Tiny Phones That Go Inside a Butt (2016)
vice.com
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Obviously it's possible to get reasonably large items up your bottom, otherwise fisting wouldn't be such a popular hobby, but for the purposes of easy storage and retrieval, you're going to want to go as small as possible.
Look, I've had plenty of "How did I get here?" moments on the internet, but this is the first time it's been directly from an HN link.
-- "Report of Investigation" [0] (PDF), Office of the Inspector General, State of Ohio
They used them for, well, pretty much exactly what you might guess they would use them for [1]:
> The inmates used the computers for credit card fraud, reading material on how to make drugs and weapons, download porn and music, etc.
Articles:
- "Prison Inmates Built And Hid DIYs Computers In Ceiling, Hacked The Prison Network" [1]
- "Two Ohio inmates hacked their prison from the inside using makeshift computers built from spare parts" [2]
[0]: http://watchdog.ohio.gov/Portals/0/pdf/investigations/2015-C...
[1]: https://fossbytes.com/prison-inmates-diy-computer-hidden-cei...
[2]: https://qz.com/958503/two-ohio-inmates-hacked-their-prison-f...
> fuck an iPhone 6 Plus, or, rather, don't. You'd look like Spongebob Squarepants: a rectangle with limbs hanging off. Having said that, I knew a dwarf who plugged a Blackberry
How practical would it be to erect a Faraday cage around a prison? How practical would it be to jam the signals? I bet one could interdict a lot of criminal activity by stopping or eavesdropping on prison cell phone conversations.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
• complete control over where you live,
• complete control of your movements,
• complete control over your physical interaction with people who are not prison staff or other inmates,
• in the US almost no fourth amendment restrictions on searching your living space or possessions and so can pretty much arbitrarily conduct extensive searches for prohibited items,
that it is actually possible for a significant number of prisoners to keep their smuggled items hidden once they get them in (and that they get them in in the first place is astonishing).
It gives one something to think about the next time one is taking a plane trip or attending an event with a security checkpoint. If prisons cannot keep banned items out or from being used, how can airport security or event security do so when their powers are much more limited than the powers of prison authorities?
NOTE: the prior paragraph is not meant to suggest that we should boost the powers of airport and event security. It was meant to suggest that the situation in prisons provides good evidence that much of our non-prison security is indeed just security theater.
90% plus of the shenanigans were carried off by security personnel, Insiders, and local cops.
I basically watched a hugh building in San Francisco on the weekends.
I only spoke up when they tried to blame it on public, or the homeless. Blaming the homeless was a go to. I remember they tried to blame the homeless for stealing 10 tons of electrical switching gear. Gear so heavy, it needed special fork lift to move. By speaking up--meaning I just refused to go along with them blaming innocent people for their thefts, but I knew my place.
Whenever their was a theft, or break-in; I just knew it was an inside job. The denial was huge. I personally didn't care, I just didn't want to get shot.
My boss was the most honest man I have ever known though. I think he knew how corrupt the "good guys" were, but knew not to rock the boat. He had a good heart too. They would reprimand him for feeding the cats, but he really loved all animals. Very few men left a good impression on me, but I still think about him.
I mean, it's been amply documented that they can't. I wish we'd drop the security theater; there is no way it's a good tradeoff.
I'm curious what bribery prevention mechanisms exist, for example.
Read 'Papillon' by Henri Charrière. The autobiography of a long-term prison inmate. Well written. It's amazing what people do to maintain some small freedoms in a coercive environment.
For all but the most violent of offenders, it's not worthwhile to spend the kind of money one would need to regulate their every activity.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jellyphone/jelly-the-sm...
It's a bit frustrating because the plastic wrapped battery is packed in the phone and the instructions don't tell you that. (I've gotten emails where they talk about mailing battery issues so I wondered if it even came with one or that would arrive separately.)
Getting the back cover off is kind of hard. I didn't want to break it in the first 5 minutes. There's an unhelpful unboxing video on youtube because it didn't include set up but I finally found one where they pried it off with a guitar pick.
There's also a youtube video of someone playing video games on it. Like, why? Gaming on a 5" screen is painful enough, for me anyway.
No plans to carry it anywhere except my pocket.
You can also pretty easily resell the iPhone after two years to recapture at least a third of the MSRP.
Pretty much all Apple products have excellent resale value (around here, anyways).
I went with the SE myself because it’s the only normal sized phone that’s actually good. It seems these days all you can buy in the high end range are phablets.
Why do they make such an effort to advertise memory that is useless to the end-user?
Well, it would wouldn’t it?
I'd pay half of that though..
Most popular were Motorola Pebbles and BMW Key fob phones, both small with smooth edges.
One Pebble frightened me, whilst it was small and smooth and, um, fit for purpose, it had been really badly soldered to give a point to attach the charger cables leaving some sharp prongs at one end.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/apr/15/lowering-re...
There's probably others. Not everyone agrees on which one the US judicial system obeys.
It would also be a bit pointless tof physically isolate someone if they can continue business as usual virtually uninterrupted.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-warns-of-telephone-extortio...
The content of the meeting was largely a dressing down from the US office. They had read UK Maxim recently and decided that there were too many anal related jokes and that the UK version of the magazine had to severely cut down on them upon pain of firing. As such the review for the ipod shuffle that was due for press had to be modified to "can fit between your cheeks".
I just find it hilarious that a couple of American executives had to make a transatlantic flight specifically for this purpose. :D
If they wouldn’t have to pay so much in the US for a phone call, this would be far less necessary.
