In today's episode I wanted to cover a blog post I wrote back on Jan 31st titled "Burner Phones Go Black Market in Poland."
The blog post was inspired by an article on Lodzpost.com, and you can find a link to the original article in today's show notes page.
So back at the beginning of this year Poland put a new law into effect requiring retailers there in Poland to record and report the identity of every customers buying "pre-paid" Sim cards, or "Burner Phones" if you want to call them by their more sensational name. So according to this new law, every customer has to present a government issued ID, and the store has to record their name and national identification number.
I've got a problem with this for a number of reasons, but before I get into that, let's remind people what a SIM card is. A SIM card is the little, removable chip that allows your phone to talk to your cellular carrier's network. It holds unique information such as your telephone number, but also your personal security keys and network authorization data. And if your real-life identity is registered to that SIM card, then your name is associated with every call that phone makes. But if these SIM cards are purchased with cash, or Bitcoin, and no information is required to activate them, then it can be very difficult to track who is using the phone to make calls.
So it's obvious why governments would want every SIM card to be registered - it makes it easier for them to conduct mass surveillance on everyone's phone calls rather than conduct targeted investigations of persons or cell phone numbers under suspicion of an actual crime. Of course that's not what they're going to tell you; so what's their argument? They say, "only a criminal would need to use a burner phone; so if you have nothing to hide, why would you oppose registering your information?"
Good question, so why do I oppose registration?
Well, first off, and I shouldn't have to say this, but I do, so here I go…Privacy is an inherent human right that needs no justification. Just like you don't have to justify why you have the right to free speech or justify why you have the right to practice the religion of your choice, you don't have to justify why you need privacy.
Glenn Greenwald has a really great line he uses whenever somebody trots out "I don't care if the government violates my privacy because I have nothing to hide." Usually this is in relation to e-mail so he says, "Oh yeah, well give the username and passwords to every e-mail account you ever used so that I can go back and read every word you've ever written and report on it in my newspaper." Glenn says that, so far, no one has taken him up on it, and the same thing could be said about this cell phone issue. If someone is in the "I have nothing to hide camp," they why don't they just post their full name and cell phone number online. Forget about the tella-marketers, can you imagine the non-stop calls and text messages from all the trolls on the internet.
But of course that argument isn't going to convince everyone; so let's go over my reasons.
My first reason is going to seem thin to a lot of people who aren't freedom and privacy loving wierdos like myself, but what if you don't have a government issued ID? If people really are free, why should they be forced to be tagged and tracked in a government database? In my opinion, people should be able to completely live their lives and conduct normal daily commerce without being asked "Papers Please" like we live in some fascist state.
My second reason is also going to seem thin to a lot of people, but it shouldn't! My second problem with a policy like this is that it forces the retailer to become an agent of the government, whether they agree with the policy or not, and without compensation. It may seem trivial, but it is a real cost to retailers to gather this information, store this information, and report this information to government. It will definitely hurt their sales and will likely hurt the relationship with their customers. These retailers aren't slaves to be ordered around, and if the government wants people to register their SIM cards, which is still a bad idea, they should at least gather the information themselves. Of course, they know that people, if given the choice, like won't register and the policy won't work. So they force the retailer to do it. But since storing and reporting this information puts a real cost on the retailer, it's likely that they won't put a lot of effort into it and won't do it very securely.
Which leads me to my third gripe about this kind of policy, it creates a data security nightmare. Pretend for just a minute that this was in the US, and we'll talk more about that in a bit but for right now just pretend, can you imagine being at Wal-Mart or your grocery store and being asked to give your Social-Security-Number, probably the most sensitive piece of information about you, to the random stranger behind the counter? Identity theft, which is already a huge problem, will go through the roof. Even if the store employees don't take your information, and some of them definitely will, there is a good chance that the company will sell your information to the highest bidder (lots companies do this all the time), and now you've created a huge honeypot for hackers, and we've seen big retailers get hacked before. Remember the Target hack?
Let's just look at the claim that only criminals purchase pre-paid SIM cards. According to the technology publication, Arstechnica, 25% of the population in America uses pre-paid mobile phones, and that number jumps to 70% in Western Europe and China, 95% in India, and 99% in Africa. Are you telling me that a vast, vast majority of the world's population are drug dealers and terrorist? Criminals are a drop in the bucket, we're talking 1% or less of the population. The people using pre-paid SIM cards are honest, ordinary people just trying to live their lives.
You want to know who these people are? They are the people who are too poor to buy a $900 iPhone or they don't have good enough credit for one of the major carriers to lease them one, which is really the only reason why a carrier needs to gather a bunch of personal information about you - well that and to lock you into an annual contract. And the pre-paid plans, in addition to being more private, are usually much, much more affordable.
That's the people this kind of policy is going to hurt, but it definitely won't be the criminals because the criminals, they'll just switch tactics. They'll start a black market for SIM cards from another country, or they'll use stolen phones, or they'll clone the legit SIM cards of innocent people, or they'll switch entirely to encrypted Voice over IP calls, or they'll switch to some new technology that we haven't even heard of yet. The point is, they aren't going to stop and they definitely aren't going to just hand over their information and get caught.
So, like most government policies, this will backfire. All Poland has done is create a nice new black market and compromise the private, personal information of most of their citizens. But this could never happen in the US, right?
Well, one lawmaker has already tried to make it happen. In March 2016, House Representative Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) [I probably butchered her name but she's trying to butcher our privacy so I guess we're even] introduced the Pre-Paid Mobile Device Security Gap Act of 2016, which would have required similar identification requirements as the Polish law. Luckily, the bill didn't go to a vote, but I wouldn't put it past some future Congress to take it up again because these things never die, they have a way of just coming back again and again until they finally pass.
I don't know, what do you guys think. Are burner phones a basic human right? Hit me up on Twitter @CrypTecSolution or on Facebook to let me know what you think.
What some legitimate reasons why ordinary people would want to use a temporary, private phone number? I think the reasons can be as trivial as selling a couch on Craigslist to as consequential as trying to hide your conversations with a divorce lawyer from an abusive spouse, but I'm interested to hear what you guys think.
One of the major reasons why I use pre-paid SIM card is to have a dedicated, private phone for buying Bitcoin peer-to-peer.
And one of the best places to buy Bitcoin peer-to-peer over the internet is Paxful.com. With Paxful, you don't have to go through some exchange with KYC, or know your customer regulations, that require you to give up personal information. On Paxful, you get to decide how much information you want to share. There are over 300 ways to buy Bitcoin. If privacy is not your main concern, you can use your Paypal account or a debit card. And if privacy is important to you, you can buy your Bitcoin for cash by anonymously depositing it at a vendor's local bank branch. Paxful even makes buying Bitcoin so easy, you can use old gift cards. If you're looking to buy Bitcoin, use the link in today's show notes page to helps support CryptoTech Solutions at no additional cost to you.
And that wraps up today's show. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Don't forget to subscribe to the show on Itunes and consider leaving us a review. Thanks for listening and I'll see you again next time.
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Original Article:
http://lodzpost.com/polishnews/prepaid-sim-cards-poland-registration-mandatory/
Other Citations:
https://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/prepaid-mobile-phone-users-in-america-hit-record-high/
http://gizmodo.com/house-lawmaker-want-to-require-personal-information-to-1767368371
https://www.cryptotech.solutions/3217-burner-phones-go-blackmarket-in-poland/