Philadelphia Mayor joins list of those calling for mobile phone kill switch

Philadelphia’s Mayor has signed on to a plan to try to make stolen cell phones worthless.

Philadelphia is a hotbed for smartphone thefts.

 The Secure our Smartphones plan or SOS for short is designed to pressure mobile phone manufacturers to install a lock that can make the phone useless once it it lost or stolen.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says lost and stolen phones are a $30 billion a year business.

“The difficulty is that these phones are to easy to steal, two easy to clean, there’s a process called ‘jailbreaking’ and too easy to resell,” he said.

 Mayor Michael Nutter is the latest of dozens of public officials to urge phone manufacturers to install a “Kill Switch”

 “We are calling on cell phone manufacturers to act as responsible corporate citizens by designing the products with technology that would render a stolen phone inoperable and useless,” Nutter said.

If the manufacturers do NOT cooperate, Schneiderman says new laws could mandate the switches.

But he says it’s unlikely to get that idea through congress now and the phone makers would likely argue passing laws state-by-state as unworkable.