"Let's ban tiny phones" - UK Government | Hacker News Reader

"Let's ban tiny phones" - UK Government

shkspr.mobi

66 pointsedent75 comments

I've been to jail in the UK. I served 4.5 months in B and C category prisons. Phones are so easy to get hold of, I don't think most people would believe it. During my time I emailed photos from inside the prison to friends outside using a smartphone. Approx. every other prisoner had a phone, and everyone had access. They were so popular that I was able to keep myself safe (i.e. useful) by offering a phone unlocking service. Top-up voucher codes were a currency, even more than tobacco.

The thing is, they weren't small phones. People didn't smuggle them in their colons - they used code systems to arrange for their friends to throw things over the fences in particular places. Mini-riots were organised to coincide with throwovers. Drugs get in the same way.

There were a whole lot of more inventive methods used too. Suffice it to say that the problem is not the size of phones. It's that if you deprive people of their freedom, they spend all their time thinking about how to get it back. They will eventually work out how to get a little piece. Tiny phones won't make the blindest bit of difference.

I'm curious about two things.

Firstly, how do you charge a phone? I wouldn't have thought cells had plug points.

Secondly, is there any realistic way of stopping phones getting in? Building higher fences, and putting sensors on them, sounds like one way of stopping throwovers for example.

Cells in UK jails are not barren concrete-and-metal things like in the movies. They have a sink, a desk, a kettle, a TV, a (usually padded) chair and a bed. You charge your phone by plugging it in :).

Another fact many people don't know is that you can buy things, legally, in prison. By things, I mean pretty much anything in the Argos catalogue. You get an allowance of £10/week which you can save up (you have to earn it or have it sent in - it's not free). Some people had playstation 2s. Lots of people had stereo systems.

Many of the phones came without chargers, but people were very good at reworking electronics. I saw one system where someone had rewired the inside of his casette player to have two contacts so he could slot in his phone battery and it would charge when he pressed play, in a nicely hidden compartment.

I think there's not really any way of preventing smuggling. Like all systems of oppression, prisons stimulate peoples desire for freedom. When you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to think about a way to smuggle something in, and then you have 10k people in a prison, and people get transferred between prisons... eventually someone will come up with a way, and it will spread fast.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Having thought about it, hand cranked and solar chargers are fairly cheap and small.

Too bad someone crafty enough to modify a cassette player to recharge a phone ends up in jail.

fundamentally, I agree. But keep in mind, skimming ATMs is a fine way to end up in jail. There is plenty of genuine crime one may commit with a knack for electronics.

Why don't they put some type of device that suppresses the GSM frequencies near each cell? Not that I am advocating this, just wondering why they haven't done that.

In the US that would be illegal, and get you in serious trouble with the FCC.

What is possible, however, is for the prison to run its own cell tower with whitelisted IMEIs - i.e. only the guards' phones.

New UK startup:

We deliver your package by anonymous drone. Drop from any height with or without parachute at any hour of the day.

You mail us your package together and a form specifying when, where and how your package should be delivered. Use the calulator on our webpages to calculate the price of the delivery. Cash or check is accepted. Any change can be delivered with your package.

Specify drop height, parachute, time and coordinates. We will deliver within 30-60-120 minute windows at different prices.

accept bitcoin instead of cheques adds to the anonymous nature of the service.

My thoughts exactly (except for the part of making it an underground startup): in these days of drones and copters boom, I wonder how much time will pass before we hear about phones, guns, tobacco or whatever being smuggled into prisons by swarms of elusive quadrocopters.

Prisons will probably have to adopt some form of electronic countermeasures. Civilian GPS is easily spoofed, auto-targeting lasers could make onboard cameras useless, and radio jamming ought to be put in place regardless of drones to combat cell phones.

Governments are able to play the game of constantly one-upping electronic warfare systems, but you could make it too expensive for civilians to have any sort of control or visibility when flying a drone over your site.

Interesting idea, but that wouldn't work, the authorities wouldn't let the drones close enough to the prisons.

