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Hi, so my name is Ben Dalton
and I what I want to talk
about is a project that
I've already built, which
was really trying to allow a room
of strangers to share their
free mobile minutes with
someone. So through the power of
a phone box.
But in putting together this talk, what
I found is that I was looking at
what the phone box means to us
culturally.
And I want to make a case for trying to
keep the phone box going as
something that we can rely on.
So this talk ended
up being about what a phone box
is. And it's sort of this space,
a quieter space with semi
privacy.
It encompasses something of of anonymity
in terms of communication.
You can dial a number without having to
verify your identity.
And then also in the process
of creating a new phone box that's
sustained by a room full of strangers by
a community.
I was interested in this idea of the
phone box in a public space
and what the effect of placing something
into a public space and having that
public sustain the common
good.
What that does to the to the phone box.
I'm a researcher at the Royal College of
Art and also principal
lecturer at Leeds University in the U.K.
And my main research at the moment is
Pseudonymity.
And I'm interested in designing for
Pseudonymity and the phone
books featured only very
briefly in the kind of history
of Superman as a place to change from one
pseudonym to another.
But I think the fact that it very quickly
stuck in people's heads as the
place that Superman transitions
privately from one pseudonym to
another isn't a mistake.
I think that's actually kind of a key
feature of what phone boxes mean to
us as a culture.
And there's another thing that
I've been struggling with a little bit,
and it's the tension
when talking about phone boxes between
wanting to own them as a subculture.
So I think within this
context, some culturally we
have a kind of great affinity to the
phone box. It sort of represents
something special
to hacker culture.
But if you want to try and build
kind of rich, robust, usable, sustainable
pseudonym tools or
tools for anonymity in terms of
communication, if you're constantly
invoking this subcultural narrative
around phone boxes as being
for hackers, then you're kind of
pushing aside a larger community of
users. And so the other argument
I want to make in this talk is about
designing for the mundane, sort of
presenting things in a language of
everyday use rather than this kind of
more exciting pirate kind of
hacker culture.
And I'm sort of illustrating my talk for
a large part with clips
of phone boxes featuring in
in popular media.
And that, again, I think shows our
affinity with this kind of representation
of communication in and anonymous
in a private form, but in a public space,
your own view when you're using a phone
box, but you're also kind of hidden away.
So a little bit of background to the
project.
I was invited by Drew Hemmat
and the feature Everything team to submit
an idea to their City Fictions
exhibition. They run an annual event, The
Future Everything Festival
in Manchester, in the UK
and The City Fictions was about a
speculative but also
functioning future city.
And I'd previously worked
with Feature Everything in the
year before to create a project called
Chata, which was a public, a physical
public space, a cafe with privacy,
violating
properties, a lot like Facebook and
Twitter in terms of their privacy
policy and branding.
We used guinea pigs to
draw people into sharing more than they
normally would publicly and online.
So the space in
Manchester for the city
fiction was an
empty building
and I proposed
to create the telecom system for this
city of the future.
And what I wanted to do was
to try and engage
people to create
a resource between themselves.
So by pooling the resources, these
minutes that you get free with your
phone plan into a common resource,
we can offer a free phone service
to anyone who needs to make a call.
That was the idea, the proposal
to feature everything.
And here is a photo that sort of
encapsulates the entire working system,
the experience of using that system and
condensed into one image.
So this guy is using
the handset of the free phone box
to make a call.
He's making a call to just
a random stranger somewhere.
Any low pay phone numbers
or a landline or a mobile phone in the
UK?
In this case, it's someone in the same
room. But that phone number could be
anyone.
And he's doing it by borrowing
minutes from this guy's mobile
phone. So this guy has
chosen to allow the system
to borrow call time from him.
How does that work?
What I did was to ask people when
they came and sat in the cafe if they
wanted to, to connect their mobile
phones to the system over
Bluetooth using the handsfree
profile.
So
on your phone, the system just looks like
a headset or an in car stereo system
and you're just able to select it and
pair with it.
And then the system chooses
one of the phones in the room to make the
call.
As you can see here, the phone box
is virtual.
It's created with tape very quickly.
And the whole project for me has a
certain kind of feeling to it of the fat
labs around buttholes, speed
projects in that each kind of component
was sort of attempted in quite a small
amount of time. The phone box was
certainly assembled in less than eight
hours.
But as a project, overall, it doesn't
deserve this speed project approved stamp
because things took longer than that.
So how did it work?
As I said before, I was relying on this
handsfree profile, which is part
of the Bluetooth specification.
This beautiful diagram is in the official
documentation and shows
that your phone using handsfree
can connect to a headset, but also
to a car.
And the difference between the handsfree
profile of the bottom and Blackfire and
the one above it, the headset profile is
handsfree allows you to.
I'll numbers as well, which is what you
want to do. We want our
phone booth to be able to connect to a
phone and dial the number and have it
passed through the audio in both
directions.
There's another profile, the same access,
and that allows a much more control,
access to phone books, control
over the phone, and that's used in cars
as well. But I steered clear of that one.
It was slightly more complex.
And I also worried about the security
implications of kind of people handing
over more control of their SIM to
this computer in a public
space.
How did I build the system?
Well, I used a Debian
installed on a sort of generic
PC.
I used the stable wizzy
that was available at the time, and that
dictated you sing blues,
which is the Bluetooth stack,
and that dictated using
Debussy's as a communication
channel.
Between that and any other software that
I was trying to control the handsfree
profile with.
I found blues
to be horribly documented.
