A different take on mobiles and terrorism
Thursday, February 21st, 2008The 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.”