Oh and the drones I have seen available can't handle enough weight to lift much of anything.

> Interesting idea, but that wouldn't work, the authorities wouldn't let the drones close enough to the prisons.

Couldn't they instead mortar things into the prison? Shoot a capsule with a phone on a very steep ballistic trajectory.

That is likely very illegal (read illegal and somebody cares) which could get you into that prison.

You don't need to patch the problem and anyone trying is probably out to sell you $50 million system.

In my state an inmate was broken out with a helicopter. The Dept of Corrections had an interesting solution. Anyone caught looking up at the sky goes into solitary confinement. No one has tried it since.

You don't patch the cause of the problem, you break the part of the will that would even make you think about the solution. It is much cheaper and it creates a more malleable population.

Not that I approve of the approach but the voters wanting anything that can't be painted as 3 hots and a cot.

If you want to know what life in a UK prison is actually like, read this ebook, HMP - A Survival Guide http://issuu.com/prisonism/docs/hmp_a_survival_guide

It's a down to earth practical guide aimed at someone who hasn't been to prison before. The ToC features such chapters as Sharing A Cell, Violence, Getting Stuff Done (Complaints and Applications and so on. Smoking teabags, making toast using the radiator, cooking noodles in the kettle, making rope out of sheets to pass things between cells, flash-distilling vodka using ice cubes and a live 240v mains cable, it's all in there.

I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered what prison really involves, day to day, from a prisoners point of view. Or anyone really. It's a fascinating document, very much DIY, reads a bit like a txtfile from back in the day.

I wish I'd read this before going inside. It's very detailed, insightful and in some places poignant.

I've posted it as an article. If you don't mind my asking, and feel free to ignore, what were you in jail for?

Sorry didn't see this comment for a while.

I ran a black-hat collective between the ages of 13 and about 17. That led to getting lots of offers to hack for money, and through discussion with the people making those offers, eventually to getting interested in document security. I developed a way to replicate the UK driving license with all security features using commodity hardware. It fooled police officers and every official that ever looked at it. I sold the licenses to fund my desire to improve the design and manufacture. People used them for, among other things, fraud. 'conspiracy to defraud' was the crime.

That's an interesting little fact, I'd have assumed (naively) it'd be closer to 1 in 10 for phone ownership in prison populations due to the risk in things coming over the walls.

Banning tiny phones is stupid. These people have already shown that they don't care about the law - that's why they're in jail[1] and having a cell phone in prison is already not legal. What's it going to be now? Double plus unlegal?

Surely faraday cages and cell-phone jamming would be easier and less restrictive for regular people. (The BBC article says they're changing legislation to allow them to block signals in prison) From the BBC article:-

> More than 7,000 phones and Sim cards were confiscated in prisons in England and Wales last year.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...)

> Using the figures below from 2009 and 2011, the UK prison population stands at around 97,000. As of October 4, 2011 the population of women in prison in the UK is 4,635.

I don't know how many phones they're not finding. Or how long prisoners have had phones before being caught.

[1] Although England and Wales sends too many people to prison and there was a problem with women not paying tv licence fines, and then going to jail for not paying the fine.

>These people have already shown that they don't care about the law - that's why they're in jail

While I agree banning small cellphones is useless, I don't care for this generalization. Not everyone in jail has a blatant disregard for law. For some it was just a moment of desperation, for some it was for some silly reason like weed, some may just be young people making mistakes and had the misfortune of being one of the few actually caught, some may not have even known they were breaking a law and some don't deserve to be there at all.

But still a good proportition of them ends up spending their lives in there by returning again and again if not being sentenced for life straight away.

It's as if being a criminal was a lifestyle some people choose to adopt from the beginning. They don't even want out of it, and some want back "in" because that's where the culture strives.

Sure, some... but the system is also set up in such a way that once you're in, it's pretty hard to get out. For one, depending on the crime your background-check is all screwed up now, making it pretty hard to make an honest living. I recently found out some companies don't hire anyone with a felony on record. It's a horrible cycle and I think it's because a lot of people make money with prisons & correction-facilities, so actually making a path to escape the criminal-system is not in their interest.

