Firstly, how do you charge a phone? I wouldn't have thought cells had plug points.
Secondly, is there any realistic way of stopping phones getting in? Building higher fences, and putting sensors on them, sounds like one way of stopping throwovers for example.
Cells in UK jails are not barren concrete-and-metal things like in the movies. They have a sink, a desk, a kettle, a TV, a (usually padded) chair and a bed. You charge your phone by plugging it in :).
Another fact many people don't know is that you can buy things, legally, in prison. By things, I mean pretty much anything in the Argos catalogue. You get an allowance of £10/week which you can save up (you have to earn it or have it sent in - it's not free). Some people had playstation 2s. Lots of people had stereo systems.
Many of the phones came without chargers, but people were very good at reworking electronics. I saw one system where someone had rewired the inside of his casette player to have two contacts so he could slot in his phone battery and it would charge when he pressed play, in a nicely hidden compartment.
I think there's not really any way of preventing smuggling. Like all systems of oppression, prisons stimulate peoples desire for freedom. When you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to think about a way to smuggle something in, and then you have 10k people in a prison, and people get transferred between prisons... eventually someone will come up with a way, and it will spread fast.
fundamentally, I agree. But keep in mind, skimming ATMs is a fine way to end up in jail. There is plenty of genuine crime one may commit with a knack for electronics.
Why don't they put some type of device that suppresses the GSM frequencies near each cell? Not that I am advocating this, just wondering why they haven't done that.
It's a down to earth practical guide aimed at someone who hasn't been to prison before. The ToC features such chapters as Sharing A Cell, Violence, Getting Stuff Done (Complaints and Applications and so on. Smoking teabags, making toast using the radiator, cooking noodles in the kettle, making rope out of sheets to pass things between cells, flash-distilling vodka using ice cubes and a live 240v mains cable, it's all in there.
I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered what prison really involves, day to day, from a prisoners point of view. Or anyone really. It's a fascinating document, very much DIY, reads a bit like a txtfile from back in the day.
I ran a black-hat collective between the ages of 13 and about 17. That led to getting lots of offers to hack for money, and through discussion with the people making those offers, eventually to getting interested in document security. I developed a way to replicate the UK driving license with all security features using commodity hardware. It fooled police officers and every official that ever looked at it. I sold the licenses to fund my desire to improve the design and manufacture. People used them for, among other things, fraud. 'conspiracy to defraud' was the crime.
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My thoughts exactly (except for the part of making it an underground startup): in these days of drones and copters boom, I wonder how much time will pass before we hear about phones, guns, tobacco or whatever being smuggled into prisons by swarms of elusive quadrocopters.
Prisons will probably have to adopt some form of electronic countermeasures. Civilian GPS is easily spoofed, auto-targeting lasers could make onboard cameras useless, and radio jamming ought to be put in place regardless of drones to combat cell phones.
Governments are able to play the game of constantly one-upping electronic warfare systems, but you could make it too expensive for civilians to have any sort of control or visibility when flying a drone over your site.
You don't need to patch the problem and anyone trying is probably out to sell you $50 million system.
In my state an inmate was broken out with a helicopter. The Dept of Corrections had an interesting solution. Anyone caught looking up at the sky goes into solitary confinement. No one has tried it since.
You don't patch the cause of the problem, you break the part of the will that would even make you think about the solution. It is much cheaper and it creates a more malleable population.
Not that I approve of the approach but the voters wanting anything that can't be painted as 3 hots and a cot.
Firstly, how do you charge a phone? I wouldn't have thought cells had plug points.
Secondly, is there any realistic way of stopping phones getting in? Building higher fences, and putting sensors on them, sounds like one way of stopping throwovers for example.
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