The people (read government) in the UK is pondering the idea to make it necessary to present some kind of identification to buy a cellphone. Be it your passport, your national ID card, or your drivers license - they want something to keep track of.

What are the reasons?

- to make it possible for mobile carriers to keep record of calls, and afterwards provide them to the government if needed
- to fight crime and terrorism
- to make a huge database of everyone in the UK that legally owns a cellphone

The only problem so far, is that there are already 48.6million subscribers of pre-paid services in UK, and to register all that (previous) data it would cost a lot, and it would also become a headache.

The office of Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said it anticipated that a compulsory mobile phone register would be unveiled as part of a law which ministers would announce next year.

via