Re: London police scans on the streets with mobile phone scanner

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> "People stopped by the police in parts of London are having their
> phones scanned and instantly checked against a national database to
> determine whether they are stolen.

> The on-the-spot checks, reminiscent of Police National Computer (PNC)
> checks for stopped vehicles, are being trialled by officers in Ealing
> and Bromley.

> A handheld wireless device called Apollo scans the IMEI barcode,
> usually found underneath a phone's battery*, and [...]

IOW, it's based on the IMEI of the phone's case, not the IMEI the phone
actually uses.  (I believe I have at least one phone whose IMEI does
not match that of its case - I had three phones of the same model with
assorted, and differing, damage, and swapped parts to get a working
phone out of the assortment, and I think the guts of the resulting
phone did not come from the same phone the IMEI-bearing part of the
case did.  Perhaps fortunately, I am highly unlikely to be in the UK in
the foreseeable future.)

I suppose that's good enough for most cases, but, really, if this
silliness has police powers behind it, wouldn't it be easier to just
require the cell carriers to collect the _real_ IMEIs?

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