The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has asked the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to force all phone companies to make stolen devices “unusable bricks” in order to make them harder to sell on and less desirable to steal.
No mere signal should be able to permanently render a computer unbootable, least of all remotely.
Don’t all devices have unique IDs beyond the SIM? I assume that already gets communicated, because the odds of true interchangeable anonymity seem implausible. A blacklist of devices flagged as stolen would be similarly effective and at least slightly less of a potential nightmare.
And how should this switch be operated, and by who?
It’s hard to imagine a kill switch for a communications device meant to be used for rendering a stolen device inaccessible or useless being misused by anyone with power anywhere in the world. At all.
Ever.
What an absolutely terrible way to deal with the problem.
Why is that?
When you create the ability to brick phones you create the ability to mass-brick phones. Imagine a totalitarian regime seeing an uprising on the horizon and bricking the phones of protesters that attended some protest. Imagine hackers or three -letter agencies getting this ability wanting to disrupt the economy of a town, city, or country. I wouldn’t be opposed to someone having software on their phone to remote brick it. I’d be surprised if something like that didn’t already exist. It’s government mandating a backdoor that’s the problem.
They will still steal them, just part them out.
Because the authorities could then brick anyone’s phone at any time. Including rich people and corporations that could hire security consultants to manage hackers to do it.
Because it’s the police’s responsibility to stop the snatchers in the first place? Not insist that other companies make up for their lack of results.
It’s not a COMPLETELY terrible idea, I know Apple already bricks stolen phones upon request, but at the owner’s expense. It’s still the people hired to solve the problem passing the responsibility on to others.
That’s already the goal of factory reset protection…
Though there’s ways to bypass FRP. And ultimately always will be.
