Imagine not being able to walk into any Walmart in the US and buy a dozen disposable, unregistered cell phones for whatever Constitutionally and God given right to privacy purpose you wish to put them to. The government will have to pry them from our cold, dead hands before we sign up for contracts with AT&T, Sprint, et al! Er, um… Forget I ever mentioned that, cell phone companies. No need to send your lobbyists to outlaw… Sorry, someone’s pounding on my door…
Tens of thousands of Mexico residents could have their cell phones cut off this weekend for failing to register their numbers under a government scheme to tackle organized crime. Congress voted in the move last year in a bid to reduce widespread crimes, particularly extortion and ransom demands, carried out via untraceable cell phones.
If cell phone users fail to register by Saturday midnight, “their line will be suspended with no responsibility from their service provider,” the Federal Telecommunications Commission said on its Internet site. Out of around 79 million registered lines, just under 55 million had been registered by Thursday, or 66 percent, according to the commission.
Thousands rushed to register by SMS or on the Internet as the deadline loomed, but bottlenecks slowed down the process and some — including Mexicans without birth certificates and foreigners without Mexican identity numbers — were unable to comply.
[…]
Critics claim the law will be ineffective because criminals can easily register phones using other people’s identities.
Nothing to see here. No government attempt to track it’s people via cell phones. Move along…
This will happen here in the USA.
The problem with the cell phone registration is not that the government will be able to track individuals, but that these databases could be sold to criminals and they can threaten you or your family if you do not pay them…
Let’s take a close look at this blog posting. If Bush was still EL PRESIDENTE, Auntie Dave would have gotten his panties in a bunch blaming Bush and the Pubes. But no mention of Obama or Democrats here by Dave. Auntie Dave, just one of the poster children for rife hypocrisy on Dvorak’s Democrat Unhinged website.
Good plan. Mexico is already awash in lawlessness. Not surprised you are against this. Liberals always feel this way. Untraceable cell phones aren’t a right I’ve ever heard of.
So what. You have to register your car, your gun (in most states), your mariage, ect. I don’t see this as a problem unless you are up to no good.
Garbage in, garbage out. The registry will be so rife with fake or wrong information that it will be worthless.
#- yank — Your are right. This is similar to the no-fly list. There will be no way to way to accurately maintain the list.
Since the article is talking about Mexico, I can see a possibility that criminals will bribe authorities for names on the list. This way only the innocent get run down by the police.
What is meant by ‘untraceable cell phones’? Pay-As-You-Go or hacked phones?
Pay-As-You-Go should have similar protections as land line phones.
The list will be useless for hacked phones. Only way to catch the criminals is to make a list that treats the innocent as criminals.
outside some subway stations in mexico city you can already buy the cell phones with someone elses identity on them.
there is a reported case in which a national newspaper did the cell phone “register” procedure with mexico`s deputy of comunications data and some other reknown names and they got trough
gitmo nation south has quite a lot going on. more people are killed each year in mexico due to drug war related issues than the total number of casualties in irak or afghanistan. and we are not even at war
As technology becomes more and more personal and effectual in our lives, attempts are always going to be made to centralize the effect/power on our lives.
This is strange. Cellular phones are traceable with cell tower triangulation software. The more abundant the cell towers, the more accurate the location fix. Today it is almost instantaneous. So trying to locate a phone isn’t all that hard to do. It doesn’t even need to be on a call.
The number is closer to 20 million unregistered cell phones here in Mexico (I live in Mexico City) as of the last day before the cut off. Frankly it is a big push to stop the drug lords from using them anonymously, which registering them isn’t going to stop them from getting the information from somebody else and registering them anyway. The system works on what is essentially like a Social Security number in the US. But here in Mexico it is Firstname-middlename-Fatherslastname-motherslastname-birthdate.
How hard is it to get this information? Go to any elementary school, and pay a secretary money under the table, and she can photocopy the school’s records for all the kids and you will have 1000 “anonymous” people donate their information and nobody will ever know. Down here most kids in elementary have cell phones anyway, so it is not that hard nor unusual.
