Congress, wireless industry team up to make stolen phones worthless | Hacker News Reader

Congress, wireless industry team up to make stolen phones worthless

extremetech.com

22 pointsmrsebastian16 comments

Oh, they're going to make it illegal to tamper with the IMEI. That's all solved then.

Why don't they just make it illegal to steal peoples phones instead?

Stealing is legal in US? That's some news.

Yes, it is, isn't it?

Without sarcasm: Why would it help to make tampering with the IMEI illegal, when the illegality of stealing in the first place doesn't solve the problem?

Well, I guess if you (unwittingly?) buy a stolen phone, the feds would want IMEI tampering to be illegal?

I assume there's lots of bulk IMEI tampering done by fences, too.

If it's unwittingly, why would I bother with changing the IMEI?

If it's wittingly, I'm already a criminal.

And you're right, IMEI changing probably already is a default part of fencing a phone.

The solution would be to make it a requirement that phones have tamper proof IMEIs.

This changes very little for the moment:

1. Most of the phones in the US are CDMA carrier exclusives; they maintain their own stolen/lost databases. Even 10 years ago you could call Verizon or Sprint and they would blacklist the ESN/MEID.

2. If you've probably noticed the majority of the US is currently on CDMA which isn't anywhere else outside of US/CA/SKorea. Taking that stolen Verizon flip phone to Mexico gets you a brick.

In the future with a larger LTE footprint this can be effective but I'll have to see.

Regarding the selling of the cellphone to a friend, you probably should change legal ownership of the device, just like you should when selling/buying a car from a friend.

I'd feel safer with this mobile device blacklist, and I believe there are no issues of privacy, since we're not talking about permanent tracking of a cellphone's location.

Won't most of the stolen phones be sent out of the country where they will be unaffected by this arrangement?

You can make big reductions in crimes of opportunity by making them just a little more difficult.

For instance, laws requiring bike helmets have big impacts on bike theft.

If this is implemented in the US, and enough privacy safeguards are put in place, I'm sure it'll spread to the EU and then the rest of the world.

This already exists in Australia and has for years. It's as simple as getting a police report done and ringing your phone company to get the IMEI blocked.

We already have it in the rest of the world - in Australia since the beginning of last decade. I'm confused why it has taken this long for the United States to implement.

This has existed in the EU for some years now. In practice, it means phones are still stolen, and moved outside the EU, mainly to North Africa.

Welcome to the future ;)

I found a Nexus phone, and a Droid Razor phone the past few months. Didn't even try to see if I could use it with T-Mobile. I was just glad I got a couple of free Androids with different screen resolutions to test my app.

Congress should not be concerning itself for making certain programming functions legal and other ones illegal. The illegal action should be identified and made illegal, not the events leading up to the illegal action.

Backspace out that line of computer code citizen, don't make me taze you. Legislating what i can and can't do with the wires in my own device because I might be stealing the phone?

Sounds to me like a chess move to increase congressional power over the citizens through tapping into the computer in every pocket.

I don't see the link between your first two lines and the third. How are they "tapping into" your phone? You do realise that your phone has a phone number?

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