Yes, the bill has an emergency exception, but you omitted to mention that it still requires police to go to court afterwards (within 6 hours, or with additional submissions to justify the delay if that is not possible) to make a showing of why a communications interruption was necessary, and requires the court to balance police claims with First Amendment freedoms, strictly limiting the scope of acceptable reasons and requiring the purpose of the interruption be as narrowly tailored as possibly.

I don't understand why you left all this out of the original story.

Because prior judicial approval is the key check to preventing government abuse; if police want to shut down a protest a judge potentially telling them they went too far 6 hours later is not going to help.

And they're supposed to get prior judicial approval. It's only acceptable to file retroactively in cases where there is an imminent risk of death or great bodily harm, such as a hostage or barricade situation or other 'extreme emergency situation.'

You're assuming the worst possible outcome (police overreach, court apathy) and using that as a justification to omit any mention of the copious rules limiting official use of this power. I find it rather ironic that you decided to leave your readers poorly informed about this, not least because it would put them at a disadvantage in any argument with a supporter of the bill.

The problem is that "imminent risk" tends to creep downward over time, to the point that it becomes "imminent risk that a citizen unit will improperly fail to bow and scrape."

If you're going to shut off several thousand cell phones, you can bloody well get a judge out of bed for that.

Perhaps, but I don't think it's fair to judge this bill on how legislators might amend it in future, or we'll never pass any laws at all.

Laws have unintended consequences. It's good to slow down the creation of laws and weigh tradeoffs. Laws are intended to be solutions. But the cure may prove worse than the disease.

Can we judge it on how the police interpret these things now?

For example, the police are only supposed to shoot people when there's imminent risk of death or great bodily harm. Yet there is routine, if not common, overreach there, including one notorious recent incident that people are currently protesting with great vigor.

If you can't reliably enforce the rule that police aren't supposed to kill people except in dire emergencies, how will you do it for cell phone kill switches?

The only safe way to analyse the risk is to assume the worst case scenario. The Ferguson police are the worst case scenario: to quell a protest they deploy violence, then complain when the protest becomes violent.

As a result of this, the police will feel justified claiming "imminent risk of death or great bodily harm" any time two or more #insert <target_demographic.h> are together in one place.

Then you just do this often enough that the judges don't have time to review every case.

Don't dismiss as ridiculous what is simply an extrapolation from current practise.

That may be true, but it should still be mentioned in the article in the interests of a fully informed electorate.

What is the response if the court rules that the shutdown was unwarranted after the fact?

Everyone whose cell phone service was interrupted has a good basis for civil rights lawsuit against the offending police department, for one thing.

A civil rights lawsuit is fine. But the problem is that doesn't PREVENT any police behavior.

1. hit the kill switch

2. tell protesters to GTFO

3. they don't comply so start shooting

4. no recordings of what happened are made so it's he said she said

5. innocent people are dead and the only recourse is a lawsuit based on conflicting sworn testimony where officers are generally held to be more reliable than non-officers

Contrast this with the no-kill-switch situation

1. tell protesters to GTFO

2. they don't comply and are filming

3. knowing they are filming, use less lethal means of dispersal

4. nobody is dead and the police are held accountable for the actions they took

The problem here is that in the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary the 6hr window gives the police plenty of time to either find a good reason for why they did what they did or if there's some particularly bad actors around, make up a good reason.

I think the vast majority of police departments wouldn't abuse their power especially considering how very nearly everybody doesn't get shot by the cops on any given day. But the concern here isn't that they'll shut down people's phones when making a traffic stop; people are concerned about the possibility of really bad actors who haven't been caught yet using this as a tool to conceal something really bad.

The "essential feature" that are disabled under this bill do not include the camera (or emergency calls).

Being able to take pictures or video but not upload them destroys a lot of the utility of a mobile device.

If you can't take a picture and upload it before you get arrested then whatever was on your phone can go away. But once it's uploaded it gets much, much harder to make it disappear.

I will concede that it's not as bad since the camera still works. But that doesn't make all my worries go away either.

Then don't enable this feature on your phone. The law also requires that the feature be explicitly approved by the user and that it can be disabled by the user at any time.

How would the police know whose phones to do this to? The kill switch is on a phone by phone basis.

They have a thing called a stingray which can impersonate a real cell tower for the purpose of gaining information about the phones in range. That would be a very effective way to create a list of phones to temporarily disable.

That would not be very effective for the kind of cover up you were speculating about (disabling phones so they can shoot protestors without it being widely recorded on video).

