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from the this-explains-why-we-never-have-bars dept.
The US government will be forced to explain why its cell network kill-switch plans should be kept secret today.
Under Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 303, the US government – in particular the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – is allowed to shutdown cellphone service anywhere in the country, and even across an entire city if it feels there is a crisis situation.
However, the actual content of the policy remains secret, raising fears that it is open to abuse. For example, it's not clear who is authorized to make such a decision nor under what circumstances.
There are also groups concerned that killing of cellphone service during an emergency could make things worse.
In a frequently quoted example, San Francisco's rail system BART flipped a cell network kill-switch in several subway stations in 2011 amid a protest over a BART cop who shot and killed a drunk homeless man ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/12/bart_polioce_cut_mobile_phone_service/ ). Charles Hill allegedly threw a knife at an officer before the police opened fire.
The fact that the network shutdown was ordered against a public demonstration raised immediate concerns over how the policy is written and implemented.
In February 2013, sparked by the BART event and a refusal by the DHS to release the policy under a Freedom of Information Act request, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sued the DHS ( https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/04/27/epic-case-dhs-phone-kill-switch.pdf ) [PDF] in order to get it to disclose the details.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:16PM
Its a pretty stupid excuse for this system. Plenty of other options to go with. The boston marathon bomb was said to have been triggered using the parts from remote control toy cars (see wikipedia article). Even the bomb was made from a pressure cooker and fireworks. The Westgate shopping mall in Kenya was attacked by armed thugs. The US is filled with plenty of guns and obtaining them is pretty easy. A similar attack could EASILY occur on US soil and all their high tech BS surveillance and kill switches won't stop it.
Tin foil hat time: This is more about suppressing protests and activism than stopping a bomb.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday April 30 2015, @10:47PM
It's not about winning the war, it's about suppressing unfriendly populations -- like how we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and domestically during the war on drugs, and now moreso domestically with the war on terror.
A war on terror...we're supposed to win by being afraid of everything? Classic doublethink. And now doublethink is taught as Common Core in America's public schools, which allows kids to improperly evaluate basic fucking arithmetic problems and still get the problem right with the proper explanation. And vise-versa, a student could have a numerically correct answer and still fail the problem because it was not calculated in the manner expected.
This can and does break the will of the student or citizen, with Learned Helplessness [wikipedia.org] being the end game.