FORGET Prince Harry’s under-age boozing and pot smoking. If Britain’s Home
Office is right, the fastest-growing illegal teenage pastime is stealing
people’s mobile phones
(see “Mobile targets”).
The problem may be particularly serious in Britain, but we should remember
that thieves steal cellphones everywhere. Some of the reasons are all too
obvious: mobile phones are by definition small objects of high value that are
often used on street corners. But one less obvious factor fuelling the theft is
the globalised technology behind mobile phones.
Nearly every commercial cellphone network in the world uses the GSM system.
That’s good news for the European inventors of that system—and for you too
if you want to use your phone abroad. The downside is that handsets stolen in
London can be whisked off by the hundred to Munich or Moscow, reprogrammed in a
trice and sold on. That is why it is wrong to claim, as the British government
does, that this is simply opportunistic “teen-on-teen” street crime that can’t
be tackled through systematic police work. Many of the thieves are teenagers.
But many will also be selling on the phones they steal to grown-up criminals in
organised chains. These are the people who can and ought to be brought to
book.
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At the same time, this is not, as some phone companies claim, purely a
policing issue. Nobody is saying the companies must make stolen phones
impossible to use, just a lot harder—something they could easily achieve
through the existing system of electronic serial numbers used to mark
handsets.
Some companies already use these IMEI numbers to block stolen phones. But to
be truly effective every company must do the same, and at present some are
refusing to play ball, claiming the method won’t work. Really? For years, the
cellphone industry claimed it was impossible to tap mobile conversations. But
then exactly this happened to Princess Diana and her alleged lover (with
toe-curling consequences), and the industry changed its tune. It made a selling
point of the fact that encryption would end eavesdropping on the GSM networks
that were about to come on line.
The industry also used to claim it was virtually impossible to clone
phones—that is, intercept their signals and use the information gleaned to
configure new phones to charge calls to the same accounts. Again it was forced
to swallow its words in the face of a public furore, this time when the phones
of a couple of newspaper editors were cloned. Again, encryption was the
answer.
Security tags aren’t foolproof. Phone manufacturers must ensure that the
numbers aren’t accidentally duplicated, and that once installed in a phone they
cannot be altered. Then the networks need a central—and preferably
global—register listing the tags of all phones reported stolen, so they
can all block them from their networks. All this is eminently doable.
Some companies will no doubt continue to claim the approach is fatally
flawed. But the only thing that’s truly defective is their will to implement
it.
