3 ms·

Really? I'm pretty sure that when CA passed the smartphone kill switch law all smartphones got kill switches.

• tzs 11y ago
  One big difference with that was the phone makers were moving toward kill switches anyway. Apple touted theirs as a feature long before that law was introduced in California. The main opposition to kill switches came from phone carriers because they make a lot of money selling (1) replacement phones to people whose phones are stolen and (2) theft insurance to people who fear their phones will be stolen, and from some privacy and civil rights groups that (1) misunderstood the bill due to not reading it carefully and/or (2) were basing their opposition on completely ridiculous scenarios [1]. [1] For example, some claimed that police could use the kill switches to quickly and without a warrant shut down all the phones of protestors to stop them from reporting and filming police brutality. That was a ridiculous scenario for several reasons. First, the kill switch involves sending a targeted command to each specific phone to be killed, so the police would first have to bring in something to identify all the protestor phones. Then they would have to go to the phone maker or the carrier (which depends on how the particular kill switch works for that phone) and get them to send the command. There is no particular reason to believe that the companies would have a procedure for that, so this could be very slow...and there is also no reason to believe it is even possible, because nothing in the law requires that the company can kill the phone without the cooperation of the owner. By the time they do all this, the protest is likely to be long over. Furthermore, the law only applies to smartphones. People with feature phones would be free to report and record unfettered, as would people using tablets. On top of that, the law allows (and as far as I know every implementation implements) the phone owner to turn off kill switch capability, so the "use the kill switch to cover up police brutality" plan only works if none of the protestors are smart enough to turn off the kill switch before joining the protest. If the police actually, in the real world, were going to try to block protestors from reporting and recording with their phones they would do it by trying to get the cell towers in the area shut down, or by using Stingray-like devices in active mode to intercept and block communications.
  • sageikosa 11y ago
    Identifying the phones with stingray solves at least one of those problems.
  • pessimizer 11y ago
    > There is no particular reason to believe that the companies would have a procedure for that This is where you go off the rails. There's little reason to believe that the companies would have a procedure for doing this for the first time, there's a little more reason to believe that they would have a procedure for doing this the second and third times, by the sixth and seventh times they want do do this, it will be surprising that they don't have a procedure, and by the tenth and eleventh times it will be negligent that after all this time, they haven't managed to put a procedure into place. By the 30th or 40th time, there will be a police issued Android app to send in GPS coordinates and request a radius, and at headquarters, someone will type that into an app running on Windows XP and then click "OK."