“Hell is full of good intentions or desires.”
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
The Registration for prepaid SIM cards Bill, if approved by the Philippines Congress, is just begging to be abused by both the government sector and crime syndicates.
Although the intention of this bill is pretty obvious and admirable, we also need to look into the possibility that this won’t work at all. Let’s take a look at how the bill says it will be done:
- The bill requires one to submit government issued ID to the SIM seller before it can be purchased: Government IDs can be EASILY faked. The criminals already know how to do this. This will be another source for which “fixers” can earn from.
- The sellers are required to take note of all information from the buyer then submit them to the Telco: As above, this info can be easily faked. The telco would just end up with expensive servers full of fake info for all we know.
- The Telco will only activate the SIM cards after registering the info to their databases: Good luck with updating all that data. Changes to marital statuses, addresses, etc. can be expensive and hellish.
Let’s take a look at what may happen if this comes to pass. This may sound like it’s all FUD, but it happened before (no less to the President of the Philippines) so there’s a basis for all of this.
- Government will have free access to easily tap any person’s texts and calls. This would be good if they will only tap suspected criminals, but private, innocent individuals will be open to such abuses–especially those of government critics.
- This will only increase the possibility of corruption between the buyer and seller. Those who don’t have any government IDs will resort to this option in order to buy a SIM card. Yes, there are still people who don’t own one in the Philippines…
- Identity theft will increase. Criminals will never use their real identities to buy SIM cards. They will either create a fake one or use someone else’s identity. This will result in innocent people being charged with crimes, while the criminals will run Scott-free and look for a new identity to steal.
- Criminals will just find a way to circumvent this. If I was a criminal, I’ll just find a cheap internet cafe where I can use eMail for my nefarious purpose.
Reading that the Department of Justice just approved it is rather discouraging. I hope that this bill will never be put into law.
For more info, go to Txtpower.org.