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Supreme Court may Force Department of Homeland Security to Divulge Secret Plan to Cut Cell Service

posted by martyb on Sunday August 16 2015, @12:11PM   
from the walkie-talkies-FTW dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

The Supreme Court was asked in a petition to force the government to disclose the US clandestine plan to disable cell service during emergencies.
...
The Electronic Privacy Information Center told the high court's justices Tuesday that the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit's decision created a new "catchall provision that can be used in any case involving records related to domestic and national security programs." (PDF)

The privacy group had demanded the documents from the Department of Homeland Security in 2011 following the shuttering of cell service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system to quell a protest. The Department of Homeland Security refused to divulge the documents associated with SOP 303, which the appeals court described as a "unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices."

In recent protests in Hong Kong the government shutdown cell service in the area of the protests. The protesters used FireChat to get around the restrictions.

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Original Submission

• Increasingly stupid thing to do in the first place (Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Sunday August 16 2015, @01:36PM

  by zocalo (302) on Sunday August 16 2015, @01:36PM (#223515)

  Beware the unforseen consequences. One small problem with this idea is that an increasingly large number of telemetry type data devices are using the mobile phone networks to transfer their data, and are quite often doing to with SIMs that are no different than those found in consumer devices instead of those with some form of priortisation setup. Usually that's just for backup purposes and/or low importance data, but usage in more critical infrastructure is definitely on the rise so an extended outage that negates any resilience through retries could well cause more secondary problems than the primary ones that switching off the service is intended to solve.

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  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

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