They delete their documentation when they
move forward.
And since they moved on from this version
in there to their latest one, it was very
difficult to actually discover how to
change settings reliably.
All of the things that people had written
online before just weren't up to date
enough. And so it's difficult to actually
have the system respond
in the way that it was documented online.
Luckily, someone
some Ravich
had created a few years ago,
this implementation of the
handsfree profile server for
Linux could no hands.
When you read about this online,
the project at the time is
quite well documented.
It has a back end and then a front end
and a number of test programs to to
try it out. But over time, it's kind of
fallen out of use and maintenance.
And there's a lot of frustration in
sort of CA modding forums,
trying to get this program to work
again.
There's been an attempt to fork it onto
GitHub by a
number of people started by
Thomas Zimmerman.
And that's the version that I
started to play with.
And even that I
was finding, I could get the program to
run, but it was unable to actually make
the connection reliably.
I was able to make simpler Bluetooth
connections like streaming audio in one
direction. But actually creating this
handsfree profile seemed a bit
more complicated, thanks
to additional notes from John Tapsell.
I was able to actually find some settings
and and by going
through several Bluetooth dongles, I was
able to find one that did actually work
reliably with a number of phones
over Bluetooth.
The hardware, like I said, was a generic
PC.
I used a
simple USB phone
as the audio input and
output and also the keypad.
As you can see, again, everything's kind
of stuck together with tape.
And that's a running theme throughout the
project.
For the software, so the
PC has
the no hands
software running, and that's
controlling access to phones
over device, that's where the commands
are being passed backwards and forwards
to blues.
And so I wrote three Python scripts
that also sit on on
DBAs and allow
no hands to do most of the heavy lifting
and then just throw commands in
occasionally to do things like
pairing with phones as they appear
in the vicinity of the Bluetooth
dongle and also
to find the key presses
and work out what calls
to make.
And the resource of all the phone numbers
is built from the phones in the
neighboring area in the Cafe of
Feature Everything.
I also found just to mention briefly,
this app Bluetooth Eskow
tests to be quite useful in
actually trying to fine tune the settings
to get the audio to reliably play
in both directions on
the on the phone.
I'm not going to show you much
in the way of the script because it's
just some sort of, again, held together
with tape pieces of code to kind of
pass certain instructions over
Debussy's to blues and to no
hands.
Just two things to mention here.
The big list of the beginnings of mobile
phone numbers in the UK.
It turns out that most
free numbers or low cost numbers on
people's phone call plans
are easy to
select. By the first two digits,
only one or two 03 and 07.
But there is a subset
of numbers that look like no more mobile
phone numbers, but are on various islands
that are affiliated with the UK Guernsey,
Guernsey and the Isle of Man and some
call forwarding services that are premium
rate but just look like normal numbers.
And so what I'm doing there is just
building a white less than
a blacklist of numbers to
filter any calls that are dialed.
So I'm not passing expensive calls on
to the donors who have offered
up their free minutes.
I basically only want free to
mobile users calls to go through.
The other thing I'm doing there at the
top is connecting to the
USB handset.
It turns out that wasn't supported
a standard on the version of Linux
that I was using.
And so I'm just using the
human interface device rule
access to pull out the
key presses and translate them into the
numbers that are being dialed and the
call button that's being pressed.
So this is just
storing in the dialed numbers and
then filtering them and passing
them on to the the whichever mobile
phone has been selected to make the call.
So what we have here then is a
functioning
phone box that allows strangers
to walk into a space dial, a phone
number, which in itself is a little
bit strange.
If you grew up with phone boxes,
you probably that feels quite normal.
But now sort of a new
generation of people aren't used to
accessing people through numbers, but
rather through address books and faces
and IDs.
But what's interesting to me is that the
system is sustained by a social
group in the same space.
So Bluetooth has a like a range,
which is roughly room size, which means
that if this phone is to stay free and
usable, there has to be a community and
active community of people willing
to donate minutes to it.
Now, I don't think the donation seems
like much of a problem. Most people have
more minutes that they can use.
It seems part of the mobile phone
contract to sort of law under these
minutes and you never really use them up.
So most people seem quite happy with
that.
But, you know, maybe there's some other
implications around
being a donor or being a
phone call phone box user.
And I want to investigate those a little
bit more.
So one issue that I thought about
a bit is this kind of issue of power.
So the people who might
sort of choose to donate minutes and the
people who might choose to use a free
phone box may fall into different groups.
And that might be because it's like a pay
as you go contract versus a a contract
that gives you free minutes.
It might be because you have no phone.
Homeless people might find the service
particularly useful to use as callers
travelers. Again, maybe their phone
doesn't work in another country.
So you start to see this kind of weird
separation between donors and users.
And I was worried a little bit about
that, especially since phone boxes tend
to put you on display.
If you haven't seen this for a film like
Sabena, all of the references are down
the bottom and the slides are online.
It's about a man who gets trapped in a
phone box.
So what are the benefits to a caller to
coming in and using this this free
phone service? Well, obviously, it's
free, but there's another benefit as
well, which is that it offers you some
anonymity.
If you place a call through your home
phone or through your mobile phone,
you kind of have your identity
tied to placing that call.
If you go and use a payphone,
you have a slight anonymity
in the communication.
The record is still made of where
that call is directed to.
But you're kind of reasonably anonymous,
although, of course, you know, phone
boxes are in public spaces and can be
observed. But there is some degree of
anonymity there.
And certainly that feature reoccurs
is a theme in films as a way of
delivering tip offs and hacking
and everything else.