I actually don't think that even half of them actually want to be in jail. I think they've been made to believe there's no way out.

Any numbers on how large that "good proportion" is in the UK? This sounds a bit too Guy Ritchie to me.

It's really obvious you don't know much about prison and recidivism. Being convicted and spending time in prison has long reaching affects on your life. Your employment options become more limited, you may lose voting rights, your existing social networks are disconnected, you may be forced into low wage labor while imprisoned, you may be denied access to educational resources that would help you be employed after release, among other things.

> It's as if being a criminal was a lifestyle some people choose to adopt from the beginning. They don't even want out of it, and some want back "in" because that's where the culture strives.

You think people choose on purpose to be imprisoned rather than be free? This is a rationalization that prisoners deserve to be in prison because they are fundamentally flawed.

You make a very good point, and I apologise for my over-generalisation.

I should have been more careful.

I think the intent is to limit the degree with which one can still coordinate nefarious activity outside their prison. (like continuing to run a drug ring from you cell...) And the jailers probably have a good idea of who they want to target. Cell phones might be rampant in jails, but for 90% of the inmates you don't care about. The 10% you don't want to have cell phones have probably gotten much better at hiding them (ie small phones)

All that's just my guess, I'm not really advocating the ban, I'm just trying to think from other points of view.

> UK officials are considering banning the sale of small mobile phones designed to resemble car key fobs.

Prisoner with a phone-shaped object: suspicious. Prisoner with car keys: not suspicious?

I suspect it would be to do with spotting visitors bringing in illicit mobile phones not prisoners.

Person taking car keys into the visiting room: not suspicious.

You get stripped of all metal when you enter visiting rooms in UK prisons.

Both are suspicious circumstances, but this is more to target people taking phones into prisons concealed as something else.

Prisoner with car keys: not useful. Prisoner with a phone: useful.

You can stab people with keys. I have a VW flick key. Sharpen it up, and its a great little weapon.

You can stab people with almost anything. Toothbrush, piece of paper carefully folded, shoelaces melted into a soap mould... stopping one more thing getting in won't matter.

I think the idea was to make it easier to notice them, as parent suggested.

It is not hard to notice an RF transmitter. If the police thinks their size matters in any way, they completely missed the point.

so we should just give them knives since they will just find a way around not having one anyway?

For all of the dumb policies and harsh criticism that the US government gets, it seems to me that the UK has a government that takes the level of insanity offered by the US government, and adds several layers of nanny-state craziness and general noxiousness.

Yes, yes! Ban it!

We should also travel back in time and ban the fist mobile phones. Who needs it when you have the remarkable British telephone wiring system?

http://www.google.se/imgres?q=telephone+wiring+pole+mess&biw...

But wait... how about British plumbing? Can't the prisoners climb down the wall on the pipes that are conveniently located outside of the wall? Ban it!

That's all "legacy" telecoms and plumbing. It's not like that any more.

It's much worse now.

Any basic problem involves digging up your entire garden and the street to find the pipe / cable which is pissing out water / gas / shit and piss.

Oh and OpenReach can now charge you £150 to fix your line because it's a pain in the arse to dig everything up (for the 8th time in the year) because the ground is flooded and the SNR ratio goes off the scale.

Keeps the contractors in business I suppose by my lawn looks like a fucking chess board...

Wouldn't it make more sense to make prisons mobile signal dead-zones?

Yeah or just track all calls from inside the prison and build a map of who the criminals are talking to good source of intel.

SOCA obviously needs to get away from the cop on the beat mentality and think outside the box.

And stoping the rip of charges for inmates using the legitimate phone inside the prisons would stop the use of phone cards as an internal currency.

At night the guards occasionally walk around with some sort of signal detector, so something like this already happens. Don't think they can intercept, but they can tell who's using a phone.

