Let's be realistic, investigative journalists can get phones from their employer. People on HN always seem to bring up the fringe case... The small percentage. Ignoring the vast majority of actual use.
well then for that matter lets just toss out the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments, since they are mostly used by dissidents and criminals to escape prosecution.
I might add, the vast majority of prepaid cell phone use is not criminal use [citation needed]
I'd be willing to wager the vast majority of the use of most things currently being argued (encryption is the hottest one right now) is not criminal.
So you want to force the majority use to give up their privacy and trust every retailer of prepaid phones with their personal information, because of the fringe cases of criminal use?
The fact of the matter is that prepaid phone use (much like encryption) is used by people for pretty banal purposes: they want to make sure that their private life stays private.
Maybe they are carrying on an illicit affair. Maybe they are running a side business their employer wouldn't approve of. Whatever the reason, people have a certain right to privacy.
The burden isn't on US to demonstrate why we need privacy. The burden is on the GOVERNMENT to demonstrate why they need to pull back the curtain on someone else's privacy to further a legitimate government interest. That's the crux of every argument opposing the government keeping records (or forcing the record-keeping by business) on everything a person does in the course of their life.
The VAST majority of prepaid phone use is legitimate and non-controversial. Why burden all of those uses with a specious need to identify themselves when conducting perfectly legal business?
You don't need an ID to buy a hammer or a knife. Why should you need one to buy a phone?
The political scaremongers are the ones harping on about the fringe cases, to our general detriment. There's nothing wrong with a desire for privacy, and anyone who wants to buy a phone without having to provide a bunch of records should be able to do so.
Also if they had been bought within a certain time-frame it is not to hard to go back and get video of the purchase depending of where it was bought at. It isn't instant to find the person but not usually impossible. Walmart takes video of every purchase, correlates the items bought to the credit card, etc.
Similar laws exist in many European countries and Poland is very likely to pass one soon.
I guess that the ostensible reason for introducing this is to help against terrorism (it is in Poland). I fail to see how this should help in any way: in places with large population density (where terrorism is more likely) mobile phones with foreign SIMs are reasonably common (am I wrong here?), so a good workaround is to buy burner SIMs abroad.
Before I could buy a sim card in Ahmedabad (the largest city in India's Gujarat state) in 2014, I had to show my passport, and also provide the name and contact details of a personal reference, who must be a resident of Ahmedabad. And, yes, the mobile phone company did actually call the referee to check that they knew me.
The rush to attribute blame to something technical and pass a quick fix law is obviously a tactic to draw attention from the real question:
Why did the authorities so utterly fail to protect us ?
The facts remain:
'Europol' knew ~400 radicalised EU citizens were at it.
Turkish Intelligence gave the bombers name to the Belgians - seemingly ignored.
The Belgians, before the Belgian bombs, interrogated the French bomber for only an hour, seemingly fruitlessly.
This echoes previous tragic incidents where the vital intel was known and passed on but seemingly ignored or lost in the noise.
For instance the Boston bomb where the older brother was known to have been radicalised at training camps by his ethnic government but the intel was not properly utilised by the American authorities who had him on their books but ignored the intel and seemingly considered him an 'asset' working for them.
Or the Paris cartoonist deaths, again a radicalised native, known to the authorities to have been radicalised in jail when as a young drug dealer he was incarcerated with Al Quaeda's no.1 european recruiter.
Where are the calls for a public investigation into the near total failure by the intelligence services to stop any plots they haven't trumped up ?
They have near total electronic surveillance at great chilling effect to freedom and great inconvenience to the economy yet still fare worse against unsophisticated plots than we should expect.
"Perhaps the real secret the spies don't want anyone to know is they are not very good at their jobs."*
<sarcasm> Yet of course our protectors were flummoxed by 'burner phones', that no-one could have suspected (despite this been the MO of previous Euro Islamist Bombers - and a entire season of the Wire). If only we made something else illegal we would have got them... </sarcasm>
Perhaps mindlessly handing more power and budgets over to these morons without any public oversight is the problem.
We need real police, real detectives, acting on intelligence not more of the same.