And so there's an exchange there between
some anonymity and public presence in
this social space of a small
group of people, which I think is
interesting.
So in a way, this free phone
box is using is sort of
mirroring the function of
a mixed network node.
So in a mixed network, the computer
is taking email and forwarding it on and
stripping the identity.
And in our system, the free phone box
is allowing you to take the things
you're saying and pass them through
somebody else's phone and sort of strip
the idea away.
So in a way, it functions sort of like
that. And so then we start to think,
well, what's the benefit for the donor
if they're starting to serve this
purpose, the purpose of providing
some anonymity, they're not worried
about the implications of of offering
an anonymizing service to strangers.
Is that kind of something that they might
be worried about?
Well, what are the benefits to donors?
One of the benefits, I think, for me is
that if you fail
your phone record with the phone
calls of strangers, what you start
to do is to decouple the phone
record from the your identity.
So the mobile phone, I think gradually
over time has become a symbol
and authentication tool for identifying
people.
And if you can start to insert other
people's phone calls into your record,
then what you're doing is start to
decouple that relationship
between you and your phone and your phone
record. And I think there's an
interesting property there that we should
look at a little bit further.
This is a brief period,
a fad called phone box stuffing
in the 1950s.
It lasted a year,
and so to me, this is reminiscent
of the idea of chaffe so chaffe,
it was called window in the UK
during the war, and people in
Germany, both countries invented at
the same time and didn't use it for
several years for the fear that the other
one might copy them.
And the idea is that you're flying your
plane, you drop a big cloud
of small pieces of metal, little
strips of metal, and as they sort of
flicker through the air, they reflect
radar. And you have this effect in the
in the radar system where you're unable
to see the plane because there's all this
reflection, this kind of small pieces
of of a distracting material.
And what we're talking about when we're
inserting stranger's phone calls
into our own personal identity record
is we're inserting data chaff
into our record and therefore kind of
obfuscating the sort
of form of our identity a little bit.
And so this, I think, is an interesting
idea in terms of controlling how
your identity is is monitored by
other people or stored by other people.
So I want to talk about Chaffe a little
bit more.
One approach to Chaffe that I've seen
come up a couple of times.
This is the first time that I saw it
kind of presented effectively.
This is a super villain either
by any arrest in 2002.
And what this did was to
create fake email
characters who would have email
conversations late at night
using keywords, you know,
about bombs and nuclear
material and biological agents and
assassinations of presidents and subways
and all those things.
And because those keyword terms were
passing backwards and forwards through
this email system, they were sort of
inserting this this chaff into the system
to kind of slow down the automatic
monitoring and kind of complicate
the monitoring technology.
But one thought
I had about algorithmic chat chaff
is that if you're creating it through
some sort of program pattern,
it may be that it's just as easy to
remove it again.
So if you're kind of creating this thing
just through sort of simple
patterns, then maybe it's easy to filter
it back out again.
So the alternative perhaps is to create
social data chaff.
That's chaff that's kind of created
by human activity and therefore
much harder to predict.
And my favorite example of that is
the A.K.
Extreme Computing Festival in 2002
where they invited people to
swap loyalty cards.
There was a big box in the conference and
everyone who arrived put their shopping
loyalty cards into the box.
And then as they left, at the end of the
day, they took another one.
And on their press release, they said,
imagine the data processors bafflement
when a healthy eating family
of four suddenly turns into a single 33
year old male consumes nothing but
satsumas and ready meals.
So, again, you know, there's this idea of
by inserting a stranger's
life into your own, you're
able to complicate the the
records that people are keeping.
But, you know, by doing it in a social
way, I think you kind of introduce this
extra level of complexity.
And I think that's what the free
payphone is doing in a way, is it's
offering social data
so these strangers will
make arbitrary calls to places that you
weren't expecting.
And that starts to insert this kind of
level of deniability.
Now, the deniability isn't perfect.
So you are definitely in the room
alongside this thing that offers
this certain level of chaff.
So people could easily point to the other
phone calls that you made at the same
time and say, well, those are probably
you and these were probably strangers.
But if you repeated this phone box
in a number of locations and you
put it places that you frequented often
cafes, libraries, workplaces
across from your home, you know, in the
park, you can start to see
that you could build up a regular kind
of influx of of confusing data
into your phone records.
And that might have interesting
consequences for the way that identity is
measured.
Critics of this, of wanting
to do this, I've presented these two
things, kind of some anonymity and
some deniability is a relatively
good things. But I think a lot of people
would say if you have nothing to hide,
why would you seek these things out?
The sort of normal narrative and what
I'd like to do next is to just sort of
make a case for
having deniability and having anonymity
as being very normal historically.
So it's not something that we're seeking
out that's new, but something that's
always been there that is just being
whittled away at the moment.
That sort of slow death of the phone
box as it's replaced by mobile phones,
I think demonstrates that we're moving
away from systems of like
everyday anonymity and communication.
Another great example, like the phone box
is the post box.
So the post box is just a hole
somewhere out in the world.
And there's lots of them. And you can
choose anyone and you just walk past
it and casually slip something in.
And there's almost no record of you doing
that. So it creates a very similar kind
of anonymity to the free
payphone.
When you post a letter, the address
of the receiver is known in the system,
but the identity and the address of
the sender is a little bit more
ambiguous. You could watch every
post-box. You could look for writing
style and those things that came later.
But when postboxes started, they
were definitely a system of anonymous
communication.