This whole thing is ridiculous. Use the Mexican voter registration card which has a picture ID and a thumbprint on the back. Make registering places where the people register the phone, and make them use that ID and they have to submit to another thumb print to verify that it is them, and the problem is solved, except for people who will loan their IDs for a free drug dose. It can be easy, but they are making it hard.
Vested interests.
Who stands to win/lose here. (1) New phone models are constantly flooding the market. So the installed Mexican Telephone Co (TelMex) and a few other companies that riding the top of the wave will win here. When people lose their cell phone because they are not registred in the national database (which if you are not registered, it is not that quick or easy to get registered, and in some cases people cannot get verification of their birth records so the Government will not give them an ID for fear that it is a drug person trying to set up a fake identity. When people finally get all that straightened out, their cell phone is dead, and basically getting it turned back on is close to the equivalent of the price of a new phone, which why pay for a new phone that is 3-5 years old to start with? Just go buy a new phone. Thus all the cutting edge phone companies think they will get new sales.
(2) Who will lose. The rest of phone market will get clobbered on this one. Movistar (which to me is well behind the wave) is refusing to cut service, because they prefer the legal mess with the government than cut off their customers, which will mean most will not stay with the company.
It is political. In the end, any crook can clone a phone set up with a lot of work, or pay somebody to use their information for next to nothing. Another problem this is attempting to fix is kidnapping calls wanting ransom money deposited in their bank account “delivered in 1 hour or your child will die.” The people run to deposit the money without calling their school or the police, and their kid is safe in school the whole time. This is especially effective when grandparents are keeping young kids, and the ransom isn’t that high.
These “kidnappers” are inmates in the local prisons, haven’t kidnapped anybody, have no way to kidnap anybody, and that is how they get money. They withdraw the money (for their family) within the same hour it is deposited and they get paid. When it is traced back to them, so what. They are in for life, and somebody deposited money into their account, and how could they be involved? They are in jail. A legal bog if ever there was one. The inmate claims he has no access to a telephone in jail, now prove otherwise? They also tell the people to go out and buy $500-$1000 dollars of telephone cards to recharge telephones, and they will call back in an hour for the numbers. By doing this, they get the money in the form of telephone credits which is impossible to “stop payment” on them. All of this is done from within the prison via cell phones that the family smuggles into them “in bodily orifices” (think enama or female particular orifice), and they thus support themselves from within prison. (Down here, the family of the inmate has to take him food, the system doesn’t provide that.)
There is a cellphone blocking device that the prisons could put in their prisons (couple hundred of dollars each) and most Catholic churches have them installed so phones won’t ring during Mass. But they don’t want to go that route for some reason. So the innocent pay while the crooks get all the benefits and protections. It is illegal for inmates to have any communication device within the prison by the way.
Guns are illegal in Mexico too. Funny that the law banning them doesn’t seem to keep them out of the hands of criminals. Who would have thunk?
“Nothing to see here. No government attempt to track it’s people via cell phones. Move along…”
Yet another consequence of the War on Some Drugs.
“Um.. uhh yes – I’d like to register my cell phone.” “Uh my name?… Sanchez… Dirty Sanchez.”
I’m surprised no one has mentioned- JCD refers to what he calls “burners”- phones without contracts or personal information needed for purchase, and I believe he said he uses them.
Yes, because no criminal would ever do anything as simple as stealing a cell phone…
sargasso wrote: This is strange. Cellular phones are traceable with cell tower triangulation software. The more abundant the cell towers, the more accurate the location fix.”
Triangulation is accurate to within 450 feet. All cellphoned sold in the U.S. must contain GPS circuitry. While it is commo0nly believed that the user can deactivate the feature except for 911 calls, it is easily over-ridden at the request of the authorities (overseers).
GPS is accurate to around 20 feet….ANYWHERE$ on the planet.
When you turn off your cellphone, it is NOT really off. It is monitoring your keypad for an “on” command, and of course it’s probable that it can receive a command from the cellular provider to silently turn on with GPS activated. The only safe way to turn off a cellphone is gto remove then battery.