> "Colorado has the highest prison phone rate for local calls, at $2.75 + $.23/minute ($6.20 for a 15-minute local collect call). The highest intrastate phone rate is charged in Oregon, at $3.95 + $.69/ minute ($14.30 for a 15-minute collect call). Washington has the highest interstate rate: $4.95 + $.89/minute, or $18.30 for a 15-minute long distance collect call."
I think most corrections departments consider phones and internet items which should be controlled (so they can be deprived for punishment and rewarded for good behavior).
Also, "monitored" doesn't happen for free. In my state, Department of Corrections officers are paid very well and have far better pensions + benefits + work rules. Monitoring by prison officials is really expensive, especially with the ~2million prisoners we have/had.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/23/news/fcc-prison-phone-call-r...
And? That’s why we pay for prisons in the first place. With the same argument we could deny them the right to clothing. Not necessary, too expensive.
But prisons are (at least here in Europe) designed as facilities to rehabilitate the people, and that requires that they can have social contact directly or via telephone, for free; it requires that they can towards the end of their term slowly get more freedoms, and be integrated back into society over months.
Treating them as something where we have to save money at all costs is, IMO, the wrong approach.
If you want to track prisoner communication you give them free access to landline phones which you record, and crack down on cellphones which are hard to monitor.
Most jails and prisons in the US do this, but minus the free part. The telecom providers charge outrageous fees and revenue share back with the prison.
Edit: There's been some reform since this was published, but it's still an issue:
"Colorado has the highest prison phone rate for local calls, at $2.75 + $.23/minute ($6.20 for a 15-minute local collect call). The highest intrastate phone rate is charged in Oregon, at $3.95 + $.69/ minute ($14.30 for a 15-minute collect call). Washington has the highest interstate rate: $4.95 + $.89/minute, or $18.30 for a 15-minute long distance collect call."
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/in-the-news/2011/pln-release...
I recall reading an article about how one prison in particular was using DF equipment to track down phones since they couldn't block them.
(Probably not legal, especially if you can't ensure you won't intercept calls originating from outside the prison)
Any time you run a StingRay in a populated area, you will grab some unintended calls. I'm under the impression (assuming judges are aware of this "collateral damage") that it's tolerable because if you are in the area you probably meet some threshold similar to "more likely than not" to have either committed a crime (or in the case of visitors to the prison, voluntarily given away your rights).
That said, I hope a tech-savvy judge gets to rule on a similar case eventually.
As far as I'm concerned, this is merely the logical conclusion.
Agreed on the 'how TF did I end up reading this article' reaction, marginally relevant in the tech world, and amusing to read.
Sure, but the iPhone XXX will detect if it's shoved up someone's ass and automatically go to silent mode. It Just Works™. You don't want to get caught because you forgot to put your cheap ass-phone on silent.
Also, this isn't necessarily about dumb kids being busted for drugs or stealing, but organized crime members. The possibility of them ordering hits from inside prison walls or tracking down people in witness protection kind of makes people nervous about letting them talk with anyone and everyone. That's not to say it's the most effective means, since smuggling, messengers, visitors and other means still exist for passing information. But that's not really an excuse to not try at all.
But most prisons are filled with dumb kids busted for drugs or stealing, and I see no reason why we should make them even more miserable... I'd rather have them keep their connections in the outside world, so they have more of a chance to get back on their feet once they are released.
(Also, I'm pretty sure an prisoner browsing Facebook all day makes a lot less trouble than one who has nothing to do all day...)
Those are often exploitatively priced, a situation Ajit Pai has sought to preserve:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/republican-led-f...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/technology/fcc-prison-pho...
Oh, that. We don't care about reintegration. We don't care if they survive outside of prison. And with what little educational abilities have been destroyed, are we surprised in the least that they go back to criminal actions to make money?
Don't get me wrong, I do agree that the US justice system is focused on punishment instead of revalidation and there's a lot that can be improved there, but this is about giving people who have a problem access to that which enabled their problem.
I'm not saying the current system - which is very exploitative of inmates, with extremely expensive calls - is anywhere near OK. But that doesn't mean you can't have provide inmates with decent communication accessibilities without having uncontrolled cellphones with them.
Meanwhile, we have private companies profiting off of exploitatively-priced communications services for inmates, when both they and their families are often in little position to pay the excessive charges:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/republican-led-f...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/technology/fcc-prison-pho...
The best (if not most profitable) solution, IMHO, is to offer inmates a low cost to free, monitored telephone service that they can use to call people on a white-list. If they're found to be abusing it, it can be taken away, but it should be otherwise unlimited.
I'm strongly in favour of rehabilitation. I don't think prison works and it should be used far less than it is. But even I think that control of mobile phones is important.
And it's not just about phones. A prisoner could easily pack Stanley knife blades in a safe package and put those up his anus.
There are some important human rights balances here. We can't insert fingers into the anus of all prisoners just in case, but we do need to protect prisoners from violent crime.
This is especially true because there are a range of different types of detention against your will - patients in a mental health hospital on a short assessment stay; people in a police cell overnight; medium term patients in MH hospital; long term patients in a forensic hospital (they committed an act of serious violence while they were mentally ill and were sent to hospital); long term prisoners who keep committing acts of violence while in prison. We can't perform the same levels of checking on all of them.
There has been some work on this, on checking what type of airport scanners work or don't work for detecting blades. It's a bit scary to see what gets through.