So by now we are all well acquainted with caller ID; the technology that allows you to see what number is calling you before you pick up the phone. Originally this technology was sold to people at an added cost as a way to screen calls and do away with “crank” calls. Users could “opt out” of the system by dialing *67 before calling a number to show as unlisted on the recipient’s caller ID. The phone companies then sold additional services to permanently block your number (a nice way to get you coming and going; though this is really no different than paying to have your number unlisted). At the time people opposed the idea of caller ID on the grounds that this would be used as a means of discrimination. The examples given were that organizations, like banks, would use the data to route calls from low income areas to call lines with fewer representatives. None the less caller ID became a standard feature on most phone plans and to my knowledge there haven’t been any large cases of such segmentation happening (mostly I would presume since banks have found better ways to segment, such as asking for your acct. number when you call and then routing you based upon the credit rating they have given you).
One important distinction with the caller ID implementation was that although you could block your number when you called someone, you could not block it from the government. This was justified by the need for criminal investigations and finding 911 callers.
It didn’t take long for phone phreaks (think of them as the hackers of today only they focused on manipulating phone systems and had their heyday in the 80s and 90s) to figure out how this system worked and how to manipulate it. At first this was through phone redirectors (such as calling card dialups) but these always showed the number that was the dialup (much like calling cards today or calls from a corporate PBX). Since even this gave away some information, others people found ways to double transmit the caller ID info to overwrite the original signal with new data, or loop though a PBX programmed to send whatever caller ID info the caller wanted (services like this are still advertised on the internet). It didn’t take long for telemarketers to pick up these techniques as a way to get people to answer their phones (this was pre-call block list). Because of this spoofing, various laws were considered to make spoofing your caller ID information a crime (in my mind this is a little like saying we would prosecute John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (the writers of the federalist papers) for signing them PUBLIUS or for not identifying yourself to the police (strangely enough there was a case on this where the court said you do have to give your name to the police (2004 Supreme Court decision in the Hiibel case)).
Today concerns of phone numbers being used for discrimination are mostly assuaged since the ubiquitous use of cell phone, number portability, and pay as you go SIM cards that make phone numbers almost meaningless. There are new issues arising though. Some services (twitter.com an obvious example) rely on caller ID for a personal identifier (login credentials). Caller ID spoofing allows people to manipulate such tools and the government is moving (along with private groups) to stop this. It is a trade-off, of anonymity for utility. What should be most concerning is how this evolution of technology has kept one thing stable; government control. With each step in this process, the public has given up some of its privacy/anonymity in exchange for not just security, but in some cases convenience (a common theme in privacy issues). What is more disturbing is that with each of these steps, the government has been able to protect its interests. In a way this allows the government to ensure that private groups can not oppose it because they have a different set of rules to play by than the rest of us.
In hindsight; caller ID is an interesting case; it’s gone from a screening tool, and fears of discrimination, to a tool of identification which is being legislated from being faked. It is a technology that can be hidden from private parties, but not the government (and in that is the concern). Information in the hands of a benevolent government can forward the public interest, but if such a government were to want to use that information against its people, having such access allows another level of control over the population. Our forefathers designed a country to have protected rights because they had grave concerns about the abuses of power by the government. We should think about what tradeoffs we are making with our decisions and how those decisions shift the balance of power.
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