Κινητά τηλέφωνα και η κοινωνία Orwellian
Από Ντάνιελ Soar | Για μια στιγμή προς το τέλος της δεκαετίας του '90, κοίταξε σαν η κινητή τηλεφωνική δύναμη μας καθιστά ελεύθερους. Θα μπορούσατε να εργαστείτε στο πάρκο, να είστε διαθέσιμοι όταν θελήσατε να είστε, να επιλέξετε σε ποιων απαντήσατε. Θα μπορούσατε να είστε οπουδήποτε ενώ κάνατε τίποτα. Εάν η θέση αναφέρθηκε ήταν δωρεάν φλυαρία (`είμαι στο τραίνο! ») ή ένα πρακτικό ψέμα (`είμαι στο γραφείο»). Η πλάτη έπειτα, ένα τηλέφωνο στην τσέπη σας ήταν μια ακριβή καινοτομία. Δέκα έτη αργότερα, υπάρχουν 3.3 δισεκατομμύριο ενεργά κινητά τηλέφωνα, σημαίνοντας ότι - εάν αγνοείτε την επίδειξη-offs-επίδειξη που έχουν αρκετά - ο μισός πλανήτης έχει έναν 85 τοις εκατό των εκατομμυρισσών νέων συνδρομών που λαμβάνονται κάθε ημέρα προέρχονται από τον αναπτυσσόμενο κόσμο. Τρία δισεκατομμύριο άνθρωποι είναι ακριβώς μερικοί Τύποι κουμπιών μακριά, και όπου είναι δεν πειράζουν. Αλλά εάν είστε ο τύπος αποχώρησης, το πρόβλημα είναι ότι οι τηλεφωνικές επιχειρήσεις και ενδιαφερόμενος άλλων ξέρουν ακριβώς όπου είστε, σε οποιοδήποτε δεδομένο δεύτερο, εφ' όσον ανάβετε την τσάντα σας με σας και το τηλέφωνό σας: ακόμη και η πιό βασική τεχνολογία, triangulation τηλεφωνικών ιστών, σας εντοπίζει μέσα σε μερικά εκατό μέτρα τα νεώτερα τηλέφωνα, με το ΠΣΤ που ενσωματώνεται, θα πουν οποιοδήποτε σύστημα που ρωτά εάν είστε στην κουζίνα ή την τουαλέτα.
Δύναμη υποθέτετε ότι αυτές οι πληροφορίες είναι είτε ενδιαφέρουσες σε κανένα είτε, στο ελάχιστο, προστατεύονται από τους νόμους μυστικότητας και προσιτός μόνο από τις αντιπροσωπείες που κυνηγούν τα βομβαρδιστικά αεροπλάνα και τους παιδόφιλους αυτοκτονίας. Αλλά θα κάνατε λάθος. Καθένας μπορεί, για παράδειγμα, να υπογράψει επάνω - σε £29.99 ετησίως - στο mapAmobile.com (`εσείς ξέρει πάντα όπου οι αγαπημένοι αυτοί σας είναι»), το οποίο επιτρέπει σε σας για να ακολουθήσει τις κυκλοφορίες της οικογένειας `και των φίλων σας» σε μια οθόνη υπολογιστών. Η προστασία, από την άποψη του φίλου σας, είναι ότι πρέπει να συγκατατεθεί με την καταδίωξη, μια διαδικασία που περιλαμβάνει την απάντησή του σε ένα μήνυμα κειμένων που προειδοποιεί τον στο αίτημα αυτό δεν πρέπει να είναι ένα μεγάλο μέρος ενός εμποδίου σε σας ως δυνάμει κυνηγό εάν συμβαίνει να αφήσει το τηλέφωνό του γύρω. That this sort of enterprising solution is possible is the result of the major networks – in the UK, Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile – having decided, in around 2002, to sell their location data to any company willing to pay for it.
