It began, as such things often do, with good intentions: brilliant men with ideals, and ideas that they believed in, and the hope of making things just a bit better. They thought they could revolutionize health care by learning where people went and what they did; massive pattern analysis algorithms could then watch for emerging symptoms from identifiable groups, or locations, allowing doctors to trace and forestall epidemics before they even began. They wanted to introduce a new generation of social networking, bridging the gap between the internet and reality by having Facebook and Twitter react to people’s surroundings and companions. They could tell us when the air around us was polluted, when traffic was likely to worsen, when our friends were around. They tried to make it all easier.
And they used our phones to do it. They asked us nicely to please download their research applications, and they told us what they would do: the new algorithms were smart, and they were always watching, deducing, calculating. They told us when we needed to exercise more; we went along with it, and we grew healthier. They kept our diaries for us, and we read them a year later and laughed as we remembered. Then the apps went public, and the entire world downloaded, exercised, and laughed with us.
But the new technologies were so much more powerful than that. The brilliant men with ideals were approached by companies and governments, and asked for their expertise and advice. Some they helped, some they refused, but everyone followed the technological trail they had blazed. Entire new businesses arose to exploit the opportunities of location-based marketing systems. DARPA adapted the technology into classified military applications. Mothers slept safer at night when their teenagers’ smartphones kept a watch to make sure the children were safe. When clubs and theaters distributed “hassle-free admission apps” that automatically paid for your entrance when you walked in the door, long lines became a thing of the past.
The phone companies were the first to push intelligence to phones without asking permission. Under the label of “Essential Pre-installed Cognitive Software,” hiding behind the cover of their EULA, they foisted apps that told them how we used their phones, where we used them, and what frustrated us about them. Then they gave that data to analysts, who told them how to make better phones for us. Everything boomed as month after month, the wireless companies’ stock prices soared ever higher. Before long, they were the biggest businesses in the world.
Then the little girl and her brother ran screaming from the blood-drenched cottage they had found in the woods, and the world reeled from the news of the Chattanooga Ripper. The police were two steps behind him as he continued to hunt, and the world was outraged. When Verizon offered the FBI their data for use in the investigation, the world cheered, and the other major companies quickly followed suit. The ones who didn’t received National Security Letters. Only one letter was protested.
The Chattanooga Ripper didn’t carry a smartphone, but some of his victims had. The data was reviewed, a movement pattern and hunting ground was established. The killer was caught! As the world celebrated the capture, the Supreme Court quietly ruled against the only phone company that had protested, setting in stone the FBI’s right to demand the data from the phones.
Data miners in law enforcement began to wash the data and filter it. Six drug rings across four major cities were busted within a month, with no apparent explanation. Police force efficiency improved by 13% as officers became accountable for the time-wasting their smartphones had reported. When the phone companies began streaming data directly to police forces, highway speeder capture became a pinpoint operation. The courts ruled the data as admissible evidence, and people began to receive their speeding tickets in the mail five days later. Police expenditures on highway patrol dropped by 40%, and the savings were directed to a new Cyber-Surveillance division.
This kicked off a sort of technological spitting contest with the online computing community. A team of researchers from Cornell built an emulator system that mimicked the exact behavior of modern smartphones. A separate team of hackers stole their technology and derived from it an app that could spoof the data reported to the phone companies; they called it “jailfaking” the phone. A lower court labeled the new software illegal; a higher court overturned the ruling, citing the First Amendment and declaring that smartphone-reported environmental data, because it was collected by devices owned by individuals, was legally a form of communication and was therefore entitled to communicate falsehoods at the discretion of the owners. So the police developed algorithms to detect spoofed data; the hackers found ways to fool the new algorithms. It was a timeless drama, and both sides were used to the sparring.
