Constant Touch (16 page)

In
March 2003, the United States, in a coalition which included the United Kingdom, invaded Iraq on the pretext of Iraq's failure to satisfy United Nations resolutions regarding the possession of weapons of mass destruction. The war was actively opposed by many countries, in particular France, Germany and Russia. For example, in February, France and Germany (with Belgium) had set opposition to the war above the obligations of NATO membership, by maintaining a veto on plans to defend Turkey if attacked by Iraq. France and Germany insisted that policing Iraq with United Nations weapon inspectors was preferable to war. France, Germany and Russia threatened to veto any new United Nations resolution authorising military action. The Europeans were swiftly demonised by the ‘hawks' in George W. Bush's administration.

One of the patterns that we have seen so far in
Constant Touch
is that international political relations powerfully shaped the development of the mobile phone, in particular through the negotiation and operation of cellular phone standards. The squabbles over who would win the contracts to build Iraqi mobile systems in the aftermath of war illustrate again this phenomenon. Mobile phones had been (effectively) banned
under Saddam Hussein. In July 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority invited expressions of interest in three Iraqi mobile licences on offer, and laid down strict rules over what kinds of bid were allowed. One of these rules, which stated that no government could ‘directly or indirectly own more than 5 per cent of any single bidding company or single company in consortia', seemed to many commentators designed to exclude companies based in continental Europe, in particular Orange and T-Mobile (in which the French and German governments held significant stakes, a legacy of the companies' origins as spin-offs from national telecommunications authorities). The rule also seemed to exclude the neighbouring Arab companies, including MTC-Vodafone in Kuwait and Batelco (Bahrain) which had already rigged up a working emergency system around Basra and Baghdad respectively. (Nor were these newcomers. Batelco had a venerable history in mobile phones: a tiny Batelco cellular network may well have been operating as early as 1978, which would make it one of the first in the world.)

Even more controversial was the decision over whether to adopt GSM or one of its rivals as the second-generation standard for Iraq. Barely a week into the war, the Republican congressman for San Diego, Darrell Issa, denounced the very suggestion of deploying ‘a European-based wireless technology known as GSM (“Groupe Spécial Mobile” – this standard was developed
by the French) for this new Iraqi cellphone system'. (He was wrong, of course. As we saw earlier, GSM was not developed by the French alone, although it was undoubtedly a
European
project.) Congressman Issa urged the choice of a rival standard, CDMA, which, as we have seen, was developed in San Diego County by a firm with intimate and long-standing links with the US defence industry, Qualcomm.

So the choice was between GSM, used by all neighbouring countries to Iraq, as well as being the standard on which most of the world's cellphones operated, or CDMA, a product and symbol of American security interests. In August 2003, following an outcry from Arab companies, the 5 per cent rule was relaxed to allow a 10 per cent stake. This still excluded companies such as Batelco. However, GSM was chosen. In the event, the three licences were finally awarded in October 2003, after delay, obfuscation and allegations of corruption, to three Arab consortia: Egypt's Orascom Telecom, Kuwait's National Mobile Telecommunications and MTC (which had strong British links, via Vodafone and the British administration in southern Iraq). As part of the Orascom Telecom deal, the key infrastructure contract went to Motorola, the one company that could boast a happy combination of GSM expertise
and
American ownership.

Once the infrastructure was in place, Iraqi cellular phones were snapped up. By 2012, according to
World Bank figures, 71 subscriptions were in place for every 100 people, which isn't far short of the Middle East average. And the full range of mobile culture and uses developed. Without mobile phones the infamous 2004 images of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison would probably not have been taken, and certainly not as widely shared. Likewise, mobile phone shops in the Shia areas of Baghdad were selling camera phone footage of Saddam Hussein on the gallows within a day of his hanging on 30 December 2006.

