Last week the California Supreme Court ruled that a police officer may pilfer the contents of a mobile phone (or presumably a PDA, net book, notebook or wallet) without a warrant merely because the person carrying it is arrested. So, once arrested all privacy rights in what you carry are lost. This is yet another in a series of slights gouging our rights in mobile communications.
Last year, the “Pre-Paid Mobile Device Identification Act,” introduced by Senators Schumer (D-NY) and Cornyn (R-TX), required that anyone purchasing a prepaid phone would have to provide their name, address, date of birth, photo, and various tax documents (i.e., 1099, W-2) to the seller, who must then transmit that information to a service provider to be retained in a sprawling database for 18 months.
According to Mr. Schumer, “This proposal is overdue because for years, terrorists, drug kingpins and gang members have stayed one step ahead of the law by using prepaid phones that are hard to trace.” No mention of the 58 million legitimate users, of course—only the argument that somehow mobile communications are suspect.
The senator is not the only one slighting mobile communications. For the first time since 2003, and after six successive years, in 2010 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) omitted from its wireless competition report the conclusion that the wireless marketplace is “effectively competitive.” Was this change warranted, or just the result of electoral politics? Consider a few stats:
- U.S. consumers command 300 million mobile connections with an 88.3 percent mobile communications penetration rate,
- Use the most innovative applications (over 240,000 applications on seven platforms),
- Which run on more than 630 choices of handsets, manufactured by more than 32 companies,
- Using the most advanced networks in the world (largest number of consumers served by 3G of any country in the world, and greatest 4G deployment in the world),
- All while paying the lowest average price per minute of any OECD country,
- But what they do pay allows U.S. wireless providers to invest $20.4 billion in their currently operational networks,
- Providing approximately 65 percent of Americans with a choice of five or more facilities-based providers. (The largest U.S. cities have more than 14 facilities-based and non-facilities-based providers, and in the smallest U.S. cities, eight out of 10 have more than 14 facilities-based and non-facilities-based providers.)
Despite these facts, the FCC is dissing mobile communications. The next thing you know, Venezuela will follow the FCC lead in regulating the Internet…
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Today's TechByte was written by Bartlett D. Cleland Director of IPI Center for Technology Freedom.