That's by far not the worst thing, the 7/7 bombings had more intelligence, as US, French and Israeli sources gave many details including names and sigint intercepts one of the "suspects" was arrested and then released 24 hours before the attack happened he later slipped the police surveillance (which according to some reports was not even plain cloths but literally a police van trailing him) and rejoined his friends (who's names and details were also known) and went on with the bombings.
Many European countries already have regulations around pre-paid sims and burner phones it just doesn't matter (especially when the terrorists are European nationals).
The biggest problem is that overall in Europe security forces do not have the budget nor manpower to deal with neither foreign nor homegrown terrorist threats and in the current political climate the fear the media more than the actual terrorists.
Is the problem a lack of budget or how those resources are spent ?
Giving more money to a failing organisation without oversight will not get better results.
The failures need a spotlight, questions must be asked and answered.
Secrecy has failed us; Public oversight is needed.
Could this have been carried out without phones ?
The terrorists planned this in close physical contact, they excecuted it in close contact - not having phones would have made little difference - synchronising watches, etc.
Our 'homeland' security apparatus was created by Neoconservatives, has it been reformed since ?
The phones issue is a red-herring to distract from the real and continued failures of our security services - this endangers us all.
The Belgian state security service which is responsible for both internal and external security (MI5+MI6, FBI+CIA, Mossad+ShinBet etc.) has 150 employees and has seen budget cuts last year despite the Paris attacks.
Belgium (and many other European countries) has ghettos which are filled with "immigrants" many of them of 2nd and 3rd generation predominately Muslim.
Those ghettos aren't policed as the police in many cases is afraid of going in to do their day to day policing and even simple warrants require the use of SWAT if not the army.
The population in those ghettos ranges from being supportive, to sympathetic to plain refusing to cooperate with the authorities for what ever reason which means that there is almost no penetration as far as traditional HUMINT sources goes.
It took Belgium months to find one guy that was hiding in within only a few blocks because the local population is not cooperative and some parts of it conspired to assist him.
But any time that this issue has been brought up it pretty much ended as a political fiasco and often a political suicide.
When some one suggested that the security services need to build an outreach program that would specifically target the Muslim population to both build trust between law enforcement and the migrant communities as well as a network of informants, they are quite often being labeled as racist, islamophobic and could kiss their career goodbye.
I am not too familiar with the subject, but is some of this hindsight bias? It's easy to point out the datapoints that could have helped once we know the results, but it may be hard to go from datapoint to predicting a terrorist. (I am assuming there are many many other tidbits of data of people that these agencies have, and most of these people don't become mass murderers)
Or from the statistical point of view, does inferring from this data produce too many false positives to be useful?
I don't see how this helps, unless the government is also listening/logging all communications on all phones. All of the proposed protections from terrorism that I read amount to total information awareness by the state -- essentially an unrecognizable civic regime.
And even then, how can it guarantee safety against a suicide pact? Total waste of time in my opinion.
28 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 66.9 ms ] threadThey are also used by investigative journalists trying to uncover government wrongdoing along with people trying to escape abusive ex-lovers.
The desire for anonymity is not synonymous with criminal intent.
GP's point seems to be that it's pointful to avoid association of that phone with any news organization at all in such cases.
I might add, the vast majority of prepaid cell phone use is not criminal use [citation needed]
I'd be willing to wager the vast majority of the use of most things currently being argued (encryption is the hottest one right now) is not criminal.
So you want to force the majority use to give up their privacy and trust every retailer of prepaid phones with their personal information, because of the fringe cases of criminal use?
The fact of the matter is that prepaid phone use (much like encryption) is used by people for pretty banal purposes: they want to make sure that their private life stays private.
Maybe they are carrying on an illicit affair. Maybe they are running a side business their employer wouldn't approve of. Whatever the reason, people have a certain right to privacy.
The burden isn't on US to demonstrate why we need privacy. The burden is on the GOVERNMENT to demonstrate why they need to pull back the curtain on someone else's privacy to further a legitimate government interest. That's the crux of every argument opposing the government keeping records (or forcing the record-keeping by business) on everything a person does in the course of their life.
The VAST majority of prepaid phone use is legitimate and non-controversial. Why burden all of those uses with a specious need to identify themselves when conducting perfectly legal business?
