Mobiele Telefoons en de Maatschappij Orwellian
Door Daniel Soar | Voor een ogenblik in de recente jaren '90, zag eruit het alsof de mobiele telefoons ons zouden kunnen vrij maken. U kon in het park werken, beschikbaar zijn toen u wilde zijn, om te kiezen wie u aan beantwoordde. U zou kunnen overal zijn terwijl u om het even wat deed. Als de plaats werd vermeld was het onnodig geratel (`ben ik op de trein! ') of een handige leugen (`ben ik in het bureau'). De rug toen, een telefoon in uw zak was een dure nieuwigheid. Tien later jaar, zijn er 3.3 miljard actieve mobiele telefoons, betekenend dat - als u de show-offs-show negeert die verscheidene hebben - heeft de helft van de planeet; 85 percent van de miljoen nieuwe opgenomen abonnementen elke dag komt uit de ontwikkelende wereld. Drie miljard mensen zijn enkel weg een paar knooppersen, en waar zij zijn zijn niet van belang. Maar als u het het terugtrekken zich type bent, is het probleem dat de telefoonbedrijven en interessant anderen precies weten waar u, bij om het even welke bepaalde tweede bent, mits u uw handtas met u en uw ingeschakelde telefoon hebt: zelfs bepaalt de plaats de meest basistechnologie, de triangulering van de telefoonmast, van u aan binnen een paar honderd meter; de nieuwere telefoons, met ingebouwd GPS, zullen om het even welk systeem vertellen dat vraagt of u in de keuken of loo bent.
U zou kunnen veronderstellen dat deze informatie of van belang voor niemand of, ten minste is, door privacywetten en toegankelijk slechts door de agentschappen beschermd die zelfmoordbommenwerpers en pedofielen jagen. Maar u zou verkeerd zijn. Iedereen kan, bijvoorbeeld, omhoog - bij £29.99 een jaar - aan mapAmobile.com (`zal u weten altijd waar uw gehouden van degenen') zijn ondertekenen, wat u toestaat om de bewegingen van uw familie `en vrienden' op het computerscherm te volgen. De bescherming, van het standpunt van uw vriend, is dat hij aan wordt gevolgd, een proces moet toestemmen dat zijn het antwoorden op een tekstbericht impliceert dat hem alarmeert aan het verzoek; dit zou niet moeten zijn veel van een belemmering aan u als zogenaamde stalker als hij gebeurt om zijn telefoon te verlaten rond liggend. 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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