Legislating Technology (Badly)

D ue to the computational power of underlying platforms, digital kill switches have a much broader capability and use than earlier industrial panic switches. In the case of mobile computing devices and smartphones, the purpose of the kill switch is to make theft unattractive. Protections include " wiping " the data off the device and/or " bricking " the device so that it is unusable. Consumer Reports estimated that in 2012 there were 1.6 million victims of smartphone theft. 1. Add to that the fact that " Apple, Google, Micro-soft, and Samsung—plus Motorola, which is owned by Google—control 90 percent of the US smartphone market, " so there aren't many manufacturers involved. 2 STAKEHOLDERS There are a variety of proposed statutory protections to discourage mobile device theft. One good source of information on this issue is the City and County of San Francisco District Attorney's Secure Our Smartphones Initiative (www.sfdistrictattorney. org/index.aspx?page=263). California introduced recent kill-switch legislation in late January 2014, 3,4 followed closely by the US Senate bill 2032. 5 Similar legislation has been proposed in the House of Representatives and in state legislatures under the general rubric of Smartphone Theft Prevention Acts. We shall investigate whether and to what degree such legislation is likely to be effective, and whether negative consequences might be anticipated. It's characteristic of willfully uninformed politicians to react to crime with legislative quick fixes when common sense dictates otherwise. Nowhere is this more evident than in legislation affecting technology and innovation.