In Afghanistan, whose conflict with the West has dragged on just as long as in Iraq, there are other mobile stories to tell. It's a poorer country and the market was less tempting to cellphone companies. Nevertheless, mobile subscriptions by 2012 stood at about four in ten of the population, and four companies combined to offer mobile phone services across three quarters of the country. The fact that cellphones could be tracked or eavesdropped meant that these companies became the target of the Taliban. In February 2008, a Taliban statement demanded that the companies turned off the cellphone infrastructure from 5.00pm to 7.00am. ‘If they do not heed it', ran the statement, ‘the Taliban will target their offices, suboffices and tower stations.' The companies agreed. Interestingly the Taliban did not call for a total suspension – presumably the phones are just too useful. But some analysts saw a message in the Taliban's partial blackout as well as a compromise. ‘Tactics
like the cellphone offensive have allowed the Taliban to project their presence in far more insidious and sophisticated ways, using instruments of modernity they once shunned,' notes Alissa J. Rubin in the
New York Times
. ‘The shutoff sends a daily reminder to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Afghans that the Taliban still hold substantial sway over their future.'

As
mobile phones have become widespread throughout much of the globe, so it is no surprise that they are used as a tool of communication for all purposes, including the organisation of political protest. We have already seen the case of the ousting of Joseph Estrada in the Philippines in 2000–01. But great care has to be taken in the analysis of such episodes, for two reasons. First, commentators in the West have been over-eager to attribute unwarranted, specific power to new technologies as tools of political protest. The novelty can distract attention from the continuing and probably more important roles of older methods of organisation. Second, unpleasant regimes have not been slow to learn lessons. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to think that new information technologies offer new ways to repress protest and to bolster authoritarianism.

Between 2003 and 2011 the world witnessed a series of protests, many of which subsided but some of which succeeded in ending long-standing repressive regimes. These episodes include the so-called ‘colour revolutions' (such as the ‘Rose Revolution' of Georgia in 2003 and the ‘Orange Revolution' in Ukraine in 2005) and the ‘Arab Spring'. In some of these protests the use of
mobile phones and social media caught the eye of commentators in the West, who proposed alternative monikers. For example, the Moldovan unrest of 2009, the ‘Green Revolution' protests over the disputed elections in Iran between 2009 and 2010, and the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt between 2010 and 2011 were all called ‘Twitter revolutions'. (The Iranian protest, the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt and that of Ben Ali's regime in Tunisia were also called ‘Facebook revolutions'.)

There is no doubt that the use of mobile phones and social media were part of the story. In Iran, camera phone images circulated on YouTube of the death of a 26-year-old woman called Neda Agha-Soltan contributed immensely to the opposition cause. In Tunisia, likewise, video footage of the small-scale protests early in the revolution was recorded and shared using mobile phones. But even then it depended on older media technologies – specifically a traditional television news network, Al Jazeera – to pick up on and spread these images further to fully ignite the unrest. Yet still it was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the mobile phone that were picked out in the West as most significant. Partly this highlighting of just one aspect of the episodes can be explained by a deep-seated set of values that presents new information technologies as inherently revolutionary. Partly it comes from a utopian belief, dating from the Cold War, that free information alone can undermine
authoritarian regimes. Partly it was simply a result of reliance by journalists and commentators in the West on what was visible and accessible to them. Faced with fast-moving and dangerous situations in far-away countries, it was easier to monitor Twitter feeds (especially English-language Twitter feeds) than pursue the stories on the ground.

Indeed the more closed a society is to the West, the more likely it is that small, visible, accessible trickles of information are seized upon and their significance overplayed. For example, take North Korea, undoubtedly the most closed country on the planet. In 2010, the
New York Times
carried the headline ‘North Koreans use cellphones to bare secrets'. On one level the story was about the rise of websites collating anonymised news of everyday life in the communist paradise, drawn from North Koreans who bravely sent them information. In fact the article, by Choe Sang-Hun in Seoul, reveals just how effective the regime was in stopping this flow. Very few North Koreans have mobile phones. The only area where messages can be sent is in the far north, where the Chinese cellular networks just about reach across the border. Genuine whistleblowers put themselves in immense danger (and if caught were shot). The North Korean regime, well aware of what the websites were doing – and the fact that three of the five websites involved were funded by the American National Endowment for Democracy surely helped it interpret
their activities ideologically – has responded in a depressingly sophisticated manner, feeding disinformation and monitoring calls.

