A different take on mobiles and terrorism

February 21st, 2008 India

The International Herald Tribune has an article this week which suggests that a rapid increase in mobile use (65 million lines) and mobile coverage (half of Pakistan’s geography, 70% of its people), are “Bringing Pakistanis Together”.  But despite the headline, the article is not about the millions of ’everyday’ calls made on the network, but rather about the links between mobiles and search for bin Laden 

People all around Pakistan now have handsets,”   Zouhair Khaliq, chief executive of Mobilink, Pakistan’s largest mobile operator, said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress, an industry convention. “It is getting increasingly difficult for anyone to hide in Pakistan, even bin Laden.”

The same article also looks at India:

Sunil Bharti Mittal, the chief executive and managing director of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile operator,  with 60 million customers, said the rapid spread of wireless technology in southern Asia was changing life across the Indian subcontinent, bringing with it the chance for increased security.

“It is hard to put a concrete figure on this, but I do believe that there has definitely been a decrease in terrorism in India since mobile phones have become more widespread,” said Mittal, whose company is adding two million to four million new customers every month. The number of mobile users in India is expected to  double from 240 million at the end of 2007 to 500 million by the end of 2010, Mittal said.

I agree with Mittal’s assessment about the chance for increased security, but I’m not sure about his second point about the decrease in terrorism in India.  Landlines and mobiles alike reduce isolation and improve the ability of governments, including the police, to coordinate activities. But what struck me about the article is how different it sounds from many other discussions of mobiles and terrorism, which focus instead on how terrorists use mobiles.  Here are two other stories from 2005 about mobiles and terrorism, both also from the IHT.

Police in Indian city crack down on ‘Osama’ video clips

The two clips, which run for a total of 57 seconds, have been circulating in Kanpur city in Uttar Pradesh state. They show edited portions of videos purportedly released by bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist group, Senior Superintendent of Police Prabhat C. Meena said by telephone from Kanpur. “Orders have been issued to start random checking of cell phones. If anyone is found carrying the Osama MMS, he will be charged with sedition,” Meena said. He added that the MMS, or multimedia message, could be used to win sympathizers for al-Qaida and spread religious hatred.

Wireless: In Thailand, on the trail of cellphone terrorists

From May 10, the government wants Thailand’s four mobile phone operators to start registering the identity of people buying prepaid SIM cards, the so-called subscriber identity module that identifies a phone to its network. That means collecting data on close to one million people a month. The impetus for this initiative apparently came from a series of bomb blasts in Thailand’s mainly Muslim southern provinces, where security forces face an insurgency. The bombs were mostly detonated by cellphones, Thai authorities say.

Indeed, all these assessments can be correct and contradictory at the same time. Mobiles are powerful tools, which are used for a variety of purposes by a variety of actors.  But perhaps the 2008 story is tapping into a more nuanced insight about how things are different in societies with high teledensity than in societies with low teledensity, and how quickly these things can change.

Note/Edit on 4 March:  – The New York Times today briefly reports that the Taliban have blown up some mobile phone towers in Afghanistan, “because, they said, American and NATO forces were using phone signals to track Taliban movements.”
 

Mobile papers at ICTD2007

December 18th, 2007 Africa, India, conferences, text messaging

MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2^nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore.   It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.

Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative.  This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones.  The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.

Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana.   This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic.  Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana?  If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.

Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.

Your mobile number, your identity

November 22nd, 2007 India

Here’s a clip from a current billboard, newsprint, and TV advertising campaign in India.  It features mega star Abhishek Bachchan (son of mega-mega star Amitabh Bachchan) presiding over a divided/acrimonious rural community. As the village sarpanch, an elected official, AB recommends replacing people’s names with mobile numbers and–presto–all is well.

Whether the ads are inappropriate, edgy, or simply over-the-top remains a matter of some debate.  But no matter how one reads the political undertones, the ads do tap a great sense of how people’s mobile numbers seem to serve as an adjunct identity. With relatively few landline numbers, no single, integrated national ID card, and often-vague physical addresses, one’s mobile number in India is important indeed.

