Smartphone 'Kill Switches' May Be Required By Law

After months of trying to persuade smartphone manufacturers to equip devices with so-called kill switches to curb rampant cell phone theft, politicians have now turned to the law to get the job done.

California Sen. Mark Leno introduced a bill today that would require all smartphones be hardwired with anti-theft technology that "bricks" stolen phones, essentially turning them into a useless chunk of metal, which authorities say would discourage would-be thieves.

If the law passes it'll most likely mean that all mobile phones in the US would come pre-loaded with a kill switch, since it wouldn't be practical to only build the technology into devices sold in the Golden State.

A coalition of police, politicians, and consumer activists, led by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, have been pushing hard to get phone makers to voluntarily include an option to remotely disable and wipe out devices on their products.

As a response to these concerns, and in an attempt to preempt legal action, Apple introduced its Activation Lock this summer, and Samsung proposed pre-loading devices with the LoJack bricking app. However, US phone carriers balked at the idea, refusing to sell Samsung products if they came loaded with the kill switch.

“Samsung appears to be taking the issue seriously, but the carriers are not,” Gascón told Motherboard’s Max Cherney earlier this week. “By continuing to reject a technological solution, the wireless carriers are subjecting millions of their customers to this epidemic of violent robberies.”

The major wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, represented by the trade group CTIA-The Wireless Association, say they’re worried that criminals could still hack into bricked phones. But Gascón suspects the real reason for the resistance is that the telecoms don't want to lose out on the hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue they get from selling theft insurance premiums, plus the billions more that customers spend replacing their stolen phones.

It’s a sizable chunk of retailers’ profits: Nearly one in three US robberies involve the cell phone theft, according to the FCC, amounting to more than 1.6 million stolen phones last year. Rampant smartphone theft is quickly becoming an unwieldy problem for law enforcement. While police have fretted for years over "Apple-picking"—crooks nicking the phone out of someone's back pocket or the like—street robberies are now becoming violent, officials say.

To address the issue, the FCC, police, and CTIA teamed up last month to create a national database to track stolen phones, and blacklist them so they can't be activated. But, the database doesn't extend outside the US, which does nothing to thwart the huge smartphone black market overseas—an illegal export operation law enforcement has deemed an international criminal conspiracy.

Authorities argue that implenting kill switches to render a phone useless once a thief gets their hands on it would deter thefts and start to rein in the illicit smartphone trade. California lawmakers will consider the proposed bill at the start of next year, and if it passes, the mandate would take effect at the beginning of 2015.