The scholar Evgeny Morozov is the most trenchant, and insightful, critic of naïve and over-optimistic accounts of the relationships between new information technologies and authoritarian regimes. In
The Net Delusion
(2011) he points out, for example, the lack of hard evidence that Twitter was the critical organising tool of the Iranian protests, but also how this absence of evidence did not prevent the claim being repeated across the blogosphere. (Indeed he cites Moeed Ahmad, director of new media for Al Jazeera, who conducted a fact-checking exercise and could ‘confirm only 60 active Twitter accounts in Tehran, a number that fell to six once the Iranian authorities cracked down on online communications'.) Morozov rightly says that ‘the mobile phone is another activist tool that has not been subjected to thorough … analysis', one which has plenty of ‘shortcomings and vulnerabilities'. Specifically, he notes that mobile phones play into the hands of regimes. First, they can turn off cellular networks, either across a nation or just in sensitive areas. For example, the Belarus government in 2006 and the Moldovan authorities in 2009 simply ordered the shutting down of the mobile network in the central squares where protestors were gathering. Second, Morozov finds plenty of evidence that authoritarian regimes are becoming
masters of sophisticated keyword searching, turning rebellious SMS messages into a mine of useful information for surveillance and harassment. In China, mobile operators routinely survey and block messages with banned words, while China Mobile's chief executive officer freely admitted in 2008 that ‘his company provides data on its users to the government whenever the government demands it'. Finally, Morozov argues that location-tracking makes this capacity to use technologies against protestors and dissidents even more powerful, further strengthening authoritarian states.

The
days when mobile phones were a symbol of privilege are long gone. In many countries the number of subscriptions equals or even exceeds the population. People are talking more, at least on the cellphone. The soundscape has also changed. In the 1990s the distinctive ‘Nokia Tune' – de, de, duh-dah, de, de, duh-dah, de, de, duh-dah-dah, in gently falling tones; in fact a few bars of the Spanish guitar composer Francisco Tárrega's
Gran Vals
of 1902 – rang out. (In the future, directors will be able to evoke the last years of the second millennium just by playing this phrase). With first customisable ringtones and then the infinite sonic potential of smartphones, the sonic soundscape of the 2000s is perhaps less distinctive. While teenagers on the top floor of a bus might indulge in ‘sod-casting', the playing of music at loud volume through the tinny speakers of their phones, most of the time on a smartphone, as we have seen, is spent silently searching the internet, updating social media and playing games. And this is done almost everywhere there are people.

Nevertheless it is now far easier to identify the places that don't have cellphones than to attempt to describe all the places that do. That said, if you look at a map of global GSM coverage – a good indicator, since it
is the most popular and cheapest standard – then there are plenty of white areas where there is no signal. The upper Amazon, the Sahara, the drier lands of west China and central Asia and the Australian outback are all blank. And of course the frozen Arctic and Antarctic are not covered with cellphone masts. Cellphone coverage is spotty on a finer grain too; it peters out as population and wealth dwindle. Where there are people, it seems, there are phones. However, the exceptions are fascinating, because they reveal the social and technical rules which constrain the mobile phone.

There are some rooms where you should not use a cellphone. In a gym, a camera phone is an invasion of privacy. Elsewhere it's a problem of disturbance. In theatres and concert halls, for example, no one wants to have a performance interrupted by a ringtone, a sound always followed by the noise of scrabbling as the embarrassed punter tries to locate the phone in the dark and fumbles to turn the thing off. Yet, of course, with bigger audiences the chance that one person has forgotten the switch off increases towards inevitability. It is a gruesome breach of social etiquette, at least in the politer halls of entertainment. In November 2005 the actor Richard Griffiths was towards the end of a Saturday matinée performance of
Heroes
, a play about war veterans in a nursing home, when an audience member's phone went off repeatedly. The first time, the actor just gave the offending woman a withering stare. The
third time, Griffiths, whom younger readers might know as Mr Dursley in the Harry Potter films, angrily told her to turn it off or leave. The audience gave a deafening round of applause – a sure sign that a well-known social rule had been re-established. ‘It's a phone-free zone. We don't want them ringing and we certainly don't want them ringing and people ignoring them pretending that it's not theirs,' said Kevin Spacey, star of
The
Usual Suspects
turned London theatre manager, of an earlier incident, adding: ‘My feeling is if people don't know how to behave they shouldn't come.'

