Aspiring Big Brothers have never had it easier

By Lim Tri Santosa

BANDUNG (JP): I have just watched Enemy of the State starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith. The film has enough spy gizmos and high-level security jargon to make a strong case that an average citizen in the United States can be routinely monitored at almost every moment of his or her life.

The bad guys have the latest toys. They know how to tap into the security cameras in a lingerie store, they know how to point a satellite at a guy crossing the street in downtown Washington, they know how to plant bugs all over houses and people. It tells us about the risk of telecommunications espionage to our personal freedoms.

Throughout the millennium, personal privacy has largely been defined as physical things. The fences that enclose our houses, the short distance between whispering lips and a listener's ears, and the words we use to guard or hide our inner thoughts. Human beings are social creatures and so much of us is defined by our relations with others.

Nothing has shaken the nature of privacy more than the rise of electronic communications. While our voices can now travel vast distances, the devices of this age can so easily infiltrate that nothing electronic is particularly secure.

There has been a steady erosion of privacy over the centuries, as the methods of communication have developed to give greater reach to our voices. Still remember the phone tapping between President B.J. Habibie and former general attorney Andi Ghalib? There are no secure connections these days; everything can be tapped as long as the devices are made.

Even your cellular phones are not safe, NMT, AMPS, or GSM cellular system can be monitored, not only a PSTN line. To err is human, every manmade system has a flaw, nothing is perfect.

Authorized government agencies or law enforcement agencies now can buy the most sophisticated cellular surveillance-monitoring device to tap every cellular telephone conversation. Some high tech surveillance industry like CCS International, Ltd (http://www.gcomtech.com), Advanced Intelligence Co. Ltd. (http://www.spy.th.com/telephone4.html), International Procurement Services Ltd (http://www.intpro.co.uk/ipsleech.htm) sell cellular monitoring and Intercept system devices.

The system will track and monitor all activity on given cellular channels, display the number of the cellular telephone being monitored and the time and date of the call. Once a call is made from a target telephone or a call is made to the target telephone; the system registers an alert and the audio is clearly monitored.

Providing a legal document stating that you are from a legitimate government agency, you can get the technical information and buy this sophisticated device. I am not sure whether any Indonesian law enforcement has a GSM cellular monitoring system. Your conversation via cellular operator is not safe anymore. You can also buy a device called SIR-GHOST (http://www.cb-security.com/catalogue/sirgost.htm) that can be used to detect or prevent eavesdroppers monitoring your GSM mobile phone. It is usually used around foreign embassies or multinational head offices where a lot of spy surveillance occurs.

The Net has hastened this erosion to a point where there is almost no such thing as privacy in the virtual world. Your e-mail can be easily sniffed and your newsgroup posting for the past few months discovered in a few minutes using Alta Vista Search Engines (http://www.altavista.digital.com/) or MIT's Usenet Address Finder (http://usenet-addresses.mit.edu/) and DejaNews (http://www.dejanews.com/).

If you don't believe it, you should try posting a message in any newsgroup or specific forum website. Within a few hours, the above Searching Engines will discover your posting. You should be careful, think twice before you post any private information; make sure there is nothing personal on it.

For most of us, this erosion of privacy has meant little, since the core of our private lives remains in the physical world. But it is perhaps the most insidious aspect of this erosion of privacy of which we have so little perception: the power of these data crumbs. Since the invention of the computer our lives have been slowly, but surely, translated into virtual form. There is an enormous amount of information collected on us that is computerized -- your bank saving account, credit card invoice, electricity and phone bills and so on. In these computers, we are what that data says we are.

So many basic social interactions are now being transferred to the virtual realm. We spend half the day talking on the phone to people we may meet once or twice a year. We even regularly e-mail people that we may never meet. Finding phone numbers and addresses on the Internet is a little more iffy, but you stand a decent chance of finding a listed number using a free service like Switchboard (http://www.switchboard.com), which has more than 90 million U.S. residential names and 10 million business names in its database.

There is one good free service called Whitepages.com (http://www.whitepages.com) to find a person in the U.S. using his/her name, phone number, address, city or state. I think this service is very useful, you can even track any Indonesian who lives in the U.S. by entering their name, and the matches are good. I can track down some of my friends' addresses and phone numbers with a few mouse-clicks. Perhaps you can even track Indonesian celebrities or high-ranking officers who have houses there.

Hansaprint (http://www.hansaprint.fi/eypeng.html) is a good starting website to find yellow and white pages of the world, and covers almost all countries over the world. Use this service if you want to look for any telephone directories and e-mail addresses in a specific country.

Companies like CDB Infotek (http://www.cdb.com) have terabytes of information that have been carefully assembled over the last 10 or 15 years from the crumbs of data that people scatter in the normal course of living in the U.S.

Real property ownership in every state is searchable by owner name, property address to provide assessed value, transfer date, transfer amount, property use description for each property owned. The service is similar to Lexis-Nexis (http://www.lexis- nexis.com) database of real estate transactions. Another offered service is a list of motor vehicle ownership by an individual or business, including year, model and type of vehicle. It provides more than enough for deep-digging investigation.

If there is anything to be paranoid about privacy in the information age, there is still hope for unwarranted fear.