7 ms·

"Let's ban tiny phones" - UK Government

66 points by edent 13y ago

AndresNavarro 13y ago
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...
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  A worthwhile discussion perhaps, I posted an alternate viewpoint above, here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257400
Mordor 13y ago
Sounds reasonable, but what are the MP's going to do, since that's the only part of them able to talk?
Shish2k 13y ago
> 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?
- protothomas 13y ago
  I suspect it would be to do with spotting visitors bringing in illicit mobile phones not prisoners.
- reubensutton 13y ago
  Person taking car keys into the visiting room: not suspicious.
  - onetimeonly 13y ago
    You get stripped of all metal when you enter visiting rooms in UK prisons.
- nicholassmith 13y ago
  Both are suspicious circumstances, but this is more to target people taking phones into prisons concealed as something else.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  Prisoner with car keys: not useful. Prisoner with a phone: useful.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    You can stab people with keys. I have a VW flick key. Sharpen it up, and its a great little weapon.
    - onetimeonly 13y ago
      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.
      - marcosdumay 13y ago
        It is not hard to notice an RF transmitter. If the police thinks their size matters in any way, they completely missed the point.
      - ImprovedSilence 13y ago
        so we should just give them knives since they will just find a way around not having one anyway?
gazrogers 13y ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to make prisons mobile signal dead-zones?
- walshemj 13y ago
  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.
  - onetimeonly 13y ago
    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.
- alexmunroe 13y ago
  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.
  - cbr 13y ago
    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.
  - omh 13y ago
    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.
- 13y ago
DanBC 13y ago
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_population 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.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  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.
- smtddr 13y ago
  >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.
DanWaterworth 13y ago
I can see this working, provided the prisoners don't have criminal connections who would be able to import tiny phones illegally.
rorrr2 13y ago
Why not ban all the criminal activity? It will surely stop the criminals.
- schnaars 13y ago
  Like banning guns.
frank_boyd 13y ago
Totally ridiculous and not justifiable. Just install jammers at the jails. The real reason for a ban must be elsewhere.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  Probably wouldn't work. The guards would break them. There's lots of money to be made off the illicit economy surrounding prison.
- bloat 13y ago
  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?
  - simias 13y ago
    How do you guarantee that the calls/texts from people around the prison won't go through that tower?
- omh 13y ago
  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.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but here's your reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257452
fetbaffe 13y ago
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=1234&bih=933&tbm=isch&tbnid=zhkXQ9VCbOdh_M:&imgrefurl=http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-20846497-telephone-electricity-pole-and-wires.php&docid=H1eS89yVqML48M&imgurl=http://i.istockimg.com/file_thumbview_approve/20846497/2/stock-photo-20846497-telephone-electricity-pole-and-wires.jpg&w=380&h=253&ei=s_oVUsLWKMSI4AT_44GYDQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:36,s:0,i:195&iact=rc&page=2&tbnh=171&tbnw=247&start=26&ndsp=32&tx=101&ty=86 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!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  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...
onetimeonly 13y ago
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.
- edent 13y ago
  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
  - onetimeonly 13y ago
    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.
walid 13y ago
Also websites that intentionally block content if JavaScript is disabled should be banned.
einhverfr 13y ago
My first thought was "how much of this is about jails and how much is about small 3g-capable cameras?
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  it's about inmates being capable of continuing to run organized crime/drug rings from inside a jail cell.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    That is the stated rationale. But after the Guardian incident, the first thought in my mind is about journalists.
Spooky23 13y ago
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.
bestest 13y ago
they should also consider drugs. and crime.
Dakos 13y ago
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.
epo 13y ago
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.

66 points by edent 13y ago

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...

ImprovedSilence 13y ago
A worthwhile discussion perhaps, I posted an alternate viewpoint above, here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257400

Mordor 13y ago

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

Shish2k 13y ago

> 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?

protothomas 13y ago
I suspect it would be to do with spotting visitors bringing in illicit mobile phones not prisoners.
reubensutton 13y ago
Person taking car keys into the visiting room: not suspicious.
- onetimeonly 13y ago
  You get stripped of all metal when you enter visiting rooms in UK prisons.
nicholassmith 13y ago
Both are suspicious circumstances, but this is more to target people taking phones into prisons concealed as something else.
SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
Prisoner with car keys: not useful. Prisoner with a phone: useful.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  You can stab people with keys. I have a VW flick key. Sharpen it up, and its a great little weapon.
  - onetimeonly 13y ago
    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.
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      It is not hard to notice an RF transmitter. If the police thinks their size matters in any way, they completely missed the point.
    - ImprovedSilence 13y ago
      so we should just give them knives since they will just find a way around not having one anyway?

gazrogers 13y ago

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

walshemj 13y ago
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.
- onetimeonly 13y ago
  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.
alexmunroe 13y ago
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.
- cbr 13y ago
  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.
- omh 13y ago
  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.
13y ago

DanBC 13y ago

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_population 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.

ImprovedSilence 13y ago
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.
smtddr 13y ago
>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.

DanWaterworth 13y ago

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

rorrr2 13y ago

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

schnaars 13y ago
Like banning guns.

frank_boyd 13y ago

Totally ridiculous and not justifiable. Just install jammers at the jails. The real reason for a ban must be elsewhere.

vinceguidry 13y ago
Probably wouldn't work. The guards would break them. There's lots of money to be made off the illicit economy surrounding prison.
bloat 13y ago
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?
- simias 13y ago
  How do you guarantee that the calls/texts from people around the prison won't go through that tower?
omh 13y ago
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.
ImprovedSilence 13y ago
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but here's your reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257452

fetbaffe 13y ago

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=1234&bih=933&tbm=isch&tbnid=zhkXQ9VCbOdh_M:&imgrefurl=http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-20846497-telephone-electricity-pole-and-wires.php&docid=H1eS89yVqML48M&imgurl=http://i.istockimg.com/file_thumbview_approve/20846497/2/stock-photo-20846497-telephone-electricity-pole-and-wires.jpg&w=380&h=253&ei=s_oVUsLWKMSI4AT_44GYDQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:36,s:0,i:195&iact=rc&page=2&tbnh=171&tbnw=247&start=26&ndsp=32&tx=101&ty=86 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!

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
harrytuttle 13y ago
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...

onetimeonly 13y ago

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.

edent 13y ago
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
- onetimeonly 13y ago
  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.

walid 13y ago

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

einhverfr 13y ago

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

ImprovedSilence 13y ago
it's about inmates being capable of continuing to run organized crime/drug rings from inside a jail cell.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  That is the stated rationale. But after the Guardian incident, the first thought in my mind is about journalists.

Spooky23 13y ago

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.

bestest 13y ago

they should also consider drugs. and crime.

Dakos 13y ago

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.

epo 13y ago

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.