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:
- Twitter
- So ashamed at myself. After resisting the mass hysteria surrounding Twitter, I finally succumbed and signed up. Here's the post mortem: Met Biz Stone, the creator, last year. Nice guy, pretty interesting. For a while, news has been breaking first through Twitter, and events are covered live this way. I'm a very DIY guy. I like to get to the bottom of things, and find things out as directly from the source as possible. If I can avoid extraneous layers of coverage and processing, like TechCrunch, so much the better I like aggregating what's being said into a single field. It creates unique contexts that, whilst usually serve no purpose (perhaps even obfuscate the meaning of a piece of information), sometimes, it can magically bring a whole new context and meaning to data. I wish my email, Twitter, Facebook friend feed, and what interesting Twits have to say, were all aggregated (as long as the tool was clever in helping me spend my 'attention credits'. For a while, I've been thinking. So many people use it to communicate, it must be a decent communication tool. It looks as though it's going to develop into a better mode of communication, and...
- Personal responsibility
- Just jotting down a thought: humans seem quite prone to, even perhaps hard-wired (since children do it a lot), to shift responsibility for 'bad things that happen' to others. At first sight, this seems strange, since you might reasonably expect people who recognise their mistakes and flaws (and are thus able to learn from their mistakes) to be more 'intelligent' (able to improve from past experiences) - you'd expect natural selection to select for self-improvers, than blame-passers. That doesn't seem to be the case, and so suggests that shifting the blame has been an evolutionarily favourable trait. That would be down to two forces: 1. Low/tolerable risk of 'punishment' for shifting blame and not recognising your own flaws 2. A (reproductive) advantage to shifting blame. What might the advantage be? This is even more speculative, but it could be that potential mates are not impressed/put off by admissions of guilt. For pre-humans in a social environment, staying confident, blameless and 'pristine' in the eyes of onlookers (even if fraudulently) appears to have been a bigger advantage than being 'intelligent' to one's own flaws. Surprising, no? Evolution favours obnoxious liars! We could dig even deeper and suggest that this might be...
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