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:
- Google Friend Connect - part 2: The largest Social Network ever built
- Having originally assumed that the reason Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn (FHL), amongst others, were involved in the Google Friend Connect (GFC) service, I initially wanted to write this post to argue that this was the biggest strategic mistake of their lives. Turns out, Google is involving them whether they like it or not - using their APIs to let you pull in your friend data to your Google Friend Connect profile from your other social networks. In light of this, the point I'll argue is therefore that not slamming the door on GFC's scraping of their data would be a fatal mistake for FHL. Needless to say, deprived of their data, GFC loses all its value to users - so this is a zero-sum game. I argued yesterday that all FHL could possibly gain from this is more information about you as you browse around the web and use social features on various websites. That's an interesting datapoint (which they may not even have access to because they're unwilling participants in this scheme), but long term, being part of GFC means their sites will be abandoned as Google rolls out the biggest social network mankind has ever seen, building...
- Google Friend Connect - part I: it’s about the data
- This week, Google announced a new tool to help me and all other website owners create social features in our sites. It's a library of javascript gadgets that I link to (in the Google library) from my site, and loads up in the site (imagine it instead of the Disqus comments system I currently have installed) to add features for visitors which they can use by signing in - like comments, a chatroom, a photo gallery for people to upload photos to, product reviews, whatever. Blogopunditry and civil rights hippies are pleased that you can log in with a google account, or OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, maybe others in future - so this isn't a straight-up move to get people to sign up Google Accounts. No, it's far more clever than that. According to their demo video, once you have a Google Friend Connect (GFC) account (having logged in with yahoo, google, openID, whatever), you can tell it who all your friends are - you simply link to your Facebook, Hi5, Orkut and/or LinkedIn social networks and it sucks that information out. For you, that's cool, because when you use the chatroom on my site, it will tell you which of...
- Oxford University launches 2008 venture capital fund for own students
- Oxford's business school, the Said Business School, has Venture Capitalist ambitions. It has put together a £1m seed stage venture capital fund, the SBSVF, and is looking to invest in businesses launched by members of the biz school itself, or members of the Oxford Entrepreneurs (OE) network. They're looking to put in £50k to £100,000 to early stage ventures. They did something similar in 2007, and ended up investing in Jambase, a frankly underwhelming live music portal (recommending and reviewing concerts, with none of the elegance or simplicity of the excellent Songkick) after reviewing over eighty applications. The copyright notice on the Jambase site states that its been around in 1998, so I'm not really sure how that would classify it as a seed stage startup. The money for the fund has been put up by Sir Philip Green and David Bonderman. Philip Green is a giant of the retail space, notably famous for catalysing the turnaround at Marks & Spencers. David Bonderman is a venture capitalist who found the Texas Pacific Group private eq firm. Interestingly, and somewhat fittingly, SBS students are involved in vetting, reviewing and doing due diligence on applicants to the SBSVF. This somewhat betrays its...
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