Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones

[inanna]

Source: London Times

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.


Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

[The Wielding Truth]

1. I thought we had it bad. UK citizens are fenced in, too.

Although mostly everyone in Europe is used to presenting passports.Am I right?

[Robbien]

2. Prepaid phones are how many of the poor have access to phones

If a person doesn't have sufficient money for food and lodging much less utilities, how can they afford to get a passport or other official ID to gain access to prepaid phones? I see a big increase in the black market prepaid phone business.

[SemperEadem]

5. Reminds me of the video game "Dreamfall"

everyone was tracked by the "eye in the sky" and the heroine of the game had a friend who could get really good cloaking codes for cell phones.

[WhichTruth]

9. That would suit their purpose

Then they would start arresting them as terrorist. Terrorist, terrorist, terrorist! They're everywhere. How does that go? First they came for... And don't forget to be very afraid.

[lligrd]

3. K&R

[SemperEadem]

4. "The Enemy Within" is real, huh?

I thought it was just a show on PBS.

[thunder rising]

6. Ahh the myth of the clever Brit...fuck'em they are as stupid as we are. That makes me feel good

[Nihil]

25. If you believe that ...

... <sigh>

I can walk off my train in London and buy a SIM card with cash inside 5 minutes.

Of course, no "terrorist" could possibly do that ...
:eyes:

[Nambe]

7. More jobs cloning phones in the UK saves the countries economic woes!

If you can google, you can clone phones. What a huge waste of resources. The DEA comes to mind.

[madrchsod]

8. 1984 is reality in england

[WhichTruth]

10. Recently re-read 1984

It doesn't read like Si-Fi anymore.

[Nihil]

24. Figures ...

... Alaskans can't spell any better than they can think ...

[ima_sinnic]

11. my lack of interest in owning a cell phone just grew by about 500% (nt)

[machI]

12. You realize the Government can locate the general area of a cell phone when ever they want to

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4258805.html

While the only way to turn this tracking off is to shut down your phone, it is not actually activated unless you call 911. If you think this raises privacy concerns, just consider the nature of mobile phones, which are continually connecting to towers. Records are kept of every tower your phone communicates with. While it may not be as precise as true GPS, this information is being recorded any time your phone is on.

If a cell phone goes to a different city, the Government has ways of finding that out. It is not necessary to make a call, only have the phone turned on.

[bean fidhleir]

22. Yet, except by taking the battery out, there's no way to be certain your phone is off, either.

It's worth remembering, too, that the police-state construction that started with Thatcher and Reagan continued with Major and Bush One, Clinton and Blair, Bush Two and Blair, Bush Two and Brown, and soon Obama and Brown.

It ain't going to stop til we *make* it stop. And our window for doing that is shrinnnnnkkkinnng.

[pam4water]

13. Damn it! Britain is a head of us in the race to fascism. Quick someone inform the NSA

[davidpdx]

14. It will only be a matter of time before the US does the same thing

When I first saw the headline, I thought it was about the US and breathed in relief when I figured out it wasn't. Certainly the US could do the same thing. It would be very ugly if they did.

[michreject]

15. eBay

Works for me.

[JCMach1]

16. Idiocy- A real terrorist can just have a sim card from another country with a fake name

The only drawback is those pesky roaming charges. Oh well, any enterprising terrorist should be able to cover that!

[Nevernose]

21. Even simpler, a fake ID.

I can go about six blocks from here and get you a good fake passport in about 15 minutes. I'm sure it can't be too different in Britain.

[T_i_B]

17. Now that is a bad idea

If Labour think that this sort of thing is actually going to win them some of the votes they've lost they are badly mistaken. This is bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake.

[LeftishBrit]

26. Agreed!

Even apart from the threat to civil liberties, it's going to make it increasingly difficult to own a mobile phone, which most younger people regard as a basic human right!

Moreover, I think this sort of constant demand for ID actually could increase the risk of ID fraud and terrorism. Most of us, even when we have up-to-date passports, keep them safe somewhere, and don't carry them around everywhere we go. However, if people need a passport to get something as simple as a mobile phone, people are going to carry their passports around much more: hence crooks will start to mug people for their passports, and people will accidentally lose their passports much more often than in the past, with the risk of the passports being picked up by the wrong people. A very badly-thought out plan from every point of view.

[JustAnotherGen]

18. I don't see any mention of SIM Cards in there . . .

Many Americans have CDMA service. The European and South/Central American standards are GSM and Quad Band GSM. If your phone is unlocked - you can buy prepaid SIM cards online. Really valuable for those of us in the US that go overseas with Global Capable (GSM/UMTS) phones/devices that have been unlocked by the carrier. I.E. - the EU has new 'set' pricing for calls from EU to EU that are far cheaper than anything a US carrier can offer - because the US Carriers are not a part of the EU.

I would think that it would be VERY difficult to track the pre-paid SIM Cards - add into that turning off the GPS . . . BTW to make sure you can do this - buy a MIL-SPEC phone. Those meet military standards for dust, shock, water resistance etc. etc. But those are also being brought into the network carriers to meet the needs of the Military - which means it must either be completely disabled or with the ability to turn it off.

Also if you guys go into your Phone Settings user menu - you should be able to turn off/on the LBS/GPS. I'm a single woman living alone in a place without family - so I always keep mine on. In case I'm abducted or something and can fire off a call to someone - it can ping my location. :rofl:

Oy - I'm off that jump-the-shark-bridge at 35 where I will never have a landline again. It doesn't make sense to me to not have a cell phone or to have both a cell and a landline. I'm never home, and I don't want to pay a phone bill, buy a phone, have an answering machine or PAY for voice mail. I made the break 4 years ago and I've saved a lot of money over the years by just having the cell. Landlines are a rip off and they nickel and dime you to death.

Even though I have an international ld plan on US based cell - I also bought a Nokia GSM capable only phone in France two years ago from Orange telecom that they immediately unlocked - and I have a prepaid GSM E.U. based SIM Card/Phone number to save money on calls to my friends in Lyon, Paris, Nice, Dublin, Amsterdam, Palermo, Dusseldorf etc. etc. I'll have to call my contacts who work at Vodafone tomorrow from that phone (I have the GPS set to off on that) and see if they can see where the call is coming from.

I'll book mark this and come back to it tomorrow morning - since those guys sit in the Netherlands.


Maybe that's a way around this nightmare for those of you who don't want to be 'tracked' on your cell at all! ;-)

[intaglio]

19. and what will the real bad boys do?

Buy overseas so the only people harmed legislation by this are law abiding ones. What a load of cobblers!

[LiberalFighter]

20. They can't buy a phone across the channel along with the service?

[bean fidhleir]

23. I'm sure that at every port there'll be a device to set off every phone that passes through

And anyone who can't show their phone's papers will be in trouble.

We need to remember that there is NO LIMIT to the amount of control they want over us. If they could arrange it so that we could do nothing but go to work and go home again, communicating with no one, they'd do it.