Things didn’t get ugly until the ghost phones began to appear. That technology was developed in Brazil, where a team of bored twenty-year-olds hooked up their computer to smartphones and began to run emulation technology with spoofing applications through the devices. The cell towers read it as a new phone entirely, and rejected its phony ID. But a Romanian cryptographer found out how to fabricate the ID keys, and hackers everywhere began conjuring imaginary phones which roamed about. Police and phone companies were baffled as phones began to report citizens flying through the air, zooming about at hundreds of miles per hour, or inexplicably multiplying themselves. Concerned that the golden age of law enforcement was at an end, the State of Massachusetts threw up hasty legislature outlawing ghost phones and data spoofing. While various venues protested the laws in court, the hackers retaliated directly: Boston went blind and deaf as the city’s cell phone services collapsed as millions of ghost phones executed a massive denial-of-service attack on the city.
The FBI hit back hard, issuing a digital search warrant on every phone ID that had been recorded in Boston at the time of the attack. Hundreds of crawler programs raided the hard drives of millions of phones across the state; but the hackers were two steps ahead and abandoned the suspicious ID numbers. Only nine perpetrators were caught. The courts sought to make examples of them, and gave them all life sentences; but to the populace, they became martyrs. There were riots in Boston, protests in Washington D.C., and idealists and anarchists joined together in ghost-driven DOS phone attacks all across the country. In the wake of the chaos, journalists went looking for the brilliant men with ideals, and ideas that they had believed in; but the men were nowhere to be found.
A civilian group called “People Against Cellular Exploitation,” colloquially PEACE, began a movement in opposition to any and all use of intelligence software in smartphones. As the digital conflict grew ever more heated, the movement gained momentum, and the stock prices of the cell phone companies plummeted. Layoff rates skyrocketed to new records every day as entire industries vanished overnight, burdened by both the conflict and the boycotts. The economy plummeted below anything that had been anticipated.
And as the beleaguered President sat down with his cabinet, he received an NSA report that a significant anti-American propaganda campaign was being piped through the cell phone network. Then the CIA told him that the brilliant men with ideals, and ideas that they had believed in, had been kidnapped by foreign intelligence agencies and were being forced to try to crack the technologies they had helped to create.
The Department of Homeland Security was assigned the monumental task of locking down security on all American networks. They began a campaign of requests, trying to ask nicely; but this uninvited governmental nosing did nothing except to anger the hostile populace even more. When the government gave its official support to PEACE, several of the largest cell phone companies declared bankruptcy and folded. Anarchy reigned as angry mobs ruled the streets while angry hackers ruled the networks.
Elsewhere, a special forces team had been sent to free and retrieve the brilliant men with ideals, and ideas that they had believed in. During the extraction, the soldiers asked them how everything had happened. But the brilliant men didn’t know.
Context
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to write a brand-new post this weekend — sorry about that — but I didn’t want to let a whole week go by without adding any content. I have quite a few old short stories, especially from my college years, that I didn’t try to publish back in the day. I hadn’t considered them at first, but now that I think about it, this blog is actually a pretty reasonable place for me to put them.
This particular story is one of my family’s favorites — partly for the narrative, and partly for the timing. As indicated in the title, this story was written in 2011, well before concerns about smartphones had entered the popular consciousness. I actually began this story while sitting in a college lecture on artificial intelligence. In that particular lecture, the professor was describing her own research, which involved using smartphones to pervasively track and analyze human behavior: activity (walking, sitting, standing, sleeping, etc.), location, duration, and so on. Bear in mind, this was well before the rise of smart-watches, after which people seem to have grown more comfortable with the idea of a distant, impersonal, faceless entity keeping persistent records of their every movement. (Although I’m not quite sure how comfortable people really are with this tech; I wonder how much of that comfort comes from simply not knowing the specifics.)
Whether or not people should be worried about this sort of thing, I cannot say. My professor certainly wasn’t worried. She had nothing but good intentions, and I don’t think she even realized how much like a Bond villain she sounded while describing her research. That, more than anything else, was the inspiration for this story. I could see that her field of research was revolutionary and that she expected only good to come of it, but I started to wonder how history would ultimately look back on her and the many, many other researchers pursuing similar topics at that time. And as I wondered, I started to speculate. And as I speculated, I started to write.
–Murray