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  Rather than expect the debate over health and mobile phones to be resolved, we should consider two quite different ways of thinking about it. First, with subscription to mobile phones hitting over three-quarters of the population in many countries, the big picture is one of users not resisting a technology, but enthusiastically embracing it, despite knowing there may be risks. What needs to be explained is not so much why there is public concern over harmful effects of mobile phones, as why the concern has so little effect on behaviour. Second, the debate will never be closed by expert pronouncement, since public concerns are framed by a powerful and growing culture of distrust towards scientific expertise. (I suggest that this trend is part and parcel of wider social and political transformations, discussed later.) Concerns supposedly directed at a particular technology are in fact generated by deeper social tensions and conflicts. Indeed, expert opinion has only united to declare harmful effects in one area: talking on a mobile phone while driving. This opened a new attack on an old alliance between two technologies of mobility.

  Chapter 19

  Cars, phones and crime

  New technologies of mobility create new crimes, new criminal modus operandi and new ways to catch criminals. Take, for example, the automobile. From the first decade of the 20th century, cars provoked a crime wave. In Britain, a speed limit of 20 miles per hour was in force between 1903 and 1930, when it was briefly revoked; and a 30 miles per hour limit in built-up areas was hurriedly reintroduced by the 1934 Road Traffic Act, after a spate of accidents, and has been in place ever since. Mobility increased through the century: by 1950 an average day’s travel was five miles, but by 2000 it was 28 miles. Much of this travel was by car. A dramatic effect of the new mobility, with its legal limits, was to create new crimes of speeding. Criminal statistics became dominated by car-related crime. Furthermore, as well as driving infringements becoming criminal offences in their own right, speedy automobiles led to more accidents, including ‘hit-and-run’ incidents. Patterns of criminal behaviour also changed. More cars meant more stolen cars. Burglars, previously confined to large towns and cities, suddenly found rich pickings in the surrounding countryside, which was now only minutes away. Statistics for break-ins correlate strongly with increased car ownership.

  The history of two technologies of mobility and individual freedom, the car and the mobile phone, has long been intimate. (BT Archives)

  But, in turn, techniques of policing and crime detection also changed in response to the mobility of criminals. On a mundane level, many hours of police time were now spent in work such as enforcing traffic codes or tracing missing vehicles. This new emphasis would have been unwelcome were it not for the new information tools that registration provided. Within a few decades of the birth of mass motoring, every driver and every vehicle had been tagged with a unique identifying number, and immense filing systems recorded changes and movements. The registers relating to motoring soon became central tools in police work. Of course, different countries responded to the mobility provided by the automobile in different ways. Norway, for example, introduced strict speed limits relatively early – a pattern shared by other countries which strongly valued social cohesion and were not swayed by lobbying from car manufacturers. The United States or China would be different cases again. But the car became so central to many societies in the 20th century that the phenomenon of increasing interdependence of policing and criminality was a common one. It should be seen as one more example of how the increased spread of technologies of mobility created possibilities of freedom from centralised authority – whether it was from the family, society or other enforcers of ‘correct’ behaviour – which in turn were countered, even domesticated, by strengthening bureaucratic or policing powers.

  A technology that demonstrated the links between mobile radio and the automobile, between cultures of mobility and freedom, was Citizens’ Band (CB) Radio. CB was not a cellular radio service: all transmissions were made on a segment of the radio spectrum, around 27 MHz, that had been given over to amateur use. Everyone could hear everyone else. From the late 1950s, a movement of enthusiasts was fostered by the marketing of CB radio kits. But CB radio really took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when its adoption was spearheaded by US truckers, providing communication and social ties across the freeways. The CB ‘fad’ marked the moment when the values – and technology – of the truckers struck a deeper chord. For a few years in the mid-1970s, the specialised CB language of American truck-drivers – ‘10-4, good buddy’, ‘Breaker 1-9, this is the rubber duck’ and so on – could be heard echoed as far from Route 66 as Britain and the Netherlands. The 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit was a smash, as was Convoy (starring ‘Rubber Duck’) the following year. What resonated was the mythology of a network of individuals living outside traditional society, indeed outside the law, best encapsulated in the supposed truckers’ trick of using CB radio to warn each other of police speed traps. The network opposed centralised power. While the popularity of CB prefigured the later demand for cellular telephony, the continuity of social values associated with both also tells us something important.

  The cellular phone is also a technology of mobile communication, and a similar story can be told. As with the spread of the automobile, this new technology of mobility created new crimes. In early-21st-century Britain, for example, the theft of mobile phones contributed to the largest recorded increase in reported crimes affecting young people. By 2007, 800,000 phones were being stolen in Britain each year. Rates were similar elsewhere: hundreds of thousands in Australia and millions in the United States. As we have already seen, the mobile phone is by far the most expensive object ever to become routinely carried on the person. (And by 2001 70 per cent of adults and 81 per cent of fifteen- to 24-year-olds in the UK possessed one.) Also, despite the phone’s slide down the social scale, its role as an indicator of status and personal identity – important, as ever, in the playground – has not been diminished. But by 2001 over a quarter of all robberies involved a mobile phone, and nearly half the victims were under eighteen. The perpetrators too were likely to be young.

