S1L47 – The danger of compulsory SIM card registration
There’s a grain of truth in the common criticism that congressional investigations done “in aid of legislation” have little to show for real accomplishments in the end.
Congress justifies these investigations by saying that you just don’t legislate in a vacuum. You need to maintain utmost relevance by staying in touch with realities on the ground.
That’s interpreting vacuum in a very narrow sense.
Vacuum should not just imply lack of fresh data, to be remedied by more fact-finding investigations. More importantly, it should mean lack of study on the effects of new law on existing laws. You can do that—making sure new law doesn’t reckon only with itself—by simply closeting yourself in the library of Congress and doing old-fashioned research.
Otherwise, you can conduct investigations all year long and STILL be in a legislative vacuum.
Both chambers of Congress have approved on Third Reading a bill that should have been thrown in the trash can on first reading. That bill—and by all indications it WILL become law very soon—requires the registration of all SIM cards, as a “deterrence” to their being used in the commission of crimes.
People commit crimes, not SIM cards. But the moment you make possession of a SIM card an element of any crime, you just created a sweeping new shotgun method of committing crimes. That is the opposite of deterring crimes. That’s the result of legislating in a vacuum—writing law without thinking how it correlates with other laws that exist already.
I’ll give you a simple example. Don’t test drive a car and then NOT return it. You cannot say you were buying it. If you did not return it, you stole it, period. That’s carnapping and it’s non-bailable. Fortunately, only you can commit that crime—so far, it’s not possible for someone to commit carnapping in your behalf.
Enforce the law on SIM registration now.
Here is Kulas, he decides to steal a car. If he went through all the trouble of stealing a car, what’s it to him to steal one more little thing: a cellphone.
He uses the cellphone to set up the test drive appointment, uses it to G-cash a “deposit,” to text several “friends” by randomly entering any 11-digit number with the message, “I have the car, where’s your buyer?” and then sends two text messages to the owner of the car—the first one is “I have the car, the police don’t know anything” and the second message is “ooops, sorry wrong send.”
Guess whose caller ID number the owner will report to the police? The police will check the caller’s ID, which is linked to the SIM owner’s home address as reflected on his government-issued ID—two of them, in fact. Scary strong evidences.
The problem is, what Kulas stole is YOUR cellphone with its SIM card registered in YOUR name. Now a warrant of arrest will be issued in YOUR name to answer for the UNBAILABLE crime of carnapping. You will want to find that car even more badly than the police. See the point?
Now multiply that scenario a hundred times—maybe more—because YOUR stolen phone can be used to relay a ransom demand, a death threat, an extortion message, a cyber libelous social media post, an easily “red-taggable” seditious remark, a false report of an adulterous affair to a homicidal husband, a steamy sexually-laden bigamous story texted to a suicidal wife, OR WORSE to trigger a remote improvised explosive device (IED).
After police retrieve the bodies of a hundred dead people from the bombing site, do you think a simple “but I lost that cellphone a long time ago!” is going to get you off the hook THAT easy?
If I gave this as an assignment to my Alpha Section law class, those guys can whip up a thousand criminal scenarios, believe me. Deema alone can probably weave that new law right into the anti-VAWC complex of husbandly crimes and NO MAN will be safe—except priests maybe, the only true “unwed Fathers.”
Stealing the cellphone is the HARDER OPTION for Kulas, as a matter of fact. Why bother stealing a cellphone, when one can be bought for as cheap as 500 pesos nowadays? Just buy any SIM and REGISTER IT under any name you want!
Where does Congress think people buy SIM cards from—the NBI Central Office? No, you buy these bloody SIM cards from the corner sari-sari store where you can pass off even a phony P150-peso bill. What do sari-sari stores know about distinguishing an authentic government ID from a fake one? My authentic City Government-issued vaccination card printed on cheap cartolina with a smudgy inkjet printer looks even FAKER than the drop-dead gorgeous but totally spurious plastic credit-card type “premium vaxx cards” you could get online.
This SIM-registration law “to serve as deterrent to crime” ranks on the same scale of stupidity as that ill-fated proposal to require motorcycle riders to wear jackets bearing the license plate numbers of their motorcycles. Duh? It’s even EASIER to steal a jacket than a motorcycle, sirs.
Or even that DENR regulation requiring the registration of chainsaws. Even if you cut down a pine tree with tender loving care using a registered chainsaw, the tree is just as DEAD, apo.
The cause of forest conservation is not advanced by worrying about people who may or may not cut trees tomorrow (let education take care of that)—but by jailing people who ACTUALLY cut trees yesterday.
This is what I mean by “legislating in a vacuum” resulting in absurdities like:
We confiscate scary toy guns from children but we allow triggerhappy self-entitled adult brats to keep REAL ones.
Now we’re going to clamp down on prepaid SIMS owned by NAMED yokels who can’t even afford to buy proper slippers—and you let blue-collar criminals brandish postpaid “Plan iPhones” registered to corporations exempt from criminal prosecution.
Congress has the gall to pre-impose the duty on ALL CITIZENS to make themselves subject to 24-hour data surveillance, but they can’t even compel WITNESSES in their own investigations to let us peek into their text messages.
We lower corporate taxes so that wealthy people can keep more money, on the theory that wealth will “trickle down” to the general economy. Wealth NEVER trickles down. It always trickles UP—why do you think there are so many Ponzi schemes and pyramid scams out there?
I rant. That’s all I can do. When they publish that “photo-op” of the president signing that stupid law into effect, what I can do is NOT APPLAUD it, but mock it.
I believe it’s the right-thinking citizens’ duty to make stupid FEEL stupid again.
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”
About Images: Some of the images used in the articles are from the posts in Atty. Joel Rodriguez Dizon’s Facebook account, and/or Facebook groups and pages he manages or/and member of.