Call to ban sale of mini mobile phones | Hacker News Reader

Call to ban sale of mini mobile phones

bbc.co.uk

35 pointsogdoad58 comments

It's kind of funny to ban an item that's already being smuggled in through a ban. Seems like it might just add another layer to the smuggling scheme. We'll eventually get to a point where the phone travels from assembly line to prison cell entirely within people's butts.

Anuception.

Why not just let prisoners have free access to the phone? This has never made sense to me.

It’s to stop them from being able to continue to commit crimes from the inside.

This is an ongoing problem in mexican prisons, see:

http://www.newsweek.com/el-chapo-puente-grande-mexico-582319

Large scale phone fraud seems like something that should be easy to stop... Even without monitoring all calls.

Assuming the officials aren't corrupt.

Okay, what do you do if you detect large scale phone fraud?

Put them in prison and take away their access to landline? Well, that's what we do now, and it's not working, they'll just use a tiny cell phone as they do now.

Except that they can't without using proxies on the outside. Instead, we decide that they no longer have a right to communicate or express themselves to anyone outside the prison.

It seems like a more effective and humane method is to allow them free telephone usage, with the complete disclosure and knowledge that their conversations are being listened to/recorded. If crimes being driven by their command are executed on the outside, it can be found out how they communicated that command, and the people responsible for committing that outside crime also punished.

Exactly how many prisoners have a criminal empire to run from prison.

Most of them have nothing. And communication would be of no concern, or am I missing something.

The problem is how to determine that someone is a "low risk" mule for coded communication. (For favours inside prison or later outside.) So the solution is a wide ban indeed.

Like with many such "solutions" its efficacy is not evaluated.

Before cell phones, they would use code words and phrases so they could orchestrate activities via monitored phone calls.

I'm not sure that total deregulation of the prison phone market is a good idea, but at least in the United States, the current solution is pretty outrageous [0]. There is a a reasonable censoring role to be played by the prison (same as it is for mail), but like much else about prison system, seems served by rent-seekers [1].

[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/06/16/fcc-prison-phone-call-ra...

[1] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2017/11/20/indiana...

Is there reason for censoring?

Most criminals don't have an empire to run from prison. I suspect there's very few prisoners where censoring makes any sense.

Consider the cost and benefit, and the value of maintaining contact with friends and family.

What exactly is the reasonable censorship role? I'm honestly curious..

One circumstance: a lot of men* are in prison for domestic violence. The victims are often close to completely emotionally and mentally broken. The offenders often have equally manipulative friends who are not incarecerated. Allowing such prisoners unfettered phone access to 1) potentially contact victims or 2) contact friends to harass victims, seems like it is worth avoiding. Words can be very powerful and escaping the cycle of abuse is difficult. That was the first instance I thought of. I imagine there are many other where censorship makes sense.

* this is the most common dynamic, violence perpetrated by men.

There are already legal mechanisms such as a judge's order (not to mention technical methods) to address such cases. Banning every convict from using a phone is like swatting a fly with a Buick.

They should use phone access as a carrot. Good behavior? You get more access to a phone. Bad behavior? You don't.

Thanks for the links. The Indy Star gave a Bad Gateway so I found the amp ariticle here:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.indystar.com/amp/858322001

intimidation of witnesses, the jury, victims, ...

Wouldn't it be a much better idea to build prisons at places that simply have no cell coverage? (if necessary make it a law for such a region - this would also make such regions good places for electrosensitive people to settle).

Considering that it is very problematic to use jammers and hardly possible to ban sales, too (if it becomes impossible to sell them directly, people will start to sell them from Shenzhen, which does not change the problem), this is probably the best option.

Prisons need employees. The employees are going to want cell coverage between work and home.

How about just banning prison visits. That would solve a lot of other contraband problems too.

Prisons already have land lines.

edit: Banning visits seems unusually cruel.

You could quite easily have a special local cell that only connects a whitelisted list of phone numbers; it could even add visitor phones for the duration of the visit.

> How about just banning prison visits. That would solve a lot of other contraband problems too.

Isn't it common for prison visits that the visitor is separated from the prisoner by some barrier (e.g. some acrylic glass barrier) so that it is nearly impossible to hand over contrabands, where the visitor is in an area that no prisoner can enter (so that the visitor cannot leave some contraband behind).

And even if there is something to hand over to the prisoner (either from a visitor and mail) I think it will have to go through security clearance. This shows that any way that a visitor uses to hand over some item can also be used via mail - so banning prison visits avails to nothing.

