Congress, wireless industry team up to make stolen phones worthless

Oh, they're going to make it illegal to tamper with the IMEI. That's all solved then.<p>Why don't they just make it illegal to steal peoples phones instead?

This changes very little for the moment:<p>1. Most of the phones in the US are CDMA carrier exclusives; they maintain their own stolen/lost databases. Even 10 years ago you could call Verizon or Sprint and they would blacklist the ESN/MEID.<p>2. If you've probably noticed the majority of the US is currently on CDMA which isn't anywhere else outside of US/CA/SKorea. Taking that stolen Verizon flip phone to Mexico gets you a brick.<p>In the future with a larger LTE footprint this can be effective but I'll have to see.

Regarding the selling of the cellphone to a friend, you probably should change legal ownership of the device, just like you should when selling/buying a car from a friend.<p>I'd feel safer with this mobile device blacklist, and I believe there are no issues of privacy, since we're not talking about permanent tracking of a cellphone's location.

Won't most of the stolen phones be sent out of the country where they will be unaffected by this arrangement?

I found a Nexus phone, and a Droid Razor phone the past few months. Didn't even try to see if I could use it with T-Mobile. I was just glad I got a couple of free Androids with different screen resolutions to test my app.

Congress should not be concerning itself for making certain programming functions legal and other ones illegal. The illegal action should be identified and made illegal, not the events leading up to the illegal action.<p>Backspace out that line of computer code citizen, don't make me taze you. Legislating what i can and can't do with the wires in my own device because I <i>might</i> be stealing the phone?<p>Sounds to me like a chess move to increase congressional power over the citizens through tapping into the computer in every pocket.