Prisoners' 'innovative' anti-IMSI catcher defence was ... er, tinfoil Prisoners at a Scottish jail evaded an IMSI catcher deployed to collar them making illegal phone calls – by putting up tinfoil after bungling guards left the spy gear visible to inmates. “As you are also aware the invisible grabber at HMP Shott [sic] was visible,” Maurice Dickie of the Scottish Prison Service wrote in an …
that would mean you couldn't go to those places if you were on-call and needed to be reached in emergencies. I would understand in some situations but not all. (Even though I think mobile phones are horrid things and I don't have a personal one at all.)
Seconded .
We're on 24x7 call for my Teenage Daughter to receive a Kidney Transplant .
Its difficult making life as "normal" as possible for Her without having to avoid places without a phone signal .
Multiple devices on separate networks to mitigate patchy reception but a jammer does not differenciate .
I'm the primary carer for my elderly father and he's got an alarm that alerts me if he falls or he can press if he needs urgent help such as confused, lost etc. It sends me his GPS location as well as calling me (I have to answer it) in order for it not to then call other relatives.
I just find it amazing that we're even considering this tech when the bottom line is theatre staff not chucking people out who are using mobiles and prisoners not being searched and having cells searched frequently.
The effectiveness of Faraday cages requires very detailed, careful application (many years ago I worked with TEMPEST kit). I've had my phone in biscuit tins, and in steel filing cabinets, and the thing will still have a signal and ring when a call comes in. Chicken wire's also probably too big a mesh to block a mobile phone signal, due to the ratio of the holes to the wavelength.
My solution is to lock the convicts in steel shipping containers. That wouldn't stop mobile signals - until I'd had the containers dumped at sea.
"Chicken wire's also probably too big a mesh to block a mobile phone signal, due to the ratio of the holes to the wavelength."
A quick google (which I did before posting my comment) would inform you that the wavelength of a GSM signal is in the order of tens of centimetres.
IIRC, a mesh is an effective Faraday cage if the gauge is in the order of half a wavelength or smaller. Chicken wire has a gauge typically in the order of tens of millimetres, so very roughly 1/10th of the wavelength, and perfectly adequate.
I wonder if the 'phone in the tin' works because the tin, rather than acting as a Faraday cage, is in close enough proximity to the phone's aerial to couple to it via inductance and act as an aerial extension? Admittedly, it's a long enough time since I did any proper physics for this to possibly be complete nonsense, but it feels feasible...
by way of a deterrent to others?
The lags haven't been deterred by the threat of "up to" life imprisonment, and even in territories where capital punishment is still used regularly and with gay abandon (like Saudi, or China), it doesn't seem very effective in stopping transgressions.
On the other hand, in the phone-in-jail context, humiliating corporal punishments might be effective, like supergluing the phone back in its original hiding place, and then force feeding the lag a big curry, whilst all the other inmates watch and jeer.
"wouldn't it be cheaper just to put a round of .303 into the cranium of any offender"
Of course it would be cheaper. Just lead to a completely different society, and where offence escalation is the norm, so if you catch someone doing something that will get them executed, they'll consider murdering you, since it's not going to make any difference. There's also the small issue that we're all guilty of something.
It's also a lot cheaper if instead of treating cancer in people over 40, heart disease in those over 50 and pretty much anything over 70, we just give them a big shot of morphine and comfy place to pass on.
Cost-benefit is not really a good plan when it comes to human life.
Also deterrents don't work (alas). Or more specifically don't work on those who are getting jailed, as they've already decided violating the moral/ethical/legal rules are OK for a certain situation.
Also deterrents don't work (alas)
Detterents work fine. It's just that harsh penalties are no deterrent; you need effective detection for that.
If the penalty for drug-dealing was one month per conviction, but you were *guaranteed* to get caught every time, then one month would be sufficient; the only people who would even consider dealing were those for whom the profit on a single deal is worth the time in prison. And that means wholesalers might sell to wholesalers, but there would be no retail trade...
Vic.
But since you can't have that kind of guarantee
Well done. You completely missed the point.
What I'm saying is that it is the probability of detection that deters, not the size of the penalty. I'm well aware that you can't make that guarantee in real life, it was merely a way of showing that a small penalty is perfectly effective if that probability is high enough.