I believe there was an issue with guards needing to be able to use their mobile phones in an emergency. The majority of the Prison service use TETRA radios now which can be linked in to the rest of the UK mainland emergency services so it shouldn't be an issue but there seemed to be a lot of reluctance so that there was a backup in the event everything else failed.

The people I know who work in prisons in the US aren't allowed to take their phones in. At least here the guards wouldn't have phones to use in an emergency.

I think that TETRA are very similar to GSM phones, in both the technology and the frequencies. So it would probably be hard to avoid any jammers interfering with them.

or just insist that the prisoners use orange or ee as it is now.

It's a tricky one, legally running jammers in the UK is a no-no on the books (http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/enforcement/spectrum-enforc...), however I'm not sure whether there's an exemption clause for prisons, or whether you can apply for a license for a jammer for specific circumstances.

So if jammers are out of the question, what about detectors?

Guards generally carry phones on them as well so there'll be quite a few false positives.

Isn't it possible to separate the trafic? I'm not versed in the GSM standard, but there must be some form of authentication. It might be possible to recognize to whom the signal belongs. (In the worst case, cooperation of the cell service providers could be mandated by law in the network cells covering the prison premises.)

I don't think so, or at least non-trivially anyway. Same reason jammers are prohibited as they have a potential spillover, as you can't definitively say 'this is the range it'll work in'.

On the part of service providers also monitoring it it's difficult, a fair few prisons are actually within reasonably populated areas so it'd have to be pretty accurate signal tracking so you didn't get some spillover.

I can't speak to the UK, but in the US jammers are illegal with an explicit exemption for prisons.

In the US its not allowed in most states to do that, some however our looking into it, what is the law like in the UK?

Great article about the problem in US prisons and how the FTC and mobile carriers don't want the bans against blocking removed. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/us/03prisoners.html?pagewa...

I can see this working, provided the prisoners don't have criminal connections who would be able to import tiny phones illegally.

My first thought was "how much of this is about jails and how much is about small 3g-capable cameras?

it's about inmates being capable of continuing to run organized crime/drug rings from inside a jail cell.

That is the stated rationale. But after the Guardian incident, the first thought in my mind is about journalists.

This has as much credence as any of Baldrick's "cunning plans". This could be one of a number of things.

It could just be a media fantasy

It might be a proposal which has made it high enough up the food chain that it is being aired in the media to see what the reaction would be.

It could be "chaff" intended to show that the Government is doing things and to draw attention away from the Guardian/Miranda fuss of recent days.

It is unlikely to be under serious consideration. As I have said here in recent days, despite your collective geekish arrogance, they are cleverer than that and they are clever than you.

What I don't understand is that these phones don't seem to be aimed at inmates. As other people have pointed out small phones have been around for a while, their size hasn't proved useful to smugglers. Furthermore the particular phones under attack here a designed to look like a car key. Which if I imagine is just as contraband as a phone is.

Seems like the government is attacking these phones under false pretences, which is what really worries me here.

I see the discussion revolving around the ideas of jamming the signal and alternative ways for prisoners to have access to cellphones.

I would prefer to have a discussion about whether it's a good idea to forbid cellphones in jail in the first place...

A worthwhile discussion perhaps, I posted an alternate viewpoint above, here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257400

Also websites that intentionally block content if JavaScript is disabled should be banned.

they should also consider drugs. and crime.

Totally ridiculous and not justifiable. Just install jammers at the jails.

The real reason for a ban must be elsewhere.

Probably wouldn't work. The guards would break them. There's lots of money to be made off the illicit economy surrounding prison.

How about putting a cell tower right on the jail's roof?

Woulds you use your smuggled phone if you knew the signal was going straight through the warden's cell tower?

How do you guarantee that the calls/texts from people around the prison won't go through that tower?

There would be problems with interference from jammers.

I've spent time in a hospital overlooking a jail, and I really wouldn't have appreciated my mobile signals being jammed.

I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but here's your reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257452

Why not ban all the criminal activity? It will surely stop the criminals.

Like banning guns.

Sounds reasonable, but what are the MP's going to do, since that's the only part of them able to talk?

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