The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [99]
Any technologies based on keyword filtering can, of course, be easily tricked. One can deliberately misspell or even substitute most sensitive words in a text message to fool the censors. But even if activists resort to misspelling certain words or using metaphors, governments could still make the most popular of such messages disappear. In fact, it’s not the actual content of the messages that worries the government—no one has yet expressed cogent government criticism in a hundred forty characters or less—but the fact that such messages could go viral and be seen by millions of people. Regardless of the content being shared, such viral dissemination of information makes authoritarian governments feel extremely uneasy, as it testifies to how much their grasp on information has been eroded. In the most extreme cases, they won’t hesitate to use the nuclear option and block most popular messages, without paying much attention to their content.
What is even more dangerous about using mobile phones for activism is that they allow others to identify the exact location of their owners. Mobile phones have to connect to local base stations; once a user has connected to three bases, it is possible to triangulate the person’s position. In an online demonstration to its current and potential customers, ThorpeGlen, a U.K.-based firm, boasts that it can track “a specific target through ALL his electronic communications. . . . We can detect change of SIM and change of handset after identifying one suspect. ... We can even detect that profile again even if the phone AND SIM are changed.” This means that once you’ve used a cellphone, you are trapped. To clinch their marketing pitch, ThorpeGlen attached an online map of Indonesia that depicted the movements of numerous dots—millions of Indonesians with their cellphones; it allowed a viewer to zoom in on any particular sector. But it is hardly the only company offering such services; more and more start-ups cater to the vibrant consumer market in cellphone surveillance. For just $99.97 a year, Americans can load a little program called MobileSpy onto someone’s cellphone and track that phone’s location whenever they want.
Monitoring the geographic location of phone owners may enable the government to guess where big public actions might be happening next. For example, if the owners of the hundred most dangerous cellphone numbers are all seen heading to a particular public square, there is a good chance that an antigovernment demonstration will soon ensue. Furthermore, mobile companies have strong economic incentives to improve their location-identification technology, as it would allow them to sell geographically targeted advertising, such as prompts to check out the café next door. If anything, determining a person’s location by tracing his or her mobile phone is poised to get easier in the future. While ThorpeGlen markets its services to law enforcement and intelligence firms in the West, it’s not clear if any restrictions would prohibit the export of such technology elsewhere.
Many activists are, of course, aware of such vulnerabilities and are doing their best to avoid easy detection; however, their most favorite loopholes may soon be closed. One way to stay off the grid has been to buy special, unbranded models of mobile phones that do not carry unique identifiers present in most phones, which could make such devices virtually untraceable. Such models, however, also appeal to terrorists, so it’s hardly surprising that governments have started outlawing them (for