Vic.
And what I'M saying is that at long as the probably isn't 100%, SOMEONE'S gonna gamble. More than likely a significant number of someones. Including those with the means to influence those odds (corrupt the guarantors, like I said) and see it as a worthy investment.
IOW, the deterrent effect is probably overstated in terms of probability of getting caught. After all, they won't stop crimes of passion (where probability never figures) or sociopaths (who will always plan about getting away with it).
"Method of covert communications using narrowband infrared"
Inspired by those reallllllly old IR helis intended for indoor use, and later videosenders which
alas got trashed when said IR helis crashed across the country.
Patent it, then sue anyone using it back to the Stone Age.
Simples :-)
(nit: might violate a patent or 10 probably owned by Golf Charlie Hotel Quebec and co)
I think the issue there is that the people doing the searching are probably the ones who supplied the confiscated items, honestly.
Personally I'd resolve that by having a set pool of search people large enough to make bribing everybody impossible, who travel around prisons randomly and get paid bonuses for finding contraband and or entry points for the contraband.
And people are using tinfoil in the direction of these devices to block them? Figure out which way the mobile base station is, and stick them that way. Fin foil it all you want, chaps. Failing that, just stick half a dozen surrounding the prison perimeter.
Some kind of mobile detection kit?
Im not by any means an expert, but there must be some measurable output from a mobile phone that could be detected?
Dot detectors around the building have a silent alarm go off if a phone is detected - start searching for it.
The problem isnt that we need to stop them using phones, its that we need to stop them having the phones in the first place.
Still amazes me how we're looking for a tech solution to basic prison functions - in other words confiscating banned items regularly.
Still amazes me that we have so many prisons, and claims that we need more. Expensive, clearly not much deterrent, and pretty ineffectual in preventing re-offending.
"Still amazes me that we have so many prisons, and claims that we need more. Expensive, clearly not much deterrent, and pretty ineffectual in preventing re-offending."
But it keeps them off the streets. Or would you rather have them looking for YOU next?
As for increasing the shakedowns, there's also the matter of budgets.
But it keeps them off the streets. Or would you rather have them looking for YOU next?
The problem is that with the lack of jail places in the UK, we don't actually keep them off the streets for very long. At an emotive level, I LIKE the idea of punitive sentences, endless years breaking rocks, cold gruel, regular beatings from savage warders, and cold stone walled cells on Dartmoor. But sadly logic and fact shows that doesn't stop the bastards re-offending when they get out, so all that prison does is act a a bit of a buffer in a system that can also serve as a criminal meeting ground and skills sharing college. And I'm paying for that.
Certainly there's a lunatic or irredeemable hard core where the only solution is to lock them away forever, and a few whose crime is so heinous that they should forfeit any chance of release, but that's probably a couple of big prison's worth, not the rotating army of perhaps 300,000 regular reoffenders who make up the bulk of the UK's 100,000 prison population.
>But it keeps them off the streets
Where they are replaced by lieutenants.
Prison doesn't work. It doesn't deter. It doesn't reform. It doesn't protect society.
It's sad that most commentards are focussing on ways to make life harder for people who already find life hard enough.
Prison is supposed to prepare criminals for return to society - a society in which phones play a major role. But prisoners' only access to a phone is an expensive, un-private, inconvenient dumb payphone.
For every gangster who (supposedly) runs his empire with a contraband smartphone, there are a thousand who just want to talk to their kids.
"Where they are replaced by lieutenants."
Then the lieutenants get busted, too. And so on. At some point, the organization gets so disorganized due to lack of leadership they can't function effectively and end up splintering into local hoodlums again instead of organized rackets.
"Prison is supposed to prepare criminals for return to society - a society in which phones play a major role. But prisoners' only access to a phone is an expensive, un-private, inconvenient dumb payphone."
Except many prisoners are dead-ends. They were never in society to begin with. And since the UK doesn't believe in capital punishment, not even for the likes of a Bin Laden, there's no outlet for the true rejects.
"Tends to foster corruption."
That may be why you make the pool big. Big enough a pool will likely have an Untouchable that can rat on the rest, keeping everyone honest. Unless you can show a very large body able to be bribed completely down to the last agent...
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