First, they'd have to set up a Stingray. Then they'd have to get the phone numbers. Then for each number, they have to go to the appropriate company and ask that company to do the kill. Note this only works for smartphones. Feature phones are not required to support a kill switch. There are feature phones that include still and video cameras.

That's going to take a while...and it is going to miss a lot of people in addition to those using feature phones. It will also miss tablets, laptops, and GoPro cameras.

If, improbably, the only people with cameras in the protest are people on smartphones, they still have almost no chance of making the coverup work. To get the kill switch applied without court approval, they have to claim it was an emergency, and then justify retroactively that shutting down phone communication was necessary because of that emergency.

They will not be able to do this, since it is almost impossible to come up with a legitimate emergency situation where using the slow and incomplete kill switch mechanism is better than simply shutting down the cell towers that serve the area. Going for the kill switch instead of shutting down the towers is practically admitting that they were not actually trying to stop communication (which could conceivably be a legitimate response to some kinds of emergency) but rather were trying to stop cameras (which almost never can be a legitimate response to the kind of emergency that can arise at a protest).

1. Setting up a stingray takes very little time if it's already mounted on a truck or a trailer.

2. Phones and towers are constantly looking for one another so that phones are always connected. This is how you are able to talk while driving or moving. You might get all the phones in an area in a few seconds or minutes.

3. You make a good point about the per-phone nature of the thing. How long before law enforcement has a kill-a-phone API though? Facebook has a dedicated website for law enforcement to get info on Facebook users.

4. Your point about missing other devices is also a good one. But again the police can arrest people and prevent the information from getting out.

5. I think your statement about simply shutting down the towers is the best counter-argument. You're right, they can just kill the towers, even without phone company assistance. Send a few officers with bolt cutters and towers will go dark.

6. There are all kinds of after-the-fact justifications for doing something especially if you're in control of the situation. You can claim basically whatever you want. Law enforcement is generally considered more reliable by the courts than regular people; cops say X and protesters say Y and judges are likely to believe the police. This is well documented.

The cynic in me says that #5 will never happen because it involves hurting big business. You can shoot up poor people with impunity, but you can't go around destroying property belonging to large companies without serious repercussions.

I can't quite decide how serious I am.

I don't understand why there is any support for this ability in a phone. So they can prevent you from calling for help, from recording them, or what not? How much of a phone is disabled?

Finally, if they can do then its likely they will have phones produced only usable by important people who will be immune so who will those people be? How do they get their phones. Let alone, if its in the phone some group will figure it out and trigger it which would be pretty much awesome in my book

Government should never be given any ability to suppress speech or the expression of it and my communicating with another person is expression. They have no right to prevent it, especially under the guise of get them all and let God sort it out mentality that they hide behind to trample individual rights

Because there's an epidemic of cell phone theft, many cellphone manufacturers don't provide a reliable mechanism for the victim of theft to deactivate their phone, and third party solutions are hit-and-miss. The primary purpose of the legislation is to require manufacturers to provide users with a way to remotely brick their phone. They're also required to get the user's permission for this as part of the phone setup, and make it easy for the user to disable the feature at any time. That's why there is support for this ability in a phone.

Also, the bill requires that owners of the phone be able to disable the kill-switch functionality at any time if they want. So anyone heading to a protest or other activity there they anticipate police interference can immunize themselves against such service interruption if they are so inclined.

This is a very important point. Also, the limited scope of the "essential features" which are disabled.

> The bill says that police CAN use this mandatory kill switch, but must comply with Public Utility Code Section 7908 in doing so.

The actual wording is this: "Any request by a government agency to interrupt communications service utilizing a technological solution required by this section is subject to Section 7908 of the Public Utilities Code".

This looks more like an IF than a CAN to me. It's saying that they cannot evade the requirements of 7908 by using the kill switch instead of some other mechanism that is covered by 7908 to interrupt communication. It's preempting a potential argument that using the kill switch would not count under 7908, and so the police could use the kill switch with less restriction and oversight than 7908 requires. This seems a more natural reading to me than your reading of it...although I haven't looked at prior drafts or the legislative history to see if there is something that indicates your reading is what is intended.

If cell service can already be at the tower level, being able to kill individual phones seems like it would be very impractical in a protest situation. This seems less prone to abuse than a mass shutdown.

I'm not sure the analogy holds. Yes, the tower level of control can be used to remotely disconnect thousands of people from the net, but this just separates people from the network.

The remote kill switch disconnects people from their ability to document what's happening. This frees the state from a sousveillent presence because it robs people of the ability to record what's happening at all. Remotely shutting down devices isn't about preventing people from tweeting - it's about preventing people from being able to create durable records of what happens.