You don't need an ID to buy a hammer or a knife. Why should you need one to buy a phone?
- People who can't afford phone contracts and have minimal usage needs.
- International tourists who don't want to pay roaming charges on their regular phone plans to make local calls while traveling.
Also, why should it be illegal to have an anonymous phone?
I guess that the ostensible reason for introducing this is to help against terrorism (it is in Poland). I fail to see how this should help in any way: in places with large population density (where terrorism is more likely) mobile phones with foreign SIMs are reasonably common (am I wrong here?), so a good workaround is to buy burner SIMs abroad.
Seems that the regulations are even more strict now and you need to register it to an address.
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g187275-i116-k914854...
Why did the authorities so utterly fail to protect us ?
The facts remain: 'Europol' knew ~400 radicalised EU citizens were at it. Turkish Intelligence gave the bombers name to the Belgians - seemingly ignored.
The Belgians, before the Belgian bombs, interrogated the French bomber for only an hour, seemingly fruitlessly.
This echoes previous tragic incidents where the vital intel was known and passed on but seemingly ignored or lost in the noise.
For instance the Boston bomb where the older brother was known to have been radicalised at training camps by his ethnic government but the intel was not properly utilised by the American authorities who had him on their books but ignored the intel and seemingly considered him an 'asset' working for them.
Or the Paris cartoonist deaths, again a radicalised native, known to the authorities to have been radicalised in jail when as a young drug dealer he was incarcerated with Al Quaeda's no.1 european recruiter.
Where are the calls for a public investigation into the near total failure by the intelligence services to stop any plots they haven't trumped up ?
They have near total electronic surveillance at great chilling effect to freedom and great inconvenience to the economy yet still fare worse against unsophisticated plots than we should expect.
"Perhaps the real secret the spies don't want anyone to know is they are not very good at their jobs."*
<sarcasm> Yet of course our protectors were flummoxed by 'burner phones', that no-one could have suspected (despite this been the MO of previous Euro Islamist Bombers - and a entire season of the Wire). If only we made something else illegal we would have got them... </sarcasm>
Perhaps mindlessly handing more power and budgets over to these morons without any public oversight is the problem.
We need real police, real detectives, acting on intelligence not more of the same.
[*] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...
Many European countries already have regulations around pre-paid sims and burner phones it just doesn't matter (especially when the terrorists are European nationals).
The biggest problem is that overall in Europe security forces do not have the budget nor manpower to deal with neither foreign nor homegrown terrorist threats and in the current political climate the fear the media more than the actual terrorists.
Giving more money to a failing organisation without oversight will not get better results.
The failures need a spotlight, questions must be asked and answered.
Secrecy has failed us; Public oversight is needed.
Could this have been carried out without phones ?
The terrorists planned this in close physical contact, they excecuted it in close contact - not having phones would have made little difference - synchronising watches, etc.
Our 'homeland' security apparatus was created by Neoconservatives, has it been reformed since ?
The phones issue is a red-herring to distract from the real and continued failures of our security services - this endangers us all.
Belgium (and many other European countries) has ghettos which are filled with "immigrants" many of them of 2nd and 3rd generation predominately Muslim.
Those ghettos aren't policed as the police in many cases is afraid of going in to do their day to day policing and even simple warrants require the use of SWAT if not the army.
The population in those ghettos ranges from being supportive, to sympathetic to plain refusing to cooperate with the authorities for what ever reason which means that there is almost no penetration as far as traditional HUMINT sources goes.
It took Belgium months to find one guy that was hiding in within only a few blocks because the local population is not cooperative and some parts of it conspired to assist him.
But any time that this issue has been brought up it pretty much ended as a political fiasco and often a political suicide.
When some one suggested that the security services need to build an outreach program that would specifically target the Muslim population to both build trust between law enforcement and the migrant communities as well as a network of informants, they are quite often being labeled as racist, islamophobic and could kiss their career goodbye.
Or from the statistical point of view, does inferring from this data produce too many false positives to be useful?
ID required to use one of the few remaining public pay phones.
good thing VoIP service and public wifi hotspots aren't widespread, otherwise the proposed legislation would be pointless. Oh, wait...
And even then, how can it guarantee safety against a suicide pact? Total waste of time in my opinion.