Science News Review

Your Cell Phone is Stalking You, and So Is the Government

Sep 21 at 8:08pm by Aileen

…should we be feeling safer yet?

The science news this week had some really odd articles that looked a lot like heavy-handed preferential placements by some junior government official trying to scare home-grown dissidents and tech-savvy terrorists writing bomb-making instructions for the internet from a cave in Afghanistan (or maybe Pakistan). My guess is that we’ll have this from time to time in the modern world, as our reliance on science and technology increases and can be used by anyone to promote whatever someone deems it pertinent to promote.

The trick is to figure out what’s real science news, what’s purposely planted disinformation, and what the ‘trial balloons’ being floated are. Then we could try to figure out what in the world the desired effect of such things might be. From the looks of our first story, the wisdom of having hundreds of millions of people “on-call” 24-7 via cell phones isn’t looking quite so desirable all of a sudden…

Yes, it’s official: there is a new psychiatric disorder and it’s caused by your cell phone. It’s called “ringxiety”. A survey presented at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in San Francisco reported that two-thirds of adults in the US hear their cell phone ring or feel it vibrate when it’s not actually ringing or vibrating.

As reported in Many hear ‘phantom ringing’ from cellphone, the more a person uses their phone, the more often they hear phantom ringing. And you thought it was just a modern comedy that so many people are now walking the streets of our towns and cities talking incessantly to themselves, the only indicator that they’re not all inpatients out on day passes being the little gadgets hooked to their ears.

Between this alarming suggestion of incipient mental illness and the notable problem that Drivers using cell phones are twice as likely to cause rear-end collisions, one might begin to wonder if being 100% ‘wired’ is particularly good for humans. Hmmm…

Of course, just because you’re imagining that your phone is talking to you when it’s not doesn’t mean nobody’s listening in on your communications. The frontier for that kind of surveillance seems to be the internet, and it’s all about the War on Terror. Scientists Use ‘Dark Web’ to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online describes a project by computational scientists at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at UA designed to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the web.

Now, you might wonder – quite legitimately – how this ‘Dark Web’ knows what emails and which of the traffic at web sites and forums is “terrorist-generated,” as well as how it can claim to be intercepting “all” of it. Further, one might be reasonably concerned about how much of regular citizens’ communications are being monitored by such a project, and whether Holly Housewife and Joe Blow and Daphne Darling the teenager are getting labeled “Terrorist” by a machine that claims to be artificially intelligent. Don’t we have laws against this sort of thing?

Something to consider in light of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution, since project director Chen has already planned expansions into other data-mining purposes:

Dark Web’s capabilities are also being used to study the online presence of extremist groups and other social movement organizations. Chen sees applications for this Web mining approach for other academic fields.

“What we are doing is using this to study societal change,” Chen says. “Evidence of this change is appearing online, and computational science can help other disciplines better understand this change.”

Maybe those little old Quaker ladies shouldn’t relax their legal challenges to unwarranted surveillance yet. Looks to me like the gub’ment still thinks recipes for chocolate chip cookies is reason to send in the Marines.

Meanwhile, across the pond, scientists at five British universities have joined with police and security services to develop a hoped-to-be-foolproof lie detector. Research to Assist in Investigation of Criminal and Terrorist Activity reports that by combining technologies for location based games with intensive communications monitoring researchers hope to determine whether deception can be identified reliably from suspects’ movements, communications and behaviors. An interesting tidbit of news:

The interactions will be studied by psychologists and analysed by data-mining specialists to determine where the team participants are applying deception or where the account of their activities is true. The researchers will also conduct interviews to assess public awareness of, and response to, monitoring and surveillance in counter-terrorism.

Perhaps if just owning and using a cell phone causes two-thirds of people to suffer schizophrenic-like symptoms of “ringxiety,” knowledge that all their online activity, television watching habits, physical movements, literary preferences and purchases are being constantly monitored and analyzed should make them feel much better. I wonder how much the government’s willing to pay someone to do nothing but monitor all my activities all the time, and if they could be persuaded to just pay me directly. I’ll promise to write it up once a week for them, and they should soon be able to get the Brits to verify whether or not I’m telling the truth…