How About a Little Quickie?

Came across an article from Mobile News - "A New Plan To Make Stolen Phones Useless?" The FCC is worried that someone might steal your cell phone and wants to help you protect it. Sounds like garbage to me. They never wanted to protect me from having my laptop stolen or my radio or my television, why should they care if someone steals my phone? Rather then just reading the article and thinking "Great, my phone will be safer" ask yourself why the FCC should care.

The article says that the problem is that if someone steals your phone, they can replace the sim card and continue using the phone. The proposed solution is to give every phone a unique identification so that they could not use the phone with a new sim card. Oh and the government is going to create a database of every phone that has been stolen. Sounds like a lot of expense and trouble for something that isn't a problem. Right now if your phone is stolen you can have service terminated immediately and you don't get charged.

What this really means is that when your phone is used for something, if you haven't reported it stolen, you won't be able to claim that someone stole your phone. Now why is this important, simple, your phone will be your cash, we have already talked about that. Now, lets say you want to buy some drugs and transfer money to a drug dealer, if he gets caught you won't be able to say that it wasn't you who paid him, you will have to say it was you or who you let borrow your phone. No black market use of electronic cash.

I think most of us would be okay with that; but, it also means that individual phones could be denied service. Maybe they prohibit hate speech and prevent you from using a phone. No, it will start with prohibiting child molesters from using phones except for "safe" numbers. We will all be happy with that, the real tyranny will come later.