According to the Sunday Times, the British Government plans to strengthen state surveillance by forcing every person who buys a cell phone, including prepaid phones, to show a valid passport as proof of identification and register in a national database that will combine data of owners of all 72 million cell phones in the UK.
The proposed database will, if realized, contain information about every phone call and every email sent in the UK. As this database would be of lesser use to the police with information on the prepaid phone users missing, who represent more than half of all cell phones in the UK, the government announced plans to introduce a compulsory mobile phone register for next year.
Apparently, prepaid phones are often used by criminals and terrorists as the calls are nearly untraceable. There are stricter regulations in other countries, for example Turkey, where users have to register every cell phone, even as a visitor, and Japan, where you need not only a passport, but an official Japanese ID card, which takes a Visa and at least a month to obtain. But there are also countries where attempts for state surveillance through phone registration by the government failed.
I remember that, ca. 10 years ago, German government agencies tried to force providers to require photo ID and to register all prepaid customers. The providers sued and won, as the courts held that registration was a violation of privacy laws. And even before the court’s ruling in Germany, especially with markets like Ebay, it proofed to be virtually impossible to control the fluctuation of prepaid SIM cards. This shows that a mandatory cell phone user registration would not only be a potential violation of privacy, but would also be absolutely impractical.
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