 Hi, so my name is Ben Dalton and 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 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 phone box. I'm a researcher at the Royal College of Art and also a principal lecturer at Leeds Beckett University in the UK and my main research at the moment is pseudonymity and I'm interested in designing for pseudonymity. And the phone box 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 subculturally 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 subculture or 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 popular media. And that, again, I think shows our affinity with this kind of representation of communication in an anonymous, in a private form, but in a public space. You're on 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 Hemmer and the Future 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's fictions was about a speculative but also functioning future city. And I'd previously worked with Future Everything in the year before to create a project called Chatter, which was 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 Future 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 number, so 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 connect their mobile phones to the system over Bluetooth using the hands-free 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, Aaron Bartol's 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 hands-free profile, which is part of the Bluetooth specification. This beautiful diagram is in the official documentation and shows that your phone using hands-free can connect to a headset but also to a car. And the difference between the hands-free profile at the bottom in black there and the one above it, the headset profile, is hands-free allows you to dial 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 pass through the audio in both directions. There's another profile there, SIM 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 Debian installed on a sort of generic PC. I used the stable Weezy that was available at the time and that dictated using Blues, which is the Bluetooth stack, and that dictated using D-Bus as a communication channel between that and any other software that I was trying to control the hands-free profile with. I found Blues to be horribly documented. They delete their documentation when they move forward and since they'd moved on from this version 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 was difficult to actually have the system respond in the way that it was documented online. Luckily, someone, Sam Rivich, had created a few years ago this implementation of the hands-free profile server for Linux called Nohands. 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 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 car 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 hands-free profile seemed a bit more complicated. Thanks to additional notes from John Tapsall, I was able to actually find some settings, 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, the PC has the no hands software running, and that's controlling access to phones over D-Bus. That's where the commands are being passed back and forwards to blues, and so I wrote three Python scripts that also sit on D-Bus 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 neighbouring area in the cafe of Future Everything. I also found, just to mention briefly, this app, Bluetooth SEO, 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 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 pass certain instructions over D-Bus 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, 0102, 0307. But there is a subset of numbers that look like normal mobile phone numbers but are on various islands that are affiliated with the UK, Jersey, Guersey 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 list and a black list of numbers to filter any calls that are dialed, so that 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 as standard on the version of Linux that I was using. And so I'm just using the human interface device raw 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, 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 newer 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 this system is sustained by a social group in the same space. So Bluetooth has a minute, like a range, which is roughly room sized, which means that if this phone is to stay free and usable, there has to be a community, an 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 lure you in with these minutes and you never really use them up. So most people seem quite happy with that. But maybe there's some other implications around being a donor or being a 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 contract that gives you free minutes. It might be because you have no phone. Homeless people might find the service particularly useful to users, 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 film, La Cabina, 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 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 pay phone, 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, phone boxes are in public spaces and can be observed, but there is some degree of anonymity there. And certainly that feature reoccurs as 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 of providing some anonymity, are they not worried about the implications 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 fill your phone record with the phone calls of strangers, what you start to do is to decouple the phone record from your identity. So the mobile phone, I think gradually over time, has become a symbol, an 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 chaff. So chaff, it was called window in the UK during the war and double in Germany. Both countries invented it 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 radar system where you're unable to see the plane because there's all this reflection, this kind of small pieces of a distracting material. And what we're talking about when we're inserting strange as 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 monitored by other people or stored by other people. So I want to talk about chaff a little bit more. One approach to chaff 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 the super villainizer by Annie Rust in 2002. And what this did was to create fake email characters who would have email conversations later at night using keywords 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 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 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 a chaff that's kind of created by human activity and therefore much harder to predict. And my favorite example of that is the NTK 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 process as bafflement when a healthy eating family of four suddenly turns into a single 33-year-old male who consumes nothing but satsumas and ready meals. So again, there's this idea of by inserting a stranger's life into your own you're able to complicate the records that people are keeping. But 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 pay phone is doing in a way is it's offering social data chaff. 