A few more beeping discussions

November 2nd, 2007 Africa, India, beeping/miss calls

Apologies for the lengthy absence – it’s been an unusually busy stretch. 

My paper on “The Rules of Beeping” is now available as part of the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). 

I’ve had lots of fun this month speaking to the broader community about beeping and missed calls, and I’m grateful to many of you for your interest. A piece from Andrew Havens at Reuters kicked off this round of discussion, which has carried into German, Swiss, and Indonesian venues (at least), plus to the Scientific American Blog. 

I also had a chance to do a podcast interview with Kamla Bhatt on beeping/missed calls this week; part one of the interview is here.  I cover a lot of the same ground in the interview as in as the paper…in case some of you prefer just an occasional ‘um’ or ‘ahh’ mixed in with your communication theory.

You see, we have a culture….

September 21st, 2007 Africa, India, beeping/miss calls, sharing behavior

Some perspectives today from the Hindu Business Line on the needs of rural mobile phone users in India. The article covers a lot of ground; missed calls, sharing, livlihoods, and text-free user interfaces figure prominently.  I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

If you thought missed calls is a purely Indian phenomenon, think again. Says Sarup [from Nokia], “I too thought so but was amazed to see this phenomenon in Africa. There they call it ‘flashing’, and the basic message is ‘Call me back’.

Having spoken to users in both spots (India and Africa) about beeping/flashing/missed calling, I’ve been impressed by how people want to describe the practice as something unique to their region.  One of my interview participants started his explanation of beeping with: “you see, in Rwanda, we have a culture…”.  I think it has to do with how people learn to beep/flash/miss call.   They’re introduced to the practice by friends and family, not by websites or manuals.  Beeping is therefore perceived as a social practice, as a (re) creation of the people they know, rather than a property of the handset or even the network to which it connects.

HOIT2007

September 6th, 2007 India, conferences, m-banking

Recently, I attended HOIT 2007—Home/Community Oriented ICT for the Next Billion.  Hosted at IIT-Madras, this was the first time the conference has been held outside the US or Europe. The “next billion” theme of this year’s version provided an umbrella for ICT4D discussions, and included a keynote by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala. 

I presented an updated version of my thoughts on m-banking—although the basic paper is unchanged—as part of a panel called “Living and Livelihoods: ICTs and the Blurring Domestic and Economic Spheres in Emerging Economies”. The panel’s other presenters were my MSR colleague Nimmi Rangaswamy (ICTs in middle class Indian families, with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing), Jan Blum from Nokia Design (street-smart businesses in China and Brazil), and Vinod Gopinath of Novatium Solutions (an overview of Novatium’s netPC).

There were only a few presentations which directly addressed mobiles-in-the-developing-world. Of those, the keynote by David Frohlich of the Digital World Research Centre about the Storybank Project was particularly interesting, Storybank is exploring the use of simple, affordable ICTs to capture to stuff of everyday life in villages in the developing world (David called it community centered design). As the Storybank website explains:

Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focusing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information

This general approach has a long history (e.g., Through Navajo Eyes), but mobile technologies open up new possibilities for these initiatives to capitalize on the handset’s affordances for simultaneity, customization, and ubiquity. New projects like Storybank can help us explore the boundaries of mobile appropriation and community use.

Speaking of digital libraries, some of concepts highlighted by Storybank remind me of similar efforts in the Digital Green project, led by my colleagues Rikin Gandhi and Rajesh Veeraraghavan at MSRI.  Digital green is focused specifically on agricultural productivity, but also relies on content generated by members of the community rather than on content created outside.

The logic of blurring the user/producer dichotomy, so central to recent developments in new media and social software, is currently finding its way into all sorts of interesting projects in the developing world; Storybank, Digital Green, and MobilED are just a few.

A modest proposal: miss call management service for India

July 12th, 2007 India, beeping/miss calls

The parody site mutiny.in has released ‘secret details’ of Apple’s plans for the iPhone India Edition. Among them is MMS — in this case, Miss Call Management Service, which “allows you to make calls to friends without giving them a mill-second to pick up your call”. Might be useful…particularly if your friends are quick to answer their mobiles.

The spoof requires a kernel of truth; missed calls are indeed pervasive in India.