This is not an article I want to write. Firstly, it relates to behavior that sickens me, and which was designed to provoke anxiety and stoke division. Secondly, it relates to the USA, and I never intended Commsrisk’s analysis of a global industry to become so dominated by the interests of the 4 percent of the world’s population that inhabits one particular country. And finally, it relates to a story that has already received the attention of the mainstream news, whilst Commsrisk is at its best when pointing out the importance of stories ignored by the mainstream. But when mainstream journalists write articles about tracing the source of racist SMS messages received by black people in the USA, and possibly sent from another country, the context of the story deals with too many issues to be ignored. So here I am, writing an article I would prefer not to write.
One difference between this particular take and most found elsewhere is that I want to concentrate on context that the mainstream news will take for granted, instead of speculating about the details of this case. The other difference is that when I share a list of links of ‘other news’, as I do at the bottom of every bulletin, many of those links were chosen because of connections with the issues discussed in the article.
- So What Happened in This Case?
- First Things First: Protecting Personal Data
- Policing Content
- How Many Investigations?
- Culture Is the Final Backstop
- Other News
So What Happened in This Case?
There may be readers who know more details because they are actively involved in investigations; I only want to reiterate the main points per mainstream journalists. Per CNN:
Authorities across the United States are investigating after racist text messages — some with references to “slave catchers” and “picking cotton” reminiscent of the country’s painful and bigoted past — have been received by children, college students and working professionals from unrecognized phone numbers in the wake of the presidential election.
Federal and state authorities are investigating a wave of bigoted text messages sent anonymously that have spread alarm among Black Americans across the country this week, officials and recipients told Reuters.
The messages urged recipients in multiple states, including Alabama, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, to report to a plantation to pick cotton, an offensive reference to past enslavement of Black people in the United States.
CNN elaborates:
It was not immediately clear who sent the messages, and there is no complete list of whom they were delivered to. At least some appear to have been sent through TextNow in what the company “believe(s)… is a widespread, coordinated attack,” it told CNN on Friday.
“As soon as we became aware, our Trust & Safety team acted quickly, rapidly disabling the related accounts in less than an hour,” said the company, whose service lets people sign up anonymously using an email address and send texts that appear to come from a randomly-generated phone number.
Reuters provided additional insight from Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.
…Murrill, a Republican, told Reuters on Friday that her office is among those investigating the text messages, adding that some targets — herself included — also received emails.
Murrill, who is white, said one of the messages hit her personal email box at 8:17 a.m. Friday, according to a screenshot of the message she shared with Reuters.
The message greeted her with an ethnic slur and said “Now that trump is president, you have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation” and that “Our guys will come get you in a van.”
…”It could be coming from a basement in Baton Rouge, or it could be a basement in Bangladesh,” said Murrill.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel issued a statement soon after the story broke.
“These messages are unacceptable. That’s why our Enforcement Bureau is already investigating and looking into them alongside federal and state law enforcement. We take this type of targeting very seriously.”
First Things First: Protecting Personal Data
Having quoted what other people have said, please let me now make an observation that I have not seen anywhere in the coverage so far. Nobody can target racist messages at the phone numbers of black people unless they already have lists of phone numbers belonging to black people. Much of the reporting of this story will be devoted to finding people to blame. If blame is to be handed out, it should begin where it deserves to begin: with lax attitudes to gathering and securing personal data.
The culprit obviously had imperfect data if white people received messages that addressed them with derogatory terms for black people. However, it is not difficult to imagine how a list of phone numbers belonging to black people might have been obtained. There have been so many breaches of data from so many organizations that the darknet is awash with criminals who sell vast troves of personal data. There are also many businesses that overtly sell personal data for supposedly legitimate purposes, whilst being conscious of the potential for this data to be misused, even if they prioritize profit over limiting who they deal with.
So one way to stop this kind of behavior in future is to stop the gathering of lists of phone numbers that can be sorted by the color of somebody’s skin. Another way is to delete the lists as soon as they are no longer needed. And a third way involves keeping tight security over who has access to such lists. This is worth repeating because authorities will tell us how hard they are working to track down the people responsible for these messages, but many of the same authorities have spent the last few decades insisting they have been effective at preventing the abuse of personal data. We should learn from history, and especially from a history of repeated failure, unless we want to keep repeating those failures.
Policing Content
There is another aspect of this story that will not receive the attention it deserves. The boundaries between kinds of communication have increasingly blurred in recent decades. There used to be methods for remote two-way communication between one person and one other person, and there were different methods used for remote one-way communication from one person to many other people. A telephone call was an example of the former; a newspaper or a television program offered examples of the latter. Computers and the internet have destroyed these divisions. Now a single person can communicate to very many other people using methods that might also be used for two-way communication. This creates a fundamental ethical problem that societies continue to wrestle with.
If somebody writes something in a newspaper, or says something on television, then it can be desirable and practical to censor what they say in the interests of maintaining social harmony. In contrast, there was never a time when it was practical to monitor all private communications that can occur between two individuals. Secret police forces like the Gestapo and its East German successor, the Stasi, were infamous for devoting enormous resources to policing their own populations. It can be argued that the ruinous cost of maintaining the Stasi’s surveillance program actually hastened the demise of communism in East Germany, whilst failing to stop ordinary people from hating their government. Now technology makes it possible to police the totality of private communications at far less cost then ever before. And we are also approaching a point where one nation’s government will be able to police the private communications of other populations too.