This one directional, anonymous
communication.
What effect did that have?
Well, in the eighteen hundreds,
there was a boom in pseudonymous.
It was used a lot by authors,
writing books and a number
of different, really inventive ways.
So the Bronte sisters
used the postal system
to hack the male dominated
publishing world and publish incredibly
inventive and creative texts
through that system.
And when they finally went to visit their
publishers after they'd become a success
and revealed the kind of big reveal that
they were these sort of timid
looking women authors,
there was, of course, that kind of
surprise in the reveal.
And they were then able to change the
system and build that change more
permanently into into publishing.
Similarly, in America,
newspaper writers, this is Charles
Brown who created this character, Artemus
Ward, and he wrote newspaper articles
under the character and really sparked
the whole kind of era in the eighteen
hundreds of pseudonymous
newspaper writing that was used
a lot for entertainment.
Mark Twain was another pseudonym
inspired by Artemus
Ward.
But the pseudonymity, as well as being
a form of entertainment, also allowed
political critique, critique,
whistle blowing, all of the things
that we associate with functioning
anonymity and pseudonymity
today.
Just to give you another couple of quick
examples, this is
more actually
pseudonym for Edward
Decker, who is Dutch
author, who used a pseudonym and
used these kind of systems of anonymous
communications through postage
and passing off to
friends.
He created incredibly, incredibly
cutting critique of Dutch
colonialism that really shifted the
conversation forward dramatically at the
time, again, in the
kind of late.
Eighteen hundreds.
But this.
Tool of the anonymous communication
system in the post-box also allowed
for great creativity.
So this is Nicolas Bourbaki.
This is a group of mathematicians who
came together, created a single identity
and wrote quite a creative approach
to set theory and mathematics,
using, again, the anonymous communication
afforded to them sort of a guarantee of
anonymity to over a number of years,
publish a series of mathematical texts
that changed perspectives on mathematics
at the time quite dramatically by
kind of pooling their efforts and
publishing under a single name.
So the case I'm making in those
couple of slides is that pseudonymity,
an anonymous communication of sorts, is
very common. And I think perhaps
given its multitude of uses,
I probably don't need to persuade you
much in this room. But elsewhere, we may
need to keep having that conversation
about why that is a useful thing
to keep sustaining,
and I think that it is difficult to
sustain it.
This is the response to the
now deleted tweet, which revealed
the pseudonym that J.K.
Rowling was using at the time
to write crime fiction.
And so the kind of effects of storage
and processing and networking
are changing the ways that pseudonyms
can work. And so I think it's important
for us to keep investigating as the
talks in the last two days have started
to pull apart, how
we can maintain levels of anonymity
in terms of communication, in social
context to keep the
possibilities of of doing this
open.
Why do we need that?
Well, the case doesn't really need to be
made, but clearly,
anonymity and pseudonymity player,
a continuous role in
the kind of powerful work of
whistleblowing, particularly
whistleblowing, is primary evidence like
the evidence of of
torture in Abu Ghraib.
And
the role
of these tools in the kind of work
of superheroes is is important for
us to be celebrating and thinking about
what we do next in terms of the technical
tools, but also the culture that
surrounds the tool, the way that we
present it to people.
And that's what I want to talk about
next.
So this is the advice published
a couple of years ago in Wired of how
to leaked to the press.
And the piece that I want to point to in
the middle is when you go to
a coffee shop that has open Wi-Fi
and then you set up an email account
and do your leaking
now coffee shops with open Wi-Fi,
the other things that turn up quite often
are libraries with public access,
free Wi-Fi, civic Wi-Fi,
campus Wi-Fi.
Sometimes those things get discussed as
the ways that you can do
what you used to do with a phone box, go
and tip off a journalist or
the police about something you want to
tell them about without necessarily
identifying yourself.
The narrative is now around these places
that have free Wi-Fi.
But over time, what I'm seeing is a shift
in the control of
identity around connecting to the web
in the UK, the library
log in, the campus log in, and more
and more obligation on businesses
and private owners of of Wi-Fi
are that you need to check identity
before you allow someone to connect.
And so the conversation
about the public benefit of free Wi-Fi
versus this kind of
shifting of responsibility and closing
down of access to anonymous
connectivity seems to be kind
of shifting in favor of of no anonymity,
which is problematic are public
spaces are sort of being stripped of
the kind of messiness that allows
all of those things we've just talked
about in terms of creativity and critique
to happen by kind of locking down
identity to every kind of access
point to this kind of immense,
interesting space that we call the
Internet and the Web.
And so what I would say is
that this demonization of
of anonymity when it works is
is always going to happen.
So the problem
is that any functioning pseudonymity
tool can always
be used as a threat against
powerful corporations and governments
that know they're doing wrong, those that
are. And so there will always
be a conscious and subconscious attempt
to demonize those technologies, whatever
they are originally designed for.
And so there's this constant kind of
issue about the way that you
describe and present the pseudonymous
and anonymous tools that you're making
for communication in terms of trying
to present them in ways that won't be
demonized.
And so, really, for me, that comes
this idea of how do you design for
pseudonymity sort of alongside
the idea of creating technical tools
through cryptography that allow
for anonymous communication.
How do you design the sort of culture
around it, the cafe of people who are
sharing their phone minutes to allow
anonymity to happen?
How do you make that space acceptable to
people so it can be sustained and
be ongoing?
And I don't think the superhero
analogy that I've pitched at the
beginning of this talk and through it is
really the one to draw on, because that's
just the other extreme to the
terrorists and the pedophiles.
