this in a hundred different places.
So guess which option the periwigged idiots take?
Not allowed in prisons?
Then why call them cell phones?