Irish Examiner View: Are mobile phones the enemy within?

Already faced with fraud and phishing scams, the latest revelations about Pegasus spy software dent public confidence even further

The Irish public has had to endure a wave of scam calls in recent weeks.

It is just over 30 years ago that Nelson Mandela told his anxious nation to take their “guns, knives, and pangas, and throw them into the sea”. 

To bring that up to date, political and civil leaders wanting to give their best advice to voters and citizens could usefully urge us to consign our mobile phones to the murky depths as well.

What was once seen as an immeasurable consumer benefit is turning into a ubiquitous weapon with the potential to harm both self and society.

The scandal, for it is nothing less, over the Pegasus spyware which can turn any mobile phone into a personal