It's just kind of we sort of end up
having this debate at either end of the
spectrum. And really, we should be in the
middle somewhere around all of those
issues from the past, around sort of
everyday use the just kind of general
dependance on these tools as something
that's a useful part of our society.
And that, as someone mentioned, I
think it was Nadia Henninger
yesterday, she said we need to normalize
burner phones.
And, you know, even the term burner
phones is sort of appealing to the
subcultures of the conversations
we have here, rather than kind of
thinking about how it would fit into
everyday use.
But the idea of normalizing, I think, is
an interesting one.
One way to do that is to be playful.
But then place play can also be
sort of pushed to the sidelines.
And so the kind of hacker narrative
can be quite playful.
The art narrative that I used to present
this idea originally also sort of
struggles a little bit from that.
You know, people can sign a sideline.
It is just art.
And really the question is how do we put
it into the everyday?
So first of all, what do we love
about phone boxes?
The thing that I think phone boxes
represent to us is, is it is a
space to escape momentarily.
You're still part of the public space.
It's not a dark box, kind of sealed
away entirely.
You can see what's going on around you,
but you also have some privacy
for a moment.
There often feature in films as a
connection to a loved one,
something you use when you've just
arrived somewhere new, a connection back
to the known there, a sort
of universally familiar.
And a lot of countries have sustained
that by having policies that enforce
phone boxes being in all parts of the
country. So it's sort of a common good
almost by design.
And they're also, you
know, actually reasonably private.
So, you know, there is some sound leakage
and technology in terms of spying
might change our relationship to those
physical spaces.
But historically, they were a relatively
private space, a door you can close,
a space that you make your own.
I want to represent both sides to what we
dislike about phone boxes.
Well, I think one issue is
that they are often broken
and so they're so undependable
resources.
Another one is that they
might contain sex adverts.
If you go to London, the phone box
is in the center of town near the
business district to sort of smid with
the glue of many years of adverts
for phone sex.
And they're also
sometimes they smell of urine,
which, you know, to begin with seems like
a terrible feature, but perhaps sort
of suggests that people find them private
enough that you can do that private
thing.
So, you know, maybe that's a feature in
disguise.
And also, historically, occasionally
they've been linked to bomb threats.
You know, the anonymous tip off can also
be the anonymous bomb threat, which,
again, we can think in the analogy to the
remailer reason that a number
of matters were shut down was through
this kind of connection to bomb threats.
And so we have to struggle with this
relationship with how technologies
and systems are presented.
And the direction that I think we should
go is to
think about this in terms of social
use and public space.
So one thing that
I like about the idea of rather
than talking about free Wi-Fi, and
there've been a number of very admirable
and in some ways, you know, reasonably
successful projects over the years to
open up Wi-Fi network.
That's one that was launched this year or
last year. That, again, is attempting to
make home networks a
free, open Wi-Fi system.
And I you know, I think that's the
direction we should be going.
But to have that conversation with people
who are just coming to Wi-Fi as a concept
through the the use of their
iPhone for the first time,
I'm talking about free Wi-Fi.
The the the fear that a stranger
will hide outside your house and
use it for nefarious
means is always going to outweigh
outweigh the altruism of
of wanting to to do some sort of public
good. But if we talk about phone
calls rather than data,
should we talk about lending?
A stranger, your phone, that is
still a reasonably socially acceptable
thing to do if someone comes
up to you and asks, you know, I'm stuck
and I need to contact home, lending
them your phone seems reasonable.
It's still a thing that socially we
accept as a group.
And so we can play with the fact that
although phone calls are now just data
like any other kind of data,
the fact that we socially hold those in
higher regard than we do the other kinds
of data in terms of lending and giving
and altruism, I think allows
us to have a different kind of
conversation. But I think something like
this free phone by phone box project
does is allow us to to go in
that direction
and.
The other thing that I think
the phone example does
is it raises in our minds this idea of
digital possessions.
So advertising and
contract packages
by mobile phones over the last
few years have focused heavily on
giving you free minutes, like free
minutes and free texts being part
of what you're getting for paying
this monthly fee.
And what's that? What that has done is
emphasized the idea that this kind
of abstract sort of
digital. No, you know, because
basically providing text, for example,
is very cheap for the network, but
they've kind of sort of
walled it off and created a piece
of property that they've then given to
you.
And possession's, I think, is a much
better word than property.
So the intellectual property debate is
bound up in control systems
of corporate control
on everyday use.
But possessions are much more personal.
And we have this conversation about your
possessions, your free minutes and what
you want to do with them.
I think we start to have a quite an
interesting conversation about kind
of control and use of technology
now, I'm sure buried in many
phone contracts, if not now, than if this
free payphone idea caught on would be
this clause that said you can't just give
your free minutes over to
a system that gives them to someone else
because they're not actually yours in the
minds of a phone company.
They're just a kind of a law.
But they still they feel very much
like yours, like your possessions,
and they do to a lot of people.
So I think there's an interesting kind of
tool there to enter this debate
around control of
digital technology.
That kind of narrative, I think extends
quite nicely.
Now, the phone lending,
there's definitely a higher level of
altruism, but people also have
fears about phone lending
and the kind of standard fare, I
think, which is probably quite
right in this kind of context, is if you
hand someone your phone, you're handing
them all of your personal data.
And so I think, again,
this idea of a pay phone
that arbitrates in that process, you're
lending someone your phone without
handing over the physical artifact
and an access to your personal
information.