Contraband often comes in through employees.

Well, the solution is clear: We ban employees.

Looks like a future project for HN disruption. Automating the prisons.

An automated panopticon.

In what calculus would cellphone service for prison employees at work outweigh prisoner visits?

Actually that would be in violation of human rights. Also prisoners have a right to see their lawyer.

> How about just banning prison visits.

This is sarcasm right? Because if you just want to disregard human life, you might as well just kill everybody instead of incarcerating. No more prisons then! Problem solved?

How about registration of sims for the tower that covers the prison?

The article seems like it's sensationalising a little bit and I can't quite work out the purpose.

> "Beat the BOSS" phones can be bought for £25, but are reportedly changing hands for up to £500 inside jails.

This is ostensibly an article about phones being on sale on online marketplaces and being advertised explicitly for smuggling.

So, let's search Amazon UK: "beat the BOSS phone", there's one phone that looks like it's small. Granted, it does say that it's 99.9% plastic. Nowhere in the description is it marketed as being to beat the body scanner. BOSS isn't mentioned.

The second result is a Nokia 105, which I'm fairly sure is not what the article is talking about. Ebay's not-yet-taken-down listings are a little more explicit with one of the two listings referring to a "cell" and "Boss." Arguably, "Boss" could refer to, say, the boss at work. Maybe choosing that as an acronym for the scanners wasn't such a great idea after all.

Questions a journalist might have been expected to have found answers for:

A minister has claimed this, so is it plausible? Could there be another agenda? Is it a distraction?

The claimed battery life is 5 days. How are these being charged?

Is there a legitimate use for such a small phone?

Will extending a ban to outside likely be effective given that, say, drugs are also banned outside prison? The article does not mention drugs other than as contraband.

Why are they £500 if these things are routinely changing hands and can be obtained for so little and are so easy to smuggle?

Who do the inmates pay the £500 to? How?

How are they smuggled? Visitors seems unlikely, because the risk of getting caught is high.

Why is there no analysis of the widespread claims spanning decades that prison guards have been involved in many smuggling operations?

The media has been running stories for months about drones (i.e. quadcopters) being used to smuggle stuff into prisons. Why is there no mention of drones or any synonyms in this article?

Don't these also have a legit use for people like journalists, who may also require a covert means of communication?

Or maybe just people who want a tiny phone, like kids or women with a small purse.

Don't forget fashion models.

Or ants.

I was under the impression that the phone are very very small. Would be hard to use for a woman or a child.

Seems a little ridiculous to me, just install IMSI catchers in the prison, and you can monitor and/or block calls from any phone whatever the size or composition.

Couldn’t you use a gsm jammer inside the prison instead?

You cannot use a jammer of any kind in the United States, for almost all values of you, including state and federal penal agencies. https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement

That's an interesting US fact, but the story is about the UK. Is it likewise restricted there?

Yes, it is.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/interference-enforcement/s...

Criminal, according to Ofcom regulations.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/interference-enforcement/s...

There are after all good reasons to ban them, but even if those reasons didn’t exist, the Tories would ban them for their usual “law and order” reasons.

The law was changed to permit jamming in prisons. It is quite difficult to implement because you have to avoid jamming outside the prison, but a successful feasibility study was carried out. And the government decided it was too expensive to roll out nationally.

As an alternative it'd be nice to see some higher-tech GSM detection technology that allowed them to pinpoint the phones (or at least be aware of their presence).

So, cell towers?

I don't know a tremendous amount about cell towers, but I was under the impression that they couldn't very accurately pinpoint locations - I was thinking more of a [foxhunting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting)-style location, where you could (hopefully) find a phone's hiding place with relative ease.

A recent article on how to track cell phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803443

I guess they could use a "stingray" type device, which could be used to control, rather than interrupt the cell signal.

Rectal exams.

Lead paint? :)

- Just kidding...

Faraday prison cells.

or just a faraday cage.

Why kidding? That should work. Paintings with metals is really a thing.

Lead is toxic to human, any other metal can do.

I suspect any quantity of metal sufficient to act as an RF shield or Faraday cage would be toxic to humans in paint form.

Unless ingested, iron should be fine. It is also low maintenance.

In my part of the world they are talking about shutting down the 2G network in the next few years. Since these small phones run on that network the UK authorities might want to check to see if the problem is going to go away on its own.

Why not make Faraday cages in prisons, or use cell phone blockers?

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