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A New Proposal Would Require Identification to Purchase a Prepaid Cell Phone

A bipartisan Senate bill would be the first of their kind to be aimed at stopping terrorism suspects from being able to hide themselves behind the cloak of the use of a prepaid cell phone to plot their attack. Currently a prepaid cell phone requires nothing in the form of identification.
The bill would require anyone purchasing a prepaid cell phone to present some identification and when this happens they would require the cell phone companies to keep this information on file just like they currently do with any subscription cell phone or landline phone.
The two senators sponsoring this legislation are:
1. Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer – Democrat from New York
2. Senator John Crnyn – Republication from Texas
Their proposal would require this information to be retained by the carriers for a period of 18 months once the cell phone has been deactivated.
Schumer talks about the proposal being very overdue for many years as the drug kingpins and the terrorists and gang members being able to stay steps ahead of the law through using a prepaid cell phone. Prepaid cell phones are way too easy to get away with things as they are so hard to trace.
One of the most recent examples of this is the Times Square plot. Apparently the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, used a prepaid cell phone in order to arrange the purchase of the Pathfinder that he used to attempt his bomb attempt. In addition to that he used the prepaid cell to make many calls into Pakistan before attempted his bombing. The federal authorities were able to catch a break when the number that was listed in the call log of the phone matched another that was provided to United States Immigration and Customs officials months earlier. This was when he entered back into the United States after being in Pakistan.
If it wasn’t purely for that one stroke of luck the authorities wouldn’t have ever been able to match the phones number. This is what was provided by the seller of the Pathfinder.
There is currently no House companion bill. Schumer has been speaking to the Attorney General though and does believe that the legislation has some good chances of winning support from the administration. This comes not directly from Schumer himself but from one of his spokespersons.
Privacy Concerns
The advocates for civil liberties though have some concerns about the proposal stating that there has to be a role for anonymous communications in any society that is a free one. Anonymity is important for the whistleblowers, for the battered spouses, for the reporter’s sources, etc… Even with that the spaces for the anonymous or pseudonymous communications have been extremely narrowed. One example of this would be pay phone; they’ve for the most part been disappearing.
Additionally the privacy advocates are worried that necessitating prepaid cell phone registration could be just another step forward to something that is more worrisome, identity registration in order to access the internet. The thought is that almost anyone would admit that in any free society there is a need for people to be able to communicate without leaving a complete digital paper trail behind them. So the privacy advocates are stating that the proposal has to be considered and taken in with a much broader context.
Countries that already have cell phone registration requirements in order to help prevent terrorism are:
• Australia
• German
• Indonesia
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• Norway
• Switzerland
• Thailand
• South Africa
In the United States there have been some similar state laws proposed in many states including Texas, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

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Tags: Cell phone plans, Cell Phones

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 4:12 pm by Bryan Bradshaw and is filed under Cell phone plans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.