I'm sorry, this is running a little bit
slow, I think sort of
detracts a little bit from
from the experience.
But I think we can
use the the
strong sort of feeling
of people's perspectives on
phone lending to outweigh these kind
of niggling fears to a certain extent.
And so the questions really that
we come to is
creating a free phone box that's
sustained by a room full of people
opens up a conversation about digital
access and communication that includes
these elements of anonymity and
deniability with
a much larger community of people.
If you install the phone in the right
place in a in a in
a popular use park
or cafe or library,
the benefits of providing
free phone calls and have a community
sustaining a resource together,
I think quite easily outweigh in people's
minds the kind of niggling fears.
What I'm interested in proposing this
project here today is how people might
counter that, how this kind of inevitable
demonization might happen.
I'm kind of interested in studying how
that conversation will go.
The direction that I've thought about
already is the obvious one.
Someone walks into this space,
uses the free payphone to place
a bomb scare, and that starts
to kind of cut away at this idea
that we're just creating this common
good. But I think there's an interesting
balance in the fact that Bluetooth
has the short range, which
means that it becomes a sort of social
negotiation.
So just like using a payphone on a street
corner, although you're anonymous, you're
also on view.
And so there's kind of a form of
anonymity that's not absolute.
Often when we think about
cryptography, it's it's very binary.
It either works or it's totally broken.
And I think by placing these tools
back into a social negotiation,
something interesting happens that
I'd be interested to try and see whether
we could map that to other
sort of environments and communication
systems.
The kind of two other ideas that sort of
sprung to mind for me from
this idea of altruism
is taking that idea of charitable giving
further. So in terms
of kind of deconstructing the way
that digital identity seems to be more
and more sort of stuck
into these kind of network systems
and archives, one
of them is to ask the question, what
does anonymous charitable giving look
like? So if if you
want to, as people do now and
have for hundreds of years, donate to
a cause without saying who you
are, you have to strip away your identity
from that financial transaction.
And all of the records that have been put
in place to track
money start to
kind of come up against this sort of
tradition of charitable giving.
And I think it's a good case where you
could take the upper hand by asking
how do we still give anonymously
to charities?
The other question I want to leave us
with is
how do you give to people who have
nothing, including any form
of authentication?
So at the moment, giving things to people
who live on the streets or have lost
everything is quite easy
because you can just give them physical
things. You could give them money.
That's an anonymous currency that they
can spend somewhere else.
But if we bind money
and resources and access to
welfare and benefits into identity
systems, how do we maintain giving
to people who've lost access to those?
We can talk about biometric
fingerprinting, but I think that
conversation, again, provides the upper
hand.
And for me, this talk has
been about learning about
what kind of social context could
you create in order to
talk about the things that we're talking
about every day and these kind of
contacts and these kind of conferences
about anonymity and about pseudonymity
working well, but placing them into
a social context.
Thank you very much.
So thank you very much
and I have to say something.
The Irish Sea and the Internet and
Twitter want to say a
big thank you to you and to tell you this
talk was awesome.
So one thing.
The thing that was often
noticed, your T-shirt is awesome,
thanks, I see.
So for our Q&A, we have
a lot of questions from the Internet
and maybe we have some questions from
here. So line up behind the microphones
where we stop off some Internet
questions.
Hello again from the IOC.
Besides being an awesome talk, there are
many, many questions on all
levels, like practical questions
on how it does work, but also on law
and like politics behind it.
So I start with the more technical ones
and maybe just
some summing them up so you can
just explain the technology behind
it a little bit together.
Like they ask whether it's
possible to always not
send the caller ID
from the person who bought the
phone or the phone minutes.
Whether it's possible to also share
international calls of the
contracts, allow it,
whether there's a limit for the minutes
somebody wants to share and
whether they have to activate it every
time.
Yeah, that's.
Yeah. Okay. So
the perring, what
I did with the Python scripts was to
when I recognized a new phone entering
the Bluetooth range, was to immediately
identify it as trusted and to
give it the same pin for everyone.
And so the effect for people entering
the room, entering the cafe was very
much like pairing with a cheap
headset. It just had a default pin
and you just choose it from the menu and
pair it and then that pairing lasts.
So Bluetooth has a sustained identity
and I maintained
a list.
I wondered about whether the system
should maintain a list of donor phone
numbers over time or whether it should
have some sort of purging system.
I think I would urge on the side of
purging, given that one of its sort of
properties is this kind of property of
anonymity.
But there's some balance.
There may be kind of over a
some period you would choose to delete.
International calls are not in the
UK. Seen many free minute
plans that include international calling.
But I think with the shift in EU
regulation around cheaper international
calls within the EU, maybe there'll
be some motivation for that to change.
I've also seen a lot of plans recently
that have shifted from some free
minutes to unlimited minutes.
And I think there's an interesting
dynamic there for a few years
before we entirely shift over to
what's happened and the other
kind of calling systems to
kind of play with those free minutes
in interesting ways.
The final point
about caller ID,
I thought about trying to
find I think that the problem is that
each mobile phone company has different
protocols for how you turn on
kind of anonymizing the outgoing
call. And so I didn't come up with a
kind of simple, easy way to do that.
I thought about putting up instructions
for people to do it themselves.
But in the end, I just kind of put a note
to say that these kind of IDs would
be passing through.
The other idea I had was to run a system
like Asterix that
would when you placed a call mentioned
to the person before the call was put
through, that this kind of exchange was
happening.
So you kind of frame it in a context.
But again, I think that sort of
overcomplicated it.