In Britain, phones and BlackBerrys are banned from the meetings of David Cameron's Cabinet, partly because they are a distraction but also to reinforce a constitutional point that ministers share responsibility for decisions and therefore need to pay attention. Phones in Parliament are allowed, so long as they are set on silent. At the top, phones are banned because they interfere with the operation of power and authority. At the bottom, phones are banned to make people powerless. In the United States justice system, for example, prisoners in all state and federal prisons are forbidden to possess a cellphone – pun intended. But as Kim Severson and Robbie Brown revealed in the
New York Times
, the reality is quite different. ‘Almost everybody has a phone,' said ‘Mike', an inmate at Smith State Prison in Georgia, to the reporters. ‘Almost every phone is a smartphone. Almost everybody with a smartphone has
a Facebook.' It is not gentle Facebook poking that worries authorities. Rather, since the smartphone is a personal computer connected to the internet, it can be used to access all kinds of ‘files', and not of the file-in-a-cake variety. Rather the data could be maps, instructions to criminal compadres or means of organising a prison protest. Nor can cellphone signals be jammed, since this would interfere with the constitutional right to communicate held by those with legal phones – lawyers, guards – who visit prison.

The banning of mobile phones is, significantly, most earnestly wished for in institutions that depend on a well-defined and strong hierarchy of authority. Prisons, hospitals and courtrooms are exemplary cases. Anxiety over phones in schools also partly springs from this source. Mobile phone bans are a matter of individual school policy in Britain, but in Osaka in Japan, New York City and the state of Bavaria in Germany, for example, there is a region-wide prohibition. Time spent texting is time not spent paying attention to the teacher. Ringtones are as disruptive in the classroom as they are in a hushed theatre. However, there is a mismatch between official policies and actual practice. The Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed the use of cellphones by teens in the United States in 2009, and paid particular attention to schools. The majority of pupils attended schools that permitted cellphones to be brought to school but forbade them in
class. A quarter banned cellphones altogether, while a mere one in ten were permissive. However even in the no-phone schools, over six out of ten teens smuggled their cellphone in every day. Phones were hidden ‘behind stacks of books, under desktops, inside of bags', while one pupil was even more inventive: ‘I've got [a second phone] … if you get caught using your phone you can pull out a fake phone, turn it on and give it to them.'

Pupils want phones because they are an important tool for maintaining their social lives. Parents sometimes side with their children rather than with the school in this area. New York is an interesting special case because the city has a rule, introduced in the 1980s at the time of pagers, that bans all electronic communications devices from school premises. ‘Schools are for learning,' said the city's mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2006, backing the ban, ‘and these devices are diversions from learning.' But parents disagreed. ‘As a single parent of three children, at three different levels, in three buildings, I have no choice but to use a cellphone to coordinate logistically,' said Carmen Cola. Another parent added: ‘If [my child] couldn't take his cellphone, I wouldn't want him travelling to school in Manhattan … I'm going to figure a way to hide their cellphones so that they'll have it.' One entrepreneurial response to the prohibition was devised by convenience stores near school gates – they installed safes so that pupils could
leave their phones in the morning and pick them up on the way home.

Another set of buildings that restrict the presence of mobile phones is corporate headquarters and laboratories. The worry here is over commercial secrecy. Apple has always fiercely protected its creative back spaces. You would never be allowed to take an iPhone into the place where iPhone prototypes are designed, played with and tested. Other companies – such as Intel and Samsung – prohibit phones, especially camera phones, from their premises. Commercial secrecy shades into national security too – phones are banned from sensitive sites such as the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapon design centre in the United States.

