Passport soon to be required for Brits buying cell phones

[Dominus Atheos]

Times Online

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.

Contingency planning for such a move is already thought to be under way at Vodafone, where 72% of its 18.5m UK customers use pay-as-you-go.

The office of Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said it anticipated that a compulsory mobile phone register would be unveiled as part of a law which ministers would announce next year.

“With regards to the database that would contain details of all mobile users, including pay-as-you-go, we would expect that this information would be included in the database proposed in the draft Communications Data Bill,” a spokeswoman said.

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said he understood that several mobile phone firms had discussed the proposed database in talks with government officials.

As The Sunday Times revealed earlier this month, GCHQ has already been provided with up to £1 billion to work on the pilot stage of the Big Brother database, which will see thousands of “black boxes” installed on communications lines provided by Vodafone and BT as part of a pilot interception programme.

The proposals have sparked a fierce backlash inside Whitehall. Senior officials in the Home Office have privately warned that the database scheme is impractical, disproportionate and potentially unlawful. The revolt last week forced Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, to delay announcing plans for the database until next year.

[The Romulan Republic]

Why is it every time I hear something about Britain in the news it confirms that country's slide towards police state status?

[Duckie]

Why is it every time I hear something about Britain in the news it confirms that country's slide towards police state status?

Because you're not listening well enough? In case any Brits want to correct me here, security measures aside Blighty is not currently occupied by the V for Vendetta guys or any other fascist police states, is it?

[Ekiqa]

This makes the series "The Last Enemy" all the more terrifying.

What is also terrifying is that HM Revenue and Customs lost the data of 25 million people last year, and a man walked out of the MoD with a hard drive containing classified data that they forgot to wipe.

Lets hope that sanity prevails among enough of the Labour Party to kill this. Both the LibDems and the Tories announced that they will kill the national ID cards, and it took the 6th try to get that passed through the Lords.

[Stark]

What do you need atm to buy pre-paid phones in the UK? In AU you already need enough info to actually put an id on the 'account' that's represented by the chip, but people seldom go through the process of 'transferring ownership' when they give the chip to other people etc.

[NoXion]

Surely there are better ways of "combating terrorism" than eavesdropping on everybody's phone & internet communications and demanding passport ID for mobile phones?

What's to stop the prospective terrorist from simply using a phone acquired under someone else's name?

I'm not convinced that the terrorist threat demands this kind of extreme response. We dealt with Irish terrorism without all this Big Brother bullshit, and the apart from 7/7 all the planned terrorist acts have been carried out by raging incompetents (Glasgow airport incident anyone?)

[dragon]

When you buy a prepaid phone here in Germany you have to show a form of id and have the phone regristered before you can take it out of the store. But then afterwards so many of these phones end up in used stores, so it's easy to get one off the net. Even though the purpose of the id and register isn't for goverment survillance but more so for the Telecom monoploy.

[Zac Naloen]

What do you need atm to buy pre-paid phones in the UK? In AU you already need enough info to actually put an id on the 'account' that's represented by the chip, but people seldom go through the process of 'transferring ownership' when they give the chip to other people etc.

Right now, all you need is Cash.


It's the contracts that require ID info.

[Zac Naloen]

Surely there are better ways of "combating terrorism" than eavesdropping on everybody's phone & internet communications and demanding passport ID for mobile phones?

What's to stop the prospective terrorist from simply using a phone acquired under someone else's name?

I'm not convinced that the terrorist threat demands this kind of extreme response. We dealt with Irish terrorism without all this Big Brother bullshit, and the apart from 7/7 all the planned terrorist acts have been carried out by raging incompetents (Glasgow airport incident anyone?)

Who said anything about eves-dropping?

The data base is just whats been dialled/emailed and when.

No content, so they claim.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Good thing terrorists haven't figured out the idea of forging identity papers.

[Rye]

Why is it every time I hear something about Britain in the news it confirms that country's slide towards police state status?

It makes good news.

[Edi]

That measure is a useless boondoggle.

If a phone is acquired in someone else's name, or just bought in some other country like Finland, Sweden or any other and then a British prepaid chip used in it, it does an end run around this idiocy. Unless they mean to make the registration mandatory when buying a prepaid mobile phone account, which is entirely separate from the goddamn handset. In which case they might as well outlaw prepaid accounts entirely. In which case it would perhaps be possible to use foreign prepaid accounts (it'd just cost a fuckload more).

A basic knowledge of operator procedures and how the technology works makes it quite clear that this is nothing but scaremongering, overzealousness, ignorance and at worst a move toward giving the authorities more power to conduct surveillance on citizens.

If they actually had some way of targeting it at the criminals and doing something about the problem they cite as a reason, I might have some sympathy, but this is outright bullshit. I happen to work for an operator, so I know enough about how this shit works to call it.