You're all going to love this one. I haven't done any fact checking yet, but it's off the Telegraph UK website at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...co-to-fingerprint-all-mobile-phone-users.html Here's the article: Mexico will start a national register of mobile phone users that will include fingerprinting all customers in an effort to catch criminals who use the devices to extort money and negotiate kidnapping ransoms. Last Updated: 11:15PM GMT 09 Feb 2009 Under a new law published on Monday and due to be in force in April, mobile phone companies will have a year to build up a database of their clients, complete with fingerprints. The idea would be to match calls and messages to the phones' owners. Hundreds of people are kidnapped in Mexico every year and the number of victims is rising sharply as drug gangs, under pressure from an army crackdown, seek new income. Politicians who pushed the bill through Congress last year say there are around 700 criminal bands in Mexico, some of them operating from prison cells, that use cell phones to extract extortion and kidnap ransom payments. Most of Mexico's 80 million mobile phones are prepaid handsets with a given number of minutes of use that can be bought in stores without any identification. The phones can be topped up with more minutes via vendors on street corners. The register, detailed in the government's official gazette, means new subscribers will now be fingerprinted when they buy a handset or phone contract. The plan also requires operators to store all cell phone information such as call logs, text and voice messages, for one year. Information on users and calls will remain private and only available with court approval to track down criminals.
I'm pretty sure that the mafiosos already register cell phones in other people's names anyway. So if these other people are the ones getting fingerprinted...and then the phone in question is used in a crime...then can't the other person just say "I lost my phone?" Am I being dense here?
I want to quote what my husband said when he read this...I'll leave out the preceding string of swear words...
Or just install signal blockers... but its just more evidence of how much power these scumballs have even in prison, that the prison administration doesn't do more to control their illegal activities. & yes, the idea is stupid, as you could easily just steal a phone before you make the extortion call.
And won't this just lead to corruption at the fingerprinting database level? I'll give you $500 pesos to make sure my print is blurry...or to put your own print there...or to mix up the records...or...