Two
technologies of mobility, cars and mobile phones, have developed together, but the intimate relationship might be unravelling with another set of restrictions and prohibitions. One of the first ways in which radio telephones were used was in police patrol cars in American cities. The commercial mobile radio services of the 1950s and 1960s were marketed at the chauffeur-driven classes or at businesses where mobility was part of the job. Even Lars Magnus Ericsson, back in 1910, first imagined a mobile telephone while driving in the Swedish countryside. Furthermore, both technologies have featured a Janus-faced aspect: on the one hand they have been used to powerfully express and reinforce the freedoms of the individual, while on the other the centralised databases that accompany them – the driving and vehicle licence databases and the information kept about cellphone subscribers' movements, actions and contacts – have been used by the forces of law and order. Technologies of mobility created new opportunities for crime, but also the tools by which crime was fought. In the United Kingdom, a new twist in the relationship occurred on 1 December 2003 when it became a specific offence to use a hand-held phone when driving. Similar bans were introduced in countries from Australia and Austria to Turkmenistan and Zimbabwe. In the United States, like the mobile service itself, the regulations were patchy – total bans in New York and California, partial bans in Florida and Illinois,
but none in Alabama and Idaho. While most ‘hands-free' phones are still legal, the bans do seem to be the beginning of the end of the affair.

Anyone who has flown in an aircraft will be familiar with the following announcement prior to take-off: ‘At this time, we request that all mobile phones, pagers, radios and remote-controlled toys be turned off for the full duration of the flight, as these items might interfere with the navigational and communication equipment on this aircraft.' The request is often frustrating and sometimes – as in the case of the car – ignored, both signs of how we now expect to be in constant touch. (In 2006, the Federal Aviation Administration discreetly surveyed 38 flights for cellphone calls, and found ‘considerable onboard radio frequency activity'.) The problem is that aircraft are complex assemblages of electronic and other systems, which can be affected in unpredictable ways by signals from mobile phones. When switched on, the phone attempts to connect to a network and, not finding one, boosts its signal to maximum power. In 2008 the RTCA (originally the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, but which acts as an independent body bringing together industry, government and academic parties), found that unauthorised electronic emissions ‘could exceed interference thresholds for critical aircraft systems', notably two systems: one for determining position, one for recording the glide slope, the angle crucial to landing.

However,
there is money to be made from passengers desperate to stay in touch with the ground. The European plane maker Airbus announced research in 2006 that claimed that mobile phones could be used safely in flight. There remains the problem of distance – 35,000 feet is a long way from the cellular networks. (Indeed, reception is spotty just at the top of city skyscrapers.) In the Airbus trials the A320 airplane carried a ‘picocell' (a tiny cell), which communicated to Globalstar satellites, and thence to the ground. A similar, contemporary trial was carried out by American Airlines in collaboration with Qualcomm. In 2009, the budget operator Ryanair – never one to miss an opportunity to find new things to bill passengers for – introduced a chargeable service allowing calls to be made over 10,000 feet. Other airlines – Qantas, Malaysia Airlines, Emirates and Royal Jordanian – did the same. The ban, however, remained in the United States, where cabin crew insisted that cellphones would aggravate the already high tensions between passengers and would interfere with the need to give clear direction in emergencies.

Phones on underground trains tell a similar story. The problem has been both technical – how can a phone be made to connect to the cellular network? – and social – will other passengers object? The technical problem is not merely distance from the ground, since base stations can easily be installed in the tunnels. Rather
the problems are ones of speed and capacity. 2G and 3G networks do not work well with fast-moving phones, and an underground train carriage can cram together 100 passengers, each with a phone. Nevertheless, these technical difficulties can be overcome – as they were on the Paris Métro (Europe's first to work with cellphones) and even the Tyne and Wear Metro in 2004. In London, progress is slow. One reason for delay is concern that mobiles might be used to trigger terrorist bombs. ‘Using mobiles in deep line sections' was not necessary, said Simon Hughes, a London mayoral candidate, in 2005, adding: ‘Texting is a luxury, security is not.' In 2012 there was still no signal on the Tube, with no agreement on who should pay for the installation if it happened: taxpayers and passengers or mobile operators.

For some the continued silence is welcome. But the case of the BART unrest shows that passengers, once connected, would soon expect that to continue. BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, the tram that runs in and out of San Francisco. In July 2011, protests were sparked by the killing of a homeless man who was shot by a BART police officer at Civic Center station. Twitter (using the hashtag #MuBARTek, in reference to the ex-leader of Egypt) was one tool used to coordinate action. As the situation escalated, the BART authorities decided to turn off the cellular network to thwart the organisation of the protestors. This in turn caused general
outrage from commuters, and even provoked cyber attacks, supposedly by the Anonymous hackers' collective. One side cried ‘freedom of speech' while the other said this was trumped by public safety concerns.