Authors: Robin Jeffrey
Pornography could be made available everywhere—from
kaccha
houses to penthouses. And though police and morality crusaders aimed mostly at the poor, the powerful too were vulnerable to the seductive properties of the cell phone. An incident in the Karnataka state legislature came to be dubbed as ‘Porngate’. Two Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) were caught viewing what were said to be pornographic clips on a mobile phone in the assembly while a debate was going on. The legislators belonged to the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), constant advocates of censorship in the name of preserving morality and Hindu values.
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The mobile
phone was
not
the old landline that had slipped into daily life in the USA as unnoticed as ‘food canning, refrigeration and sewage treatment’ and become simply ‘mundane’.
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The mobile phone, argued Clay Shirky, meant that ‘the old habit of treating communications tools like the phone differently from broadcast tools like television no longer makes sense’. The potential to record and to broadcast, at one time limited to those who controlled presses and transmitters, was now available to the majority of people, even the poor.
Crime
As well as improved ways of conducting old-fashioned crimes, the mobile phone introduced new categories of criminal activity. The most obvious, of course, related to mobile phones themselves. Small, desirable and easily concealed, they were stolen every day. By 2011, the phone was so common that a survey by a security company claimed that ‘53 per cent of the adults in India’ had lost their phones or had them stolen.
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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had issued a ‘Preliminary Consultation Paper on Mobile Phone Theft’ as early as January 2004 when the country had fewer than 35 million mobile-phone subscribers. The law, however, trailed the technology.
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To list the
crimes a mobile phone could initiate was to underline the fact that a policeman’s lot in the digital age had become a technical one. The list began with simple theft. Thieves soon discovered, however, that having a stolen phone meant they could be located and caught. Enterprising thieves learned about IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers and how to change them. The IMEI number is the phone’s fingerprint, its unique identity, usually inscribed in the battery compartment. Thieves—and those hiring them—were able to alter IMEI numbers electronically to give a phone a new and respectable ‘fingerprint’. From 2008, such tampering was made a criminal offence, but being relatively easy to do, it continued.
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Moreover, until 2009 it was possible to import and use ‘China mobiles’ that had no IMEI numbers. The owners of these cheap phones, which were sold in the grey market (
Chapter 4
), left no electronic fingerprints. In the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attack in November 2008, the Government of India required service providers to record an IMEI number before they connected a phone to their network. This put new limitations on the ‘China mobile’ trade, which, one website speculated, had 25 million handsets in use around India.
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To steal a phone and sell it was old-time law-breaking, little different from stealing a sheep or a silk handkerchief. The mobile phone, however, increased the sheer numbers of people vulnerable to property crime. For many, their mobile phone was the first item they had ever owned that was worth stealing. If the 2011 survey were correct and 53 per cent of Indians had lost their phone or had it stolen, 400 million Indians had experienced the anger, fear and frustration of consumerist crime. It did not threaten lives, but it could break hearts if a hard-earned phone held photos and an address book and provided a regular link with a distant family, as it did for millions of migrant workers.
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People resigned themselves to phone theft. One victim described a forlorn attempt to report how his phone had been stolen during his morning bus journey:
So, I went to the nearest police station and told them my story. They were helpful in that they listened to what I had to say. They asked a few questions about where I lost my phone and after I patiently answered all their questions, they said that I had to complain in a different police station. I was perplexed as to why I had to go to a different station which was very far away when I was already in a police station …
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The police, of course, wanted to avoid the paperwork and to keep the crime statistics of their station looking favourable; this victim gave up. The
Hindustan Times
reported ironically that ‘the south district of the Delhi police seemed to have performed an impossible feat … retrieving an allegedly stolen mobile phone’. In New Delhi, the owners of 10,000 stolen mobile phones persevered and registered thefts in the first nine months of 2010, up 15 per cent over the previous period in 2009. The newspaper story reported with a straight face that the police in the West Delhi station area must be doing a splendid job because ‘only 22 complaints were received’, while in Northeast Delhi, the registered phone-theft figure was 2,800.
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Some police stations were more successful than others—some in finding phones, others in fending off luckless victims.
Mobile phones
enabled more sophisticated and profitable crimes than simple theft. By 2010, 17 per cent of Indian adults were estimated to ‘have experienced cyber crime on their mobile phone’.
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The familiarity of mobile phones lulled users into misplaced trust. They responded to fake calls, gave away personal identification numbers and opened themselves to having their pre-paid credits skimmed off to pay the bills or boost the credits of tricksters.
The mobile phone provided new scope for old crimes like pornography and fraud to find far larger numbers of practitioners and victims. The mobile’s democratic qualities, which gave almost everyone a chance to communicate, also exposed almost everyone to the risk of being defrauded. ‘The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ for honest entrepreneurs also beckoned tricksters. ‘Beware! Your mobile balance can reach zero’, warned a Hindi-language story from a website based in Bihar, one of India’s least developed states. The story alerted mobile phone users to a clever fraud that sucked their pre-paid phone time dry. A phone owner would receive a call and hear a girl’s ‘sweet voice’; the call would be cut off almost at once. Curious recipients would call back, ‘and as soon as you call back, your phone balance is emptied’. The thieves appeared to have constructed a system, similar to those used to make money from phone-in-tovote competitions, by which calls to their number were charged at a very high rate and they pocketed the profits. The crooks targeted areas of the country, such as remote corners of Bihar, where literacy was low and awareness of electronic crime limited. The newspaper story also warned people about the sorts of frauds, well known elsewhere but fresh and new in Bihar, based on promises of lottery wins and prizes once a tax or a fee was paid.
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This small-time fraud illustrated the power of the mobile telephone: hundreds of millions of users, all of them exposed to new and mysterious ways of being defrauded. If the cell phone brought pornography to the poor, it also brought new ways of taking what little money they had.
Economic crimes
were not the only crimes that mobile phones made easier. Cheating, stalking, intimidation, bullying and sexual harassment all came within reach of the common man or woman, both as practitioners and victims. Boys and girls could also join in more easily than ever before. Large-scale examinations, the most common form of assessment in India, invited innovative ways of cheating, which Punjab University countered with ‘metal detectors in all of its examination centres’ in 2012. ‘Using technology like mobile phones and Bluetooth devices’, the university concluded, ‘has become a common practice during the examinations’.
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The first All India Post Graduate Medical Entrance examination in 2012 produced an elaborate cheating attempt that ended badly for the perpetrators. It involved document scanners in mobile phones concealed in long-sleeved shirts. The conspirators clandestinely scanned the exam paper and transmitted the image to a ‘control centre’ where the questions were answered by specialists. Bluetooth devices stitched to the shirt collars of cheating candidates brought the answers to tiny concealed earphones. Six examinees were said each to have paid between Rs 3 and Rs 4 million (US $50,000–$75,000) to receive the answers.
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In terms of social class, this was elaborate, elite crime on a different scale from simply reselling stolen mobiles.
There was nothing uniquely Indian about using mobile phones to cheat in exams. From Japan to the USA, such things had been happening for years, as had the use of mobiles to stalk and harass for reasons ranging from office rivalry to sexual frustration and exploitation.
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The advantage for perpetrators, as Ling and Donner wrote, was that they were ‘more anonymous’. The bully did not risk being exposed in the playground or at the village well, and victims could be tormented by calls and text messages even in their homes.
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The potential
of the mobile phone to act as a broadcaster made it dangerous, both as a facilitator and a provocateur of crime. Enterprising kidnappers and fraudsters used mobiles in predictable ways: handy innovations adapted to old trades. But the phone also led the unsuspecting into unanticipated dangers. This was particularly noticeable in matters of romance and domestic discord, as we saw in
Chapter 7
. A vignette captured the essence of such stories. ‘Woman held for killing mom-in-law’, the
Times of India
informed readers in July 2011 in a story from Uttar Pradesh. A mother-in-law went missing, her son reported her disappearance to the police and her body was found sixty kilometres from their home. ‘When the police checked the call details of the family members’—ten years earlier few police in Uttar Pradesh would have recognised a mobile phone if they had found one—it appeared that the daughter-in-law of the missing woman had been making frequent calls to another man. The plot thickened. ‘The call details’ of the Other Man’s ‘cell phone confirmed his presence’ near the scene of the crime. As the story unfolded, it appeared that the mother-in-law had discovered the liaison, and her daughter-in-law and the Other Man killed her to silence her. After the Other Man had ‘slit her throat’, he called his lover on her cell phone ‘and told her that “the work has been done”’.
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In this example, the murderers used the phone to plot the crime. In other cases, mobile phone records betrayed liaisons, or supposed liaisons, that led family members to kill allegedly wayward sons, daughters or suspected lovers.
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In a variant of the ‘cell phone gives false confidence’ theme, a civil servant in Maharashtra was burned to death while taking pictures on his cell phone of the adulteration of expensive oil with subsidised (and therefore cheap) kerosene. He was said to have stumbled across the illegal activity, got out of his car to take pictures for evidence and was set upon and murdered by the angry gang. A later version suggested that the official was demanding bribes, and the gang murdered him over a disagreement about timing and amount. In any case, the mobile phone was central to the challenge the dead official had posed to the gang, whether he threatened them with arrest or quarrelled with them over extortion. The police said the phone was recovered, though what was found on it was not revealed.
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Cell phones became one of the first items police looked for at the scene of a crime or confrontation. On one hand, pictures and phone records could reveal the identity of criminals; on the other, if the incident involved the police in an unflattering or compromising way, the evidence on a cell phone was best destroyed before it incriminated them. But the phone had a capacity to transmit messages quickly; destroying one phone did not necessarily mean the evidence itself was gone.
The phone
became a lightning rod that attracted a variety of Indian criminal activity—from corporate crime involving phone tapping and industrial espionage through to blackmail, crimes of passion and harassment, kidnapping, petty theft and small-time fraud. Mumbai cinema quickly picked up on the excitement, anxiety and plot possibilities that pervasive mobile phones presented. Films such as
Aamir
(2008) and
A Wednesday
(2009) focused on corruption, kidnapping and terrorism in Mumbai and the way in which mobile media abetted such crimes. For producers and scriptwriters, the mobile phone could be made to stand for ‘fear, paranoia, and the uncertainties of life’.
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In
Aamir
, the protagonist received images of his kidnapped family on the screen of a mobile phone. To free them, Aamir had to plant a bomb in a crowded bus. The mobile phone served as his only connection to the terrorist network holding his family hostage, and through the phone they tracked his movements and issued instructions.
Scandal and surveillance
The phone’s capacity to make people sociable—to make it easy to chat and gossip—had been recognised in the days of Alexander Graham Bell and the early landlines. In India, if the cost was small, the poor were no different: they liked to talk too. And the wealthy found themselves talking too much for their own good. The common-placed-ness of the phone made people forget that talking on it was less confidential than mailing a postcard. Private gossip readily became public property.