  A portion of this wave of thefts by and from children stemmed from bullying rather than anything more organised. But when Home Office researchers Victoria Harrington and Pat Mayhew interviewed the inmates of Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution, a more complex picture emerged. Some phones were stolen as part of the general ‘pickings’ of others’ possessions, but expensive models might be particularly targeted. Phones would be used until the service was blocked, or the pay-as-you-go card ran out. Or they would be immediately passed onto a ready local – and probably international – market. Thefts were prompted by opportunity and, intriguingly, the social tensions brought to the surface by conspicuous display of technology:

  The plethora of phones around – left for instance casually on counter tops in bars, or on the shelf near the front door at home – also makes them relatively accessible to thieves. In the case of street crime, too, potential thieves can easily spot someone with a phone. It is difficult to say how much truth there is in the contention of offenders in Feltham … that owners’ ostentatious use of phones causes a degree of irritation that provokes theft – but it might give users pause for thought.

  The Feltham boys expressed the same ‘irritation’ as the annoyed passenger on the train surrounded by mobile users, although they took rather more drastic action in response. Many police officers (although not the Home Office researchers) believed that mobile theft was often implicated in the maintenance of social status by the technique of ‘taxing’: here ‘the phone theft per se is less important than groups of offenders exerting control, establishing territorial rights, and showing “who’s who” by penalising street users (in particular young ones) through phone theft’. Possession of technology made a social statement, and, conversely, to not have a phone meant social deprivation: for the boys, phones were ‘an indispensable crutch. Their loss
of phones in custody was said to be one of the worst elements of the deprivation of their liberty.’ Loss of a technology of mobility was equated directly with loss of freedom.

  By the 2000s it was clear that stealing mobile phones had become international and more organised, partly because increased security meant that phones were hotter property. The National Mobile Phone Crime Unit in the UK, for example, in 2007, noted that phones were being stolen to order and then shipped abroad in increasing numbers.

  Reliable research on criminals’ uses of mobile phones is much harder to come by, although evidence suggests that the opportunities provided by mobile phones to make planning and carrying out crimes more ‘efficient’ have not been ignored. Smuggling drugs across the Mexican–United States border (as well as the more benign movement of immigrants) is coordinated by text messages containing information about routes and the presence of border patrols. The messages are sent by spotters who, according to Marc Lacey in the New York Times, ‘monitor the southern Arizona desert from lookout points and help steer the migrants, as well as drug shipments, away from authorities’. The patchy reception in the thinly populated border regions is a problem both for the patrols and for those they are trying to catch.

  A major influence on criminal uses has been the availability of pay-as-you-go mobile phones, which can be easily bought under an assumed name. Any calls made might be traceable, but ownership of the phone cannot be ascertained. The 7 July 2005 tube and bus bombers in London exploited this anonymity. The same advantage, of course, applies to stolen phones. Before the mobile phone, the crime of cellular fraud could not have existed – another reminder that new technologies of mobility create new crimes. The subscription fraud form of mobile crime, in which phones are bought under false names with no intention of paying for calls, is the most frequent. But the cloning of phones, in which the identity of another user is stolen, amounted to 85,000 cases in the United Kingdom by 1996, and is widespread across the cellular world: 80 per cent of drug dealers apprehended in the United States in the late 1990s, for example, were found to be using cloned mobile phones; while in the occupied territories of Israel, Palestinians made 57,000 international calls, subverting official security restrictions – and charged subscribers in Arizona.

  In 2001 a complex European taxation swindle that proved lucrative came to light. It was based, rather bizarrely, in Stoke-on-Trent, a conurbation in the northern Midlands of England which had not seen the good days since Josiah Wedgwood produced pots there. Fraudsters exploited the fact that no tax was charged on the traffic of goods within the European single market. They imported mobile phones, chosen because they were easily portable and in high demand, and sold them on to other, legitimate traders – adding 17.5 per cent tax, which was pocketed. At least £2.6 billion was creamed off in this way in 2000–01, with possibly 10 billion pounds lost to the taxman overall.

  Just as the mobility of the car was domesticated by keeping databases of information, the criminal potentialities of the cellphone have been contained by technologies of registration. Indeed, whereas there was no essential reason why cars and drivers had to be registered – if you don’t care about the law, you can get in a car and drive off; if it has petrol it will work – the cellular phone is unimaginable without databases of information. Every time a cellular phone passes from cell to cell, a reference has to be made to some central computerised list of network users. Every time an owner is billed, the information on phone use has to be totted up and processed. Unlike the automobile, databases are integral to mobile phone technology. (Although the user might never suspect this, sometimes with unintended consequences: when itemised billing was introduced in France male customers complained in their thousands because their extramarital affairs were uncovered overnight. The networks were forced to bow to public pressure and replace the last four digits of phone numbers with asterisks.)