Such services are obscure, and barely legal, but it’s about to be brought home to the majority of mobile users that what they’re up to isn’t private information. Owners of the latest version of Apple’s iPhone – avidly queued for at stores around the world last month – can now download an application that displays a friend’s location as a bright green dot on a map. In 2009, phones running Google’s Android operating system will be able to show you in pictures how to reach that green dot while avoiding traffic snarl-ups and stray hurricanes; they’ll also tell you how much a drink will cost when you get there. Along the way you might have to dodge a virtual attack from a passing stranger who, like you, has signed up to an urban espionage ‘immersive game’ and has pegged you in the street as a target. If all this sounds like unnecessary gimmickry, and you’re perfectly happy with your phone the way it is, or would be if only you knew how to make it ring like a phone rather than a wheezing horse or a three-dimensional aural representation of the rings of Saturn, then you’re out of luck: the information your phone provides is out there anyway. It doesn’t belong to you, and anyone with the required resources can do with it what they will.
At a very rough estimate half a trillion calls are made each day on the world’s mobile networks: their origin and destination, their time and duration and all identifying codes are logged on telecom provider hard-drives and generally retained, under emerging legislation, for up to two years. It’s impossible to exaggerate the value of these data. In most countries no one can listen in to your conversation – though it’s technically trivial to do – without a warrant, but given what most of us talk about most of the time what we actually say when we’re on the phone may be the least interesting thing about the call. Certainly this is the view of the growing Intelligence Support Systems industry (ISS), which sells analysis tools to government agencies, police forces and – increasingly – the phone companies themselves. Take the case of ThorpeGlen, a company headquartered in a business park outside Ipswich that also hosts research divisions of BT and Nokia Siemens Networks. At the frequent ISS conferences – Dubai, Qatar, Washington, Prague – one of the key topics of discussion tends to be how to identify targets for LI (that’s ‘lawful intercept’) in the first place: it’s a cinch to bug someone, but how do you help a law enforcement agency decide who to bug?
To help answer that question, companies like ThorpeGlen (and VASTech and Kommlabs and Aqsacom) sell systems that carry out ‘passive probing’, analysing vast quantities of communications data to detect subjects of potential interest to security services, thereby doing their expensive legwork for them. ThorpeGlen’s VP of sales and marketing showed off one of these tools in a ‘Webinar’ broadcast to the ISS community on 13 May. He used as an example the data from ‘a mobile network we have access to’ – since he chose not to obscure the numbers we know it’s Indonesia-based – and explained that calls from the entire network of 50 million subscribers had been processed, over a period of two weeks, to produce a database of eight billion or so ‘events’. Everyone on a network, he said, is part of a group; most groups talk to other groups, creating a spider’s web of interactions. Of the 50 million subscribers ThorpeGlen processed, 48 million effectively belonged to ‘one large group’: they called one another, or their friends called friends of their friends; this set of people was dismissed. A further 400,000 subscriptions could be attributed to a few large ‘nodes’, with numbers belonging to call centres, shops and information services. The remaining groups ranged in size from two to 142 subscribers. Members of these groups only ever called each other – clear evidence of antisocial behaviour – and, in one extreme case, a group was identified in which all the subscribers only ever called a single number at the centre of the web. This section of the ThorpeGlen presentation ended with one word: ‘WHY??’
Once you’ve found your terrorist, how do you know that he won’t, say, pass on his phone, or get a new number or use a throwaway pay-as-you-go handset (as British Olympic officals were advised to do by MI6 in an attempt to evade Chinese spies)? ThorpeGlen has a solution for that too. It also sells ‘profiling’ systems, which measure the behaviour pattern of an individual subscriber and, using statistical analysis, determine whether that same pattern is now appearing from another source. In other words, if your terrorist gets a new phone you’ll still know it’s him. If he keeps the same phone and starts changing his pattern, then he’s about to blow up Jakarta International Airport. This is important stuff. If you want to see how ThorpeGlen’s systems work for yourself, just log on to https://81.143.55.50:58443; all you need to do is figure out a username and password. Who isn’t a spy now?
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Contributions & Guests . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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