Does the government have the right to switch off/jam our telecoms?
The very counter-culture, but fascinating, Google group Spectre.Event Horizon puts together a ‘story’ (in its own inimitable style – pasting stories vastly dispersed in time – some several years ago, some breaking news – one after another to build up the context around an issue and make the point without cherrypickig individual paragraphs) about txtMobs being used by protesters during the Republican party National Convention as a way of coordinating thousand-strong crowds of protesters to converge with short notice (i.e. short notice to the police) on particular spots; to disperse immediately; to avoid blockades; to track particularly abusive police units; to unmask undercover agents (in this case, a txt/SMS message was sent to everyone to let them know that undercover ops were wearing red and orange bracelets).
Now, the MIT student that wrote the code for distributing text messages across an entire crowd is being subpoenaed to give up every recipient and sender’s details and messages sent/received. He actually put together a research publication (on the web, here) that describes how it was used (lots of very interesting use cases and sample messages)
This was a big success and a fair bit of headache for the police, which had been getting extremely good at crushing demonstrations. In the era of the intelligent mob, how does the police respond to this new mode of organising demos? Seems likely they’ll want to shut down the comms the mob is using. My question is this, and maybe somebody knows the answer – does the state have the authority to switch off mobile networks to paralyse mobs? What about passing a virus through these vast SMS networks to switch off or flag up participant mobiles and then switching them off?
Related:
- UK government amends data protection and cookies law
- The heel dragging is over: just three weeks before the legal deadline for the incorporation of EU changes to online tracking and data protection laws (set out in Directive2009/136/EC) expired, the UK government has finally implemented those changes (too little, too late?). This post summarises some of the changes that businesses and organisations handling user data or using certain marketing methods (like automated recordings) need to be aware of, and helps users know their rights....
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