OK,
we have two people at the microphones
and we have a lot of more questions
from the Internet, and I think I will
just start with you, Mike one,
because I don't want to see you standing
there much longer.
I have actually two
questions, but they are short
of first question is
what kind of information
is on
the telephone of
the person who is giving
the minutes?
Three minutes.
And the second question
is actually tied to the first question.
Have you do know
what kind of legal issues
a person that is giving
their minutes may have
if their minutes
are used to
journalists or somebody
like that?
I don't know the legal implications
of of a phone being used in
a number of ways.
I think in the U.K., the one kind of
hard and fast rule is that if
your phone service and someone tells you
about a bomb plot, you have to
immediately report it.
But because you don't have access to the
call as a donor, I think there's
kind of an interesting gray area that
probably hasn't been fully investigated.
The first question about your
control and the record of the call
passing through your phone,
you can, of course, just turn off the
Bluetooth connection at any time you want
so you can disrupt a call on most
phones. When I watched it happening in
the cafe, that
the phone wouldn't necessarily even
switch on when it was reaching the call
because it's used to being sort of in
this mode where it's in the car, you
know, and you're using the hands free
kit or something.
So actually the phones tended to stay
quite kind of mute screen off, no
vibration or anything when the call was
in progress.
I suppose, you know, on some phones, you
might be able to turn on speaker phone
and it would kind of mirror the call
because you're constrained by the range
of Bluetooth.
You know, you'd be in the same room as
the person making the call in the phone
box. So it could be awkward.
So there's some kind of
sort of constraint in that in that
direction.
OK, so for another
question from the Internet, yes, it's
also related to that, it's
in terms of our lawful intercept
and how that impacted your
phone books at phone box idea,
like like do you think about
that or does anybody from
interception teams already contradict
you or does it at all
influence you?
I don't know too much about lawful
intercept.
I guess the idea is that you pick
up a phone to target
and you ask permission to target that
phone. It's a system that's shuffling
your calls out to strangers, would do
interesting things to
trying to track one person's
conversations.
I imagined originally
that perhaps rather than a
phone box in a physical location,
you could build this into a phone.
So there would be an app that would allow
your phone to be the
the headset and another
phone to be a downer.
And you could run the same kind of system
just on a on a train by turning your
phone into a certain mode.
And then you could see this proliferate
into lots of different social
spaces and conventions.
But the sort of Bluetooth programing for
you to get that to work is
kind of beyond my grasp at present.
Yeah.
OK, OK, Mike,
to say
once again, really nice idea.
I really like that aspect of mixing
connections between people socially,
probably of what I see as
a problem from the usability part is that
I need to go out and use
and basically no
use the number myself.
And you have the numbers in the UK, for
example, just if
you thought about the way to make it
easier, maybe use to Bluetooth devices
and they can use the one,
as I had said, but actually it's using
the other one which goes to another phone
or something like this.
Yeah, I thought about it.
I think it would be quite easy to do.
You would just kind of need to Bluetooth
dongles.
So one person's using their mobile
phone as the handset
and another person's using their mobile
phone as the donor.
And there's kind of things just creating
the intermediary.
Although this talk
was a love letter to phone boxes and I
quite like the physical aspects as well
as having to go stand up and stand
in a space and kind of use
the handset. But yeah, no, I think that
idea has more longevity
in it.
But remember, a single phone number
nowadays than years ago used to me
too.
And people would get their mobiles out to
like copy out the phone number into the
handset just to try it out.
So clearly that's not going to function.
But then I also like this idea that
you're not having to rely on a digital
trail. You know, if you went back to
remembering some key numbers, you could
go to the service with nothing, you know,
just your memory or a piece of paper.
And there's something nice about that
dynamic as well. So I'm kind of torn
because.
Yeah, thanks.
OK, the Internet
again.
Yes, so we have another question
that goes more into the anonymity
part of it and also about like,
yeah, law enforcement, maybe
because Jacob Appelbaum,
he's a security person,
like you all know him.
I don't have to explain.
He believes that every phone call is
being voiced, fingerprinted, and at
least in Spain.
And probably if you look at all
the other interception methods, maybe
else on the rest of the world.
So there's a video online
of a talk that you gave last year in
Berlin and Zubaz where he
mentioned that this is possible, that you
can just hear a voice
and then just say which person it is.
So interception would be even more
possible. How does this.
Yeah. Interfere with your project or
what do you think about that?
Yeah, I think so.
Voice fingerprinting, of course, totally
breaks the kind of
promise of anonymity
using voice as a form of communication
if it's your own voice.
I wonder about the success of
voice fingerprinting.
I think it will be a partial success,
even in well-funded government
systems, because of the ambiguities
of the way that the voice works.
At the moment. You can hear suffering
from a cold. And I think that does things
to the dynamics of of tone,
maybe, maybe not
in the longer term.
I've been thinking about other ways of
designing for Pseudonymity.
And for me, the Bourbaki Group Nicolas
Bourbaki, created by that group
of mathematicians is an interesting group
to think they were many
people performing a single character.
And when you mix many people into
one identity,
what you get is a mix of different
fingerprints.
And that sort of blurring of fingerprints
together is not chaffe, but
this kind of other sort of layering
up of of multiple identities.
And I wonder whether that starts to mess
with fingerprints. I don't know.
I have a way of doing that with voice
on its own. But it's something a
direction that I've been thinking in for
other forms of communication, like
writing.
I mean, that's a big problem also for
browsers and everything.