  Most of this information is stored centrally, as part of the operation of the mobile switching centre, but increasingly personal data is held in the handset. In Europe, this shift coincided with the introduction of digital cellphones. First developed for the German analogue Netz-C system, which in many other ways was a commercial disappointment, the Subscriber Identity Module, or SIM card, was adopted as part of the pan-European GSM concept. While the SIM card contained information identifying the subscriber, it also could hold much more: preferred phone settings, recently dialled numbers or the equivalent of an address book. (One incidental consequence has been the reduced need to remember phone numbers. I can no longer recall friends’ numbers, since my phone identifies incoming and outgoing calls by name.) The introduction of the SIM card was prompted by anxieties over crime. The SIM card also reflected wishes – hopes rather than expectations – that the card, which could identify the purchaser, would spark a boom in mobile commerce. GSM, remember, was imagined as a key infrastructural component of a future European market.

  The GSM standard also provided the option of identifying equipment through an Equipment Identification Number (EIN) – so the SIM would say who was on the phone and the EIN would say exactly which phone was being used. In the UK, the mobile phone companies chose not to activate the EIN capability. In April 2002 the British prime minister, Tony Blair, made an announcement that many commentators considered a hostage to fortune: that the recent rise in crime would be under control by the following September. What seemed like a bold political gamble was in fact partly a measured guess that if the mobile companies were persuaded to activate the EIN, then stolen phones could be cut off as soon as they were reported. Crime and mobile phones had become matters of political spin.

  Of much greater significance was the adoption of the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) code. While the SIM card would be tied to the person, the fifteen-digit IMEI number was tied to the device. Try it yourself. Tap in *#06# and, on almost all cellphones, your IMEI will be displayed. (Why not write it down now in a safe place!) If a phone is stolen then it can be blocked by using the IMEI to disable the SIM card. Unblocking – the changing of a IMEI number, quite different from the harmless ‘unlocking’ which frees a phone from being tied to one company’s service – by anyone other than manufacturers is illegal in most countries.

  Meanwhile the information held by mobile phone operators, and even the personal data stored on the SIM card, have become detective tools and forensic evidence. In 1993, the hiding place of the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar was found by tracking his mobile radio calls. In October 2002, similar surveillance probably contributed to the arrest of al-Qaeda suspect Abu Qatada. In 2010 the chance eavesdropping of the cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s courier, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, led American investigators to the Peshawar district of Pakistan. Further intensive, and deeply secretive, probing located the al-Qaeda leader’s compound in Abbotabad. Navy SEALS shot bin Laden dead in a raid on 2 May 2011.

  Just one other, less serious example must serve as an illustration. In July 2001, after four years on the run, the authorities finally caught up in the Philippines with Alfred Sirven, a French businessman wanted as part of the investigations into the Elf Aquitaine corruption scandal. At the moment of arrest, Sirven realised the potentially incriminating evidence he held on his person. James Tasoc, of the National Bureau of Investigation in the Philippines, described what happened next: ‘He munched up the chip of his mobile like chewing gum. He broke it with his teeth.’

  While the uses of mobile phones for criminal activity and detection are revealing, we should not forget a much more everyday role: many mobile phones are carried as part of the complex strategies that we all develop of dealing with the risks and dangers of modern life. So a phone is bought by parents for a son or daughter who is leaving home as a student, or for a teenager who is starting to stay out late at night, as an act of reassurance: should they ever be in trouble, they will not lack the means of contact. The diminishing guardianship of family life is replaced by the constant touch of the mobi
le phone. Again, the fear of car breakdowns in remote places has often been cited by women as a major reason for owning a cellphone. (Notice how the two technologies of mobility interact again.) Likewise, in countries such as Sweden, the United Kingdom or Germany, where most of the population already own a mobile phone, further expansion of the market has depended on sales pitches that play on fear. Early adopters of the mobile needed little persuasion, and the young took to the chatty communicability of mobile phones like ducks to water. But selling to an older market, which can be either more technophobic or wiser in their purchases, has relied on presenting the mobile phone as a safety technology of last resort. This was why my parents bought one. While anyone who has been saved a walk along the hard shoulder of a motorway at night to find a landline telephone will know the true benefits of the mobile phone as a tool of safety, sometimes the device seems to be merely talismanic. Like a statuette of St Christopher, possession alone seems to ward off danger. A colleague of mine tells a story of one of his parents, who carried a mobile phone in their car. On one occasion a passenger needed to make a phone call and asked to use the mobile. Unsure about the method of operation, the passenger enquired how to work it. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ came the reply. ‘I always have it turned off. It’s only for emergencies.’

  Women were targeted in mobile phone advertising in the 1980s. Note how ‘peace of mind’ is promised if ‘you’re always in touch’. However, exploiting fear of crime was an old tactic, as the next illustration demonstrates. (BT Archives)