© David E. Spry
GROWING PAINS
There is danger in thinking of new things in old ways. There is danger in thinking of old things that have new applications in the old way. Thirty years ago some people still used old tube radios. My father used to go out to his workroom every night and tune in a country radio station broadcasting out of Bakersfield California. He could only pick the signal up at night. People talked constantly on citizen band radio and listened to the world on short wave radios. Most everyone owned a scanner and listened to the various police bands. The police back then spoke in the clear (without code) and everyone with a scanner knew who the police stopped and where the domestic squabbles were.
When did radio become a secure and protected form of communication? I remember picking up phone conversations on my scanner. The most memorable conversation was between a lady and her mother. The lady had proof that her husband was cheating. She explained to her mother that she had drained their joint bank accounts. With all her husbands’ credit cards in hand she was joining up with her mother to go on a shopping spree to max them out. The lady probably heard her husband talking to his significant other on her own scanner.
The point is that a cell phone is a radio. Our mistake is that we still talk on it like the signal goes through wires rather then broadcasted into space. Once broadcast, no one can claim sole possession of the signal; it belongs to the universe. Actually, the signal becomes available to the rest of the world. Since when has the hobby of tuning in and listening to radio signals been against the law? Does calling a radio transmitter a phone give the radio signal special rights? It seems impossible to demand privacy when making radio broadcasts.
When the government listens in we call it electronic surveillance. To call electronic surveillance wire tapping is like calling changing your tire-shoeing your horse. The government may not listen in to domestic communications but we think nothing of them monitoring foreign communications. What is keeping foreign nations from monitoring us? We are a foreign nation from their perspective.
We have all heard of industrial espionage. The NSA is a government agency. It is common knowledge that government projects go to the lowest bidder. Anything that the government can do the private sector can do better. I bet that they can even keep a secret. How many industrial secrets have been lost simply because an executive, engineer, or researcher does not think “radio” when talking on a cell phone? Just because we call it: phone, does not mean that the signal is securely contained in a wire. If you think that the signal broadcast from your cell phone is too sophisticated to monitor how is it that you can call any phone number in the world and have your call answered? What ever is scrambled must be unscrambled.
There is always a trade off in everything we do. If we shop at a convenience store we will pay higher prices then if we go to a grocery store. Cell phones are very convenient and inexpensive because cell phones are radios. The cell phone user doesn’t have to pay for miles of wire and telephone poles and their upkeep. The cell phone user also gives up the security of wire and with it the legal enforceable protection against wire tapping. A foreign nation or business would have to physically enter the United States to wire tap a land line.
The things we said on our cell phone fifteen years ago are now fifteen light-years away and still going. I imagine that they are spreading out and mixing with other cell phone signals. Eventually the signals will all blend together and become space noise. Somewhere in the galaxy there may be other intelligent beings also searching for evidence of intelligent life in the universe. Eventually, what you say on your cell phone will be secure when one far off alien says, “Have you found any intelligent life in the universe?” and the other replies, “No, only the same old space noise.” On the other hand they may say, “You go girl. Spend all his money!”
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