{"id":4423,"date":"2008-08-20T18:57:22","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T17:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=4423"},"modified":"2008-08-20T18:57:22","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T17:57:22","slug":"mobile-phones-and-the-orwellian-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/contributions\/mobile-phones-and-the-orwellian-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile Phones and the Orwellian Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Soar<\/a> | For a moment in the late 1990s, it looked as though mobile phones might make us free. You could work in the park, be available when you wanted to be, choose who you answered to. You could be anywhere while you did anything. If location was mentioned it was gratuitous chatter (\u2018I\u2019m on the train!\u2019) or a handy lie (\u2018I\u2019m in the office\u2019). Back then, a phone in your pocket was an expensive novelty. Ten years later, there are 3.3 billion active mobile phones, meaning that \u2014 if you ignore the show-offs who have several \u2014 half the planet has one; 85 per cent of the million new subscriptions taken up each day come from the developing world. Three billion people are just a few button presses away, and where they are doesn\u2019t matter. But if you\u2019re the retiring type, the trouble is that the phone companies and interested others do know exactly where you are, at any given second, so long as you have your handbag with you and your phone switched on: even the most basic technology, phone mast triangulation, locates you to within a couple of hundred metres; newer phones, with GPS built in, will tell any system that asks whether you\u2019re in the kitchen or the loo.<\/p>\n

You might assume that this information is either of interest to no one or, at the very least, protected by privacy laws and accessible only by the agencies that hunt suicide bombers and paedophiles. But you\u2019d be wrong. Anyone can, for instance, sign up \u2014 at \u00a329.99 a year \u2014 to mapAmobile.com (\u2018you\u2019ll always know where your loved ones are\u2019), which allows you to follow the movements of your \u2018family and friends\u2019 on a computer screen. The safeguard, from your friend\u2019s point of view, is that he has to consent to being tracked, a process which involves his replying to a text message alerting him to the request; this shouldn\u2019t be much of a hindrance to you as would-be stalker if he happens to leave his phone lying around. That this sort of enterprising solution is possible is the result of the major networks \u2014 in the UK, Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile \u2014 having decided, in around 2002, to sell their location data to any company willing to pay for it.<\/p>\n

Such services are obscure, and barely legal, but it\u2019s about to be brought home to the majority of mobile users that what they\u2019re up to isn\u2019t private information. Owners of the latest version of Apple\u2019s iPhone \u2014 avidly queued for at stores around the world last month \u2014 can now download an application that displays a friend\u2019s location as a bright green dot on a map. In 2009, phones running Google\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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 \u2018immersive game\u2019 and has pegged you in the street as a target. If all this sounds like unnecessary gimmickry, and you\u2019re 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\u2019re out of luck: the information your phone provides is out there anyway. It doesn\u2019t belong to you, and anyone with the required resources can do with it what they will.<\/p>\n

At a very rough estimate half a trillion calls are made each day on the world\u2019s 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\u2019s impossible to exaggerate the value of these data. In most countries no one can listen in to your conversation \u2014 though it\u2019s technically trivial to do \u2014 without a warrant, but given what most of us talk about most of the time what we actually say when we\u2019re 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 \u2014 increasingly \u2014 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 \u2014 Dubai, Qatar, Washington, Prague \u2014 one of the key topics of discussion tends to be how to identify targets for LI (that\u2019s \u2018lawful intercept\u2019) in the first place: it\u2019s a cinch to bug someone, but how do you help a law enforcement agency decide who to bug?<\/p>\n

To help answer that question, companies like ThorpeGlen (and VASTech and Kommlabs and Aqsacom) sell systems that carry out \u2018passive probing\u2019, analysing vast quantities of communications data to detect subjects of potential interest to security services, thereby doing their expensive legwork for them. ThorpeGlen\u2019s VP of sales and marketing showed off one of these tools in a \u2018Webinar\u2019 broadcast to the ISS community on 13 May. He used as an example the data from \u2018a mobile network we have access to\u2019 \u2014 since he chose not to obscure the numbers we know it\u2019s Indonesia-based \u2014 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 \u2018events\u2019. Everyone on a network, he said, is part of a group; most groups talk to other groups, creating a spider\u2019s web of interactions. Of the 50 million subscribers ThorpeGlen processed, 48 million effectively belonged to \u2018one large group\u2019: 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 \u2018nodes\u2019, 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 \u2014 clear evidence of antisocial behaviour \u2014 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: \u2018WHY??<\/em><\/strong>\u2019<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve found your terrorist, how do you know that he won\u2019t, 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 \u2018profiling\u2019 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\u2019ll still know it\u2019s him. If he keeps the same phone and starts changing his pattern, then he\u2019s about to blow up Jakarta International Airport. This is important stuff. If you want to see how ThorpeGlen\u2019s 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\u2019t a spy now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Soar | For a moment in the late 1990s, it looked as though mobile phones might make us free. You could work in the park, be available when you wanted to be, choose who you answered to. You could be anywhere while you did anything. If location was mentioned it was gratuitous chatter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1615],"tags":[55],"class_list":{"0":"post-4423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-contributions","7":"category-uk-news","8":"tag-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}