So, yeah, one thought I've had is that
they're just directly correlated
between how much identity,
you know, sort of uniqueness you can have
and how anonymous you can be.
So you can either say something with
meaning or, you
know, you can be anonymous.
Maybe there's just you know, you can only
have one or the other. You can just say
arbitrary things and no one will
know who you are or you can make a point,
but then something will give you a way.
Maybe you're just kind of tied.
You can have one or the other, which
would be sad.
But perhaps I mean, as
always, it's also depending on the threat
level you face.
So I still
questions. So one is a weapon.
We buy the T-shirt.
It's a beautiful T-shirt.
So this is from
David Wiley
remembering names. But I think that's
right.
He's the animator who
has made a number of very beautiful
animations that you should seek out
online. And he has a T-shirt
store called Something Like
Stupid Things, or
I'll put a link up on the talk page.
But yeah, they're all beautiful.
They're all badly drawn.
This one's called mouse character, which
is lovely.
On another level are some things.
I just posted the last question and then
we can close with the room.
OK, great.
So it's a more technical question again
or more mobile phone carrier
question because I mean, it's
forbidden for many
people to share their Internet
connection, but gathering from the phone
to the computer or to other people
computers, are there any
similar things for minutes?
And do you have any feedback from
carriers or from people talking to
you about that?
No, I have not had feedback.
I don't think anyone thought about it.
So at the moment, I imagine the
restrictions aren't there in most cases.
Some people may in some carriers may
argue that some other restriction could
apply in this case.
But I think because the weight of
the phone lending idea is quite strong,
I think perhaps if if it were to
catch on, there would be this interesting
kind of dynamic that you don't get with
the
data sharing where it's really only
something that the people in these
countries might, you know, sort of
understand the conversation
about. Can I lend my phone to a stranger
is one that I know
lots of people who don't care about
technology would be willing to fight for.
So I think there's an interesting dynamic
there, though. One more question there.
So, yeah, thanks
to me, your product looks like
a Tor to a degree.
Yeah, so first
thing, did you ever consider
creating a mash like toward
it and second thing is
this, you think, well, can you
explain it to me, how you protect
yourself from a, well,
a person that's a donor
and wants to to create
some statistics about your calls
or whatever.
So, yeah.
So it's it is a mixed network like Tor.
It's only one node though, and I think
kind of chaining them up is
cumbersome and also,
you know, might as well just be done
through kind of talk like why
do it through physical systems when you
could just kind of reach it through to
maybe there's a reason to do it through
physical systems.
But I don't know
in terms of protecting yourself from
malicious donors, one property
of the system is that it's selecting
people at random from the social
space that you're in.
And so, you know,
if your strategy was to make lots of
calls, then you're kind of spreading your
bets a little bit in terms of analysis,
traffic analysis and the like,
TOR and other mixed networks.
If someone were to fill your cafe
with at least 50 percent, you know,
malicious donors,
then they would be able to to traffic
analyze you. But then you'd have a pretty
boring cafe.
So, you know, whatever.
Yeah. Thank you.
OK, thanks a lot.
OK, we have time for
one or maybe two more questions.
So on Mike two are
could you speak about
what happens with incoming calls and
hazmats messages on donor phones
so that the
the way that I handled it for the
for the exhibition, the
certifications was just to deny
them when they came in?
So what what that means is that people
would be missing calls on
their phones and then they would see the
call in the log and could just ring back
later. But it didn't call through the
handset. So there was no way that
things would come back to the
the phone box.
The SMS is just arrive as normal.
They're not passed on to the headset.
If you are using the same access profile,
then there would be this kind of transfer
of data. But with the
handsfree profile, it's just the calls
that get passed through.
That's not ideal for people to lose
incoming calls.
And it's also slightly confusing for
someone who gets called through the
system and rings back
immediately because they see this unusual
number. So there's some kind of
interesting dynamic there, which, again,
I was thinking about trying to solve with
the server that would leave a message
saying, hey, you've just been rung by
this person using a donor phone,
you know, a stranger's phone, you might
call it.
They you know, they couldn't reach you.
They'll try again later or something.
But yeah, well, for me, it would be not
I would not hand over control over
incoming calls to a system
that's unknown to me.
So, yes, yeah, there's a lot of issues
with with trust,
but it turns out that there's a lot of
issues with trust in Bluetooth.
More generally, I think
the strategy would be to
to make this phone box
a shared resource in terms of
maintenance. So you would need to open
the project. But, of course, you know,
how do you guarantee the software and the
hardware is just the eternal question
in conferences like this?
But yes, pairing with a headset
seems reasonably benign
in comparison to, like, simpering.
And you can see on on modern phones
which kind of pairing feature you're
opting for.
And you can
therefore choose how much control
you're giving. But, yeah, you know, a
malicious version of this payphone could
just ring premium rate numbers, you know,
as fast as it can go through
all of the donor phones at once or
something, you know, but yeah, I think.
OK, we have
have do we have more Internet questions
or no, we don't
have any more Internet questions, but
just just came to my mind, I was recently
in Cairo and Egypt and there's
the traditional the use
of using of strangers
phones all the time.
Like like everybody just ask you, can I
borrow your phone for a minute?
I have to call somebody.
So father's quite relatable.
Yeah, great. I think it's a it's got a
long history in lots of places, so
hopefully that lends some kind of
momentum to to using it as a lever
back into the conversation of other
things like Wi-Fi as well.
Yeah.
So thank you so much.
Also from the Internet, again, thanks a
lot.