Bill in California Proposes Enabling ‘Kill Switch’ on Smartphones By 2015

Under the guise of law enforcement, a new bill is being proposed in California that will require remote kill switches for all cellular phones in the state. The proposed bill is supposed to be put in place because cell phones are one of the biggest items stolen during burglaries.

From RT:

The state of California has introduced a bill that would require mobile devices to have a ‘kill switch’ which would render them inoperable and impossible to reset if stolen.

If passed, Senate Bill 962 would require every smartphone sold in or shipped to California to have the mechanism installed by as early as January 2015, with smartphone manufacturers given until June of this year to come up with solutions for integrating the technology into their devices.

State Senator Mark Leno, San Francisco Attorney George Gascon, and other officials and law enforcement officers co-authored the document in hopes that the wireless industry would wake up to the realities of unusually high phone theft statistics in California, AP reported. 

We all know that a system like this can be abused by the government though. For instane in the 2011 Arab Spring Uprising in Libya and Egypt one of the things the government tried to do was to shut off all communications. If an uprising happened in California, what makes you think the California government wouldn’t do the same?

What’s your thought on this? Let us know in the comments!