On 25 August 2026, Argentina's Ministry of National Security published Resolution 806/2026 in the Boletín Oficial. It creates the "Programa para la Detección y Bloqueo de IMEI/IMSI en Establecimientos Penitenciarios". The resolution is dated 21 August. Its stated purpose is to stop criminal organizations with members in prison from using mobile devices to plan illegal activity.
The strongest case for the program
Phones are already banned inside Argentine prisons under Law 24.660 on the execution of custodial sentences, which the resolution cites. A phone in a cell is contraband that can be used to run extortion, fraud or violence from inside. Jamming is blunt and spills over onto neighbours and staff. Blocking the specific handset and line is a narrower tool than a blanket signal jammer. Because the block attaches to the IMSI as well as the IMEI, it is meant to survive a SIM swap, which is the obvious workaround. A government that did nothing here would be tolerating a known security failure. The aim is legitimate, and the design is more targeted than the alternatives.
What the resolution actually does
According to the official text and government reporting, the program builds in layers. ENACOM Resolution 300/2026, published on 13 May and in force from 21 May, amended the older procedure in Resolution 2.459/16. It added a definition of IMSI and let mobile providers block the IMEI, IMSI and associated line in certain cases tied to federal prisons. Ministry Resolution 336/2026 authorized the federal prison service to install and operate detection and blocking devices. ENACOM Resolution 734/2026, published on 13 August, extended the procedure to provincial prisons whose jurisdictions adhere.
Resolution 806/2026 then supplies the program machinery. Provinces and the City of Buenos Aires are invited to sign an adhesion agreement, and the Subsecretaría de Articulación Federal is authorized to sign those agreements and to implement the program. Provinces report detected devices through a single federal channel. They cannot order carriers to block anything. Block requests flow only from the national ministry. Per Diario Judicial, carriers have up to 48 hours to confirm they carried out a block. Per the Boletín Oficial text, carriers must keep records of each block that guarantee integrity and traceability and be able to make them available to users and/or authorities.
Those centralization and record-keeping features are real safeguards. A single requesting authority is easier to audit than twenty-four provincial ones. Integrity-protected logs mean that, in principle, someone can later reconstruct who asked for what.
Where the design is thin
The concern is not the prison population. It is the mechanism, which this resolution turns into permanent infrastructure. Three gaps stand out in the published materials.
- No stated review path. Law-firm analysis of the ENACOM measure notes that it says nothing on appeals or unblocking, and the Boletín Oficial text as published does not describe one either. Detection is by radio signal inside a prison perimeter. A handset or SIM detected near a facility can belong to a guard, a contractor, a visitor or a neighbour. Blocking the line and the IMSI, not just the device, means a wrongly blocked person loses their number, which in Argentina is tied to banking and identity verification. A wrong block needs a fast, cheap correction route, and none is described.
- No judicial gate in the text. Neither the Boletín Oficial text nor the law-firm summary says a judge must approve a block. The trigger is a ministry request to carriers. For a measure that cuts off a person's communications line, the proportionality test turns on who decides and who can reverse it.
- Oversight is promised, not specified. Diario Judicial reports that periodic audits are planned and that IMEI and IMSI data must be kept confidential. Those are good commitments, but audit frequency, the auditing body and any public reporting are not set out in the sources I could verify. Nor have any detection or block counts been published.
Why this matters beyond prisons
The relevant precedent is the plumbing. Argentina now has a standing, ministry-to-carrier channel that operates on line-level identifiers: IMEI, IMSI and the associated subscriber line. Today it is scoped to prison zones. Mission creep is the usual risk with such channels: a scheme built for one narrow location is later asked to serve other law-enforcement purposes. Nothing in the 806/2026 text indicates that, but the architecture makes it technically trivial, and only legal limits and transparency keep it narrow.
The record-keeping duty cuts both ways. Carriers will hold a log of which identifiers were blocked at whose request, and that log is itself sensitive data about who was flagged. Confidentiality is stated, but retention periods and access rules for those logs are not described in the sources.
A proportionate path
A pro-innovation, pro-rights position does not require opposing the program. It requires finishing it. Three inexpensive additions would keep the security benefit and shrink the risk:
- Publish a simple, time-limited unblocking and complaint procedure, with a deadline for the ministry to answer.
- Define the audit body, the audit cycle and a duty to publish aggregate figures on devices detected, lines blocked and blocks reversed.
- State a retention limit for block records and bar their use for any purpose other than the prison program without separate legal authority.
Provinces deciding whether to adhere should ask for these terms in their adhesion agreements. The agreements are the one place where they have bargaining power. Córdoba is reported to have instructed its adhesion, so the first agreements will set the template.
Argentina has moved from the 2016 blocking procedure to a four-resolution prison framework in under four months, between 13 May and 25 August. That speed is fine when the problem is urgent. It is also the moment to write the safeguards in, before the mechanism hardens. The security goal is sound. The review, oversight and retention rules still need to be written.