New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman reiterated, on Monday, his commitment to pressuring smartphone manufacturers to install kill switches that can remotely disable smartphones in an effort to make them worthless to thieves and black market smartphone resellers.

Standing alongside New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio at a press conference in the New York Attorney General’s office in New York City, Schneiderman stated, in no uncertain terms, that adopting an industry-wide kill switch allowing users to cancel a phone “like a credit card” was necessary in order to stem the “epidemic of violent street crime involving the theft of mobile devices.”

Schneiderman started the Secure our Smartphones campaign in June along with San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and London Mayor Boris Johnson. Schneiderman explained that he has met with representatives from the four largest smartphone manufacturers: Google Inc. (and its subsidiary, Motorola Mobility), Samsung Electronics Co., Microsoft Corp., and Apple Inc. in San Francisco to test their security features. He did not talk about each company’s discussion, except to say that he believed a kill switch, which would shut down a smart phone and render it inoperable for thieves looking to resell it, was the only satisfactory outcome. Additionally, Schneiderman pointed out during the Monday press conference that “[the kill switch] has to be industry-wide, because thieves will not look to see what kind of smart phone you’ve got.” Stolen smartphones can sell for as much as $2,000 each, he said. “These are too easy to steal, clean and resell.”

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