杏吧原创

FORGET Prince Harry鈥檚 under-age boozing and pot smoking. If Britain鈥檚 Home
Office is right, the fastest-growing illegal teenage pastime is stealing
people鈥檚 mobile phones
(see 鈥淢obile targets鈥�).

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鈥檚 good news for the European inventors of that system鈥攁nd 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 鈥渢een-on-teen鈥� street crime that can鈥檛
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.

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鈥攕omething 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鈥檛 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鈥攖hat 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鈥檛 foolproof. Phone manufacturers must ensure that the
numbers aren鈥檛 accidentally duplicated, and that once installed in a phone they
cannot be altered. Then the networks need a central鈥攁nd preferably
global鈥攔egister 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鈥檚 truly defective is their will to implement
it.