Senate Bill No. 2644: SIM Card Registration

Introduced by Sen. Manny Villar, the Senate Bill No. 2644 (or Prepaid SIM Card Registration) is “an act of requiring the registration of the buyers of prepaid SIM cards, and providing penalties for the violation thereof”.
Filed in January 20, 2011, the bill seeks to address some “text messaging related scams” and other crimes that involve the use of disposable prepaid SIM cards.
Inquirer.net reports that the Department of Justice has endorsed this bill as well:

Villar, in his proposed SB No. 2644 said that prepaid SIM cards are used by criminals in committing money-making activities such as e-raffle and random lottery.
Prepaid SIM cards, he added, have also become a tool of the so-called “dugong-dugong” gang to commit robbery or extort money from their victims.
The bill proposes that all sellers of prepaid SIM cards will require buyers to present government issued identification cards and record all personal information of the buyer.
The bill proposes a penalty of a fine ranging from P100,000 to P1 million and imprisonment from one year to two years for all violators.

Already wrote my piece about SIM card registration here before.
This is not new since telcos are already doing SIM card registration to all postpaid users — over 2 million subscribers are required to register their name and address when getting a postpaid SIM card. This process is just being duplicated to all non-postpaid (prepaid) users.
I’m sure the all postpaid subscribers would agree that this is a secure process — otherwise, I don’t think they’ll remain in postpaid and have their name registered anyways.