The standard reaction to this case will be that the authorities are right to investigate the racist texts, that they should identify who sent them, and they should punish the people responsible. It should be possible to separate the firm belief that these messages were wrong from the incorrect notion that giving authorities greater power to trace and monitor private communications is always an unalloyed good.
How Many Investigations?
Global communications is becoming one big messy ball where traditional distinctions between voice and messaging, between national and international, between personal and public are all losing their coherence. There is an eccentricity in all communications converging towards a point in time when we have to treat them all the same, and apply consistent standards to all of them, whilst there continues to be a multiplicity of organizations tasked with overseeing the rules applied to those communications.
If you want a job done well, find the best people to do it and give them the resources they need. If you want a job to be done badly, just throw lots of different people at the task and watch as many of them waste resources or slow down the people who are capable of doing the best work. The US has utterly failed to rationalize its approach to data protection, and we all continue to suffer the consequences. That lesson should have already been applied to investigating cases like this. It has not. Having multiple authorities at federal and state level investigating the same case is not a benefit to the public. It is a hindrance to accomplishing the supposed goal. A country that cannot efficiently investigate crimes that cross international borders without involving lots of smaller authorities whose work is tied to narrow intra-nation boundaries is a country that is choosing to be inefficient at maintaining the rule of law in a way that is appropriate for our current state of technological progress.
Culture Is the Final Backstop
Technologists tend to think culture does not apply to their work. The police are often the same. They are both wrong. Being blind to your own cultural assumptions does not make culture irrelevant. The importance of culture needs to be understood with a sharper focus when discussing how to investigate and impose laws worldwide. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill mused that the person responsible for these messages might have been working in a basement in Bangladesh. That might be a sign of her own prejudices about Bangladeshis. More importantly, she was not elected to enforce Bangladeshi law. My ignorance of Bangladeshi law means I do not know if any local law was broken in this case, but I can be sure there is nobody who knows enough about every country’s laws to know all the potential outcomes when the location of the culprit has yet to be determined.
It is this cultural aspect which gives me pause as others jump to the conclusion that prosecution is both inevitable and desirable. The miscreants responsible for these calls may well have broken US laws. But some care is needed when applying laws extra-territorially. If the USA can impose a law about communications originated by the inhabitants of other countries then so can China or Iran or Bangladesh. I do not want people to send racist messages, but I am equally sure that I do not want my private communications to be subject to the whims of every government everywhere.
Prevention is better than cure; tracing the origin of bad comms traffic is the cure that remains after the failure to take preventative measures such as securing personal data. We cannot change the past, so we have to deal with the consequences of previous mistakes, but that still gives us reason to pause before we make yet more mistakes whose consequences will escalate in future. To use a cultural analogy, it is normal to expect an investigation after somebody is murdered with a gun. I do not want to intervene in a debate about an American citizen’s second amendment right to bear arms, but I can reasonably observe that different countries made different choices about how to balance freedoms, with the result that many of those countries have fewer guns and fewer shootings. Not every culture strikes the same balance between prevention and cure. If Americans want to carry guns, I will not say that is wrong, but if Americans insist on a dynamic that means everybody in every nation will eventually have to carry guns to protect themselves, then that would deserve a robust response. The same principles apply to the harm done through communications, even though the harm is typically less. If the balance leans very heavily towards reacting to the crime, instead of preventing the crime, it is appropriate to challenge the wisdom of that approach.
Gathering too much data has played an essential role in the mess we now find ourselves in, with individuals becoming subject to hostile communications, some of which is now targeting victims by their race. The ‘natural’ response is to impose measures to mitigate the problem. Most of those measures involve increasing the amount of data that is gathered, and using that data to go after bad actors. Some of it will involve mass analysis and filtering of communications. When looked at dispassionately, do these remain the most obviously beneficial routes to restoring everyone’s right to enjoy life without unwanted interference? There are alternatives. People could decide to stop using phones, by which I mean large sections of the public abandon the model where everybody needs a phone number which can be used as part of an addressing system that is available for anyone to originate communications. We can step back from the precipice of one-to-one communications becoming completely submerged within a morass of anybody being able to call or message us from anywhere. We could just use other paradigms, where only smaller groups are allowed to connect with us. One of those groups may be the friends and family who know us personally, whilst another may include only the people who work at the same company.
The point I am making is that this is not a choice for the authorities, nor for communications businesses, nor for anyone who thinks they typically should decide what is supplied to the public. It is a choice for every person, because each person who can choose to receive a supply can also choose to reject it. Vegans stopped eating meat; environmentalists stopped using plastic bags for their groceries, victims of bad communications can stop answering their phones. The latter trend has already begun; such trends can accelerate. If we keep prioritizing ineffectual and reactive cures for problems that were created by the reckless and excessive use of technology, then members of the public will respond in ways that supersede the inadequate efforts of both comms providers and authorities.
Sometimes problems are rooted in culture, whether they are national cultures, business cultures, government cultures, and so forth. That can make it seem impossible to pursue any change necessitating the transformation of the dominant culture. But cultures do change, and sometimes the change is extremely rapid. When such a change occurs, society will not easily revert to its previous state. I think most readers of Commsrisk will like the idea that anybody can call or message anybody else, so long as they have their number. That does not mean it can be taken for granted.
Other News
- UK bank prohibits staff from using OTT messaging apps to ensure that all business messages can be saved and retrieved
- United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation warns law enforcement agencies not to be deceived by criminals sending bogus ’emergency’ requests for personal data
- South Korean police make 20 arrests from six international SMS messaging businesses associated with phishing scams
- Short video explains the digital arrest scam currently plaguing Indians
