August 12, 2026: The American government is seeking to eliminate or greatly reduce the use of burner phones. These are cheap, disposable phones that are often purchased by criminals and discarded after a crime is committed. The government plan involves requiring all telecommunications companies to create a database of personal information for all phone customers, including a government-issued identification number and their physical address. Criminals or intelligence agencies like the CIA, KGB, GRU, and MI6 will seek ways to obtain anonymous phones. These groups have the resources to make this happen, so burner phones will survive; they will just be more difficult to obtain. Currently there are about nine billion phones in use worldwide, and about five percent of those are burners.

One reason the intel agencies want to maintain a supply of burner phones is that the military has the means to intercept phone calls and use that information to get their job done. For example, the U.S. Army has MC-12 twin-engine propeller aircraft equipped to carry out phone traffic monitoring. These aircraft, or the larger four-engine versions, may be operating off Iranian borders right now, seeking interesting conversations.

There are ample opportunities for this sort of thing; in the past, Indian police in Kashmir revealed that they had uncovered the Islamic terrorist use of stolen cell phone IDs. Police had earlier tapped into terrorist satellite phones and two-way radio networks, forcing the rebels to use cell phones. The cell phone scam was discovered, and since then, police tracked down several dozen terrorists and supporters via lists of stolen cell phone numbers. The police discovered the scam when one rebel called in to take credit for an attack. They traced the cell phone number and found it did not belong to the person it was supposed to belong to.