Terrorist communicationProposed bill would ban “burner” phones in the U.S.

Representative Jackie Speier (D-California) // Source: brynmawr.edu

Representative Jackie Speier (D-California) has proposed a bill which would ban burner phones in the United States.

The proposed bill would require that everyone buying a phone in the United States register with personal ID.

ExtremTech reports that the goal is to prevent criminal or terrorist activities from being planned and carried out with devices that can be bought anonymously and then discarded.

Speier said that requiring shops to condition the sale of a phone on customers’ providing an ID when buying cheap phones or pre-paid SIMs could be an important measure to make it impossible for criminals or terrorists to communicate anonymously.

“This bill would close one of the most significant gaps in our ability to track and prevent acts of terror, drug trafficking, and modern-day slavery,” Speier wrote in a Facebook post announcing the bill.

“The ‘burner phone’ loophole is an egregious gap in our legal framework that allows actors like the 9/11 hijackers and the Times Square bomber to evade law enforcement while they plot to take innocent lives. The Paris attackers also used ‘burner phones.

“As we’ve seen so vividly over the past few days, we cannot afford to take these kinds of risks. It’s time to close this ‘burner phone’ loophole for good.”

The San Bernardino terrorists used an encrypted iPhone, and much of the recent debate revolved around terrorists using devices with end-to-end encryption. The terrorists who perpetrated the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris used several encrypted phones – but three of them also used burner phones, concealing their communications by not having the owners’ names associated with the phones they used.