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 were 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 were 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 in the park, you can start to see that you could build up a regular influx of confusing data into your phone records and that might have interesting consequences for the way that identity is measured. Critics of wanting to do this, I've presented these two things some anonymity and some deniability as 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 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 pay phone. When you post a letter the address of the receiver is known in the system but the identity in 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 post boxes started they were definitely a system of anonymous communication, this one directional anonymous communication. What effect did that have? Well in the 1800s there was a boom in pseudonym use. It was used a lot by authors writing books in 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 publishing. Similarly in America newspaper writers this is Charles Farrah Brown who created this character Artemis Ward and he wrote newspaper articles under the character and really sparked the whole kind of era in the 1800s of pseudonymous newspaper writing that was used a lot for entertainment. Mark Twain was another pseudonym inspired by Artemis Ward but the pseudonymity as well as being a form of entertainment also allowed political critique, whistleblowing all of the things that we associate with functioning anonymity and pseudonymity today. Just to give you another couple of quick examples this is Multa Tulli pseudonym for Edward Dau's Decker who was a Dutch author who used the pseudonym and used these kind of systems of anonymous communication through postage and passing off to friends. He created an incredibly cutting critique of Dutch colonialism that really shifted the conversation forward dramatically at the time again in the kind of late 1800s. But this tool of the anonymous communication system in the post box also allowed it for great creativity. So this is Nicholas Borbaki this is a group of mathematicians who came together created a single identity and wrote quite a creative approach to set theory in 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 and anonymous communication of this sorts is very common and I think perhaps given its its multitude of uses I probably don't need to persuade you much in this room but elsewhere we 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 JK 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 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 doing this open. Why do we need that? Well, the case doesn't really need to be made but clearly anonymity and pseudonymity play a continuous role in the kind of powerful work of whistleblowing, particularly whistleblowing of primary evidence like the evidence of torture in Abu Ghraib and the role of these tools in the kind of work of superheroes 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 Leak to the Press and the piece that I want to point to in the middle is then 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 login, the campus login and more and more obligation on businesses and private owners 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 no anonymity which is problematic. Our 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'd say is that this demonization of anonymity when it works 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 to 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 and beyond going 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 uses from the past around sort of everyday use the just kind of general dependence on these tools as something that's a useful part of our society and as someone mentioned I think it was Nadia Henninger yesterday she said we need to normalize burner phones and even the term burner phones is sort of appealing to the subculture of the sort of 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 play can also be sort of pushed to the sideline and so the kind of hacker narrative can be quite playful the art narrative that I use to present this idea originally also sort of struggles a little bit from that you know people can sideline it as 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 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 they're often featuring films as a connection to a loved one something you use when you've just arrived somewhere new a connection back to the known they're 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 so what do we dislike about phone boxes well I think one issue is that they are often broken and so they're sort of independent resources another one is that they might contain sex adverts if you go to London the phone boxes in the center of town near the business district are sort of smeared with the glue of many years of adverts for the 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 is a reason that a number of remailers 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 have been a number of very admirable and in some ways you know reasonably successful projects over the years to open up wi-fi networks there'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 where we should be going but to have that conversation with people who are just coming to wi-fi as a concept through the use of their iPhone you know for the first time talking about free wi-fi the fear that a stranger will hide outside your house and use it for nefarious means is always going to outweigh the altruism of wanting to do some sort of public good but if we talk about phone calls rather than data so if 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 you know 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 box project does is allow us 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 emphasise the idea that this kind of abstract sort of digital number 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 possessions 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 if 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 pay phone 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 allure 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 fear 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 access to your personal information I'm sorry this is running a little bit slow I think sort of detracts a little bit from the experience but I think we can use 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 popular used park or cafe or library the benefits of providing free phone calls and of 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 that someone walks into this space uses the free pay phone 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 this short range which means that it becomes a sort of social negotiation so just like using a pay phone 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 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 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 in these kind of contexts 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 IOC 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 although a thing that was often noticed your t-shirt is awesome thanks IOC 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 start with 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 is 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 borrowed the phone or the phone minutes whether it's possible to also share international calls if 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 pairing what I did with the 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 kind of identity and I maintained a list I wondered about whether this 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 err 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 maybe kind of over a some period you would choose to delete international calls I've 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 WhatsApp 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 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 place the call mention 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 over complicated it okay 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 hi I have actually two questions but they are short 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 you know what kind of legal issues a person that is giving their minutes may have if their minutes are used to tough journalists or somebody like that I don't know the legal implications of a phone being used in a number of ways I think in the UK the one kind of hard and fast rule is that if you're a 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 the phone wouldn't necessarily even switch on when it was routing the call because it's used to being sort of in this mode where it's in the car 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 speakerphone and it would kind of mirror the call but 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 constraint in that in that direction Okay, 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 box idea do you think about that or does anybody from interception teams already contacted 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 a phone to target and you ask permission to target that phone 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 headset and another phone to be a donor and you could run the same kind of system just 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 programming foo to get that to work is kind of beyond my grasp at present Okay, Mike too please Hi, once again really nice idea I really like the aspect of mixing connections between people socially Probably what I see as a problem from the usability part is that I need to go and use and basically use the number myself and you have 10 numbers in the UK for example Just if you thought about a way to make it easier maybe use two Bluetooth devices and I can use the one as a headset 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 two 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 aspect as well of having to go stand up and stand in a space and kind of use the handset but yeah, now I think that idea has more longevity in it Because I don't remember a single phone number nowadays and 10 years ago I used to Me too and people would get their mobiles out to 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 track 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 Yeah, of course, yeah, cool, thanks Okay, 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 voice fingerprinted and at least in Spain and probably if you look at all the other interception methods maybe also in the rest of the world so there's a video online of a talk that he gave last year in Berlin in Seabass 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 I'm suffering from a cold and I think that does things to the dynamics of tone maybe, maybe not in the longer term I've been thinking about other ways of designing for pseudonymity and for me the Borbaki group, Nicholas Borbaki created by that group of mathematicians is an interesting route to think in 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 chaff but this kind of other sort of layering up of multiple identities and I wonder whether that starts to mess with fingerprints I don't know 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 it'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 away 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 have still questions so Wanis where can we buy the t-shirt it's a beautiful t-shirt so this is from David Riley terrible 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 you know lovely on another level awesome thanks I'll just pose the last question and then we can close with the room okay 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 by tethering 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've not had feedback I don't think anyone's thought about it so at the moment I imagine the restrictions aren't there in most cases some people may 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 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 this conference might you know sort of understand the conversation about can I lend my phone to a stranger as one that you know 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 is there one more question there as well yeah thanks to me your project looks like a tour to a degree so first thing did you ever consider creating a mesh like a tour did and second thing is did you think well can you explain it to me how you protect yourself from well a person that's a donor and wants to create some statistics about your calls or whatever so yeah so it is a mixed network like tour 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 tour like why do it through physical systems when you could just kind of route it through tour 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 but like tour and other mixed networks if you know someone were to fill your cafe with at least 50% you know malicious donors then they would be able to traffic analyze you but then you'd have a pretty boring cafe so you know whatever yeah thank you okay thanks a lot okay we have time for one or maybe two and not more questions so on mic two could you speak about what happens with incoming calls and SMS messages on donor phones so the way that I handled it for the exhibition the city fictions was just to deny them when they came in so 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 phone box the SMS is just arrive as normal they're not passed on to the headset if you were using the SIM access profile then there would be this kind of transfer of data but with the hands-free 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 this 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 asterisk server that would leave a message saying hey you've just been run 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 but 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 trust but it turns out that there's a lot of issues with trust in Bluetooth more generally I think the 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 incongruences like this but yes pairing with a headset seems reasonably benign in comparison to like SIM pairing and you can see on on modern phones which kind of pairing feature you're opting for and you can therefore choose you know how much control you're giving but yeah you know a malicious version of this pay phone 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 thank you okay we have do we have more internet questions or no we don't have any more internet questions but I just just came to my mind I was recently in Cairo in Egypt and there's the tradition or the using of strangers phones all the time like like everybody just asks you can I borrow your phone for a minute I have to call somebody so I found this 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 so thank you so much also from the internet again thanks a lot