Comment by onetimeonly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onetimeonly | Hacker News Reader

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.

T

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com