24th April 2011
Smart Phones - The New Surveillance Tool
Mark Hanson
Technology can be scary. Now a media storm has blown up over new revelations that smart phones, specifically the iPhone and phones running Google’s Android, record the movements and locations of the handsets, effectively becoming a continuous record of a person’s whereabouts.
It has long been one of the mainstays of the conspiracy theorists that mobile phones can be used to locate and track people’s movements, but the system was not specific and required an actual process to initiate. Although the technology, known as mobile phone tracking, has increased in accuracy in recent years, the data was held only by the network company and is not used except in specific instances. There is no credible suggestion that ordinary mobile phones are regularly being tracked, although China recently announced that it would be gathering the data on a regular basis in Beijing in order to provide up-to-date traffic information.
The new revelations, first carried in the Guardian newspaper on the 20th April 2011, that Apple’s iPhone has a file that records the location of the handset, is a new development in that the intention to gather a massive database of people’s movements has now been shown to be active.
Concerns have been raised that the system, which can also be found on location-based services on Google Android phones and possibly other smart phones such as Blackberries, could be abused by marketing companies, law enforcement agencies, and totalitarian regimes.
The intention of these vast location databases that are being set up is ostensibly to provide a faster service and enable location-based features such as maps and traffic updates, yet the concerns over the potential uses of such data has led to calls in some nations for investigations into the privacy aspects of such information procurement.
"One security researcher, Alex Levinson of Katana Forensics, said on Thursday that US law enforcement had already made use of the location data recorded by the iPhone in investigations.
"Some police forces, such as those in Michigan, already carry readers that can copy all the files from a smartphone even if it is protected with a password, and that it has been used on motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union says such examination amounts to an "unreasonable search", which would be illegal in the US."
A German privacy watchdog has asked Apple to provide a formal response to the news, and they have given Apple until the 10th May to respond. Up until now, Apple has not made comment on the story.
The concerns are serious. The potential of such information being used to crush protest gatherings, enable surveillance of those such as “domestic extremists” whose main offence is to attend a Greenpeace meeting or other political activity, cannot be easily brushed aside.
The situation that is developing, whereby the few hold all the information possible about the many, is a sure recipe for global oppressive governance. We walk, blinded by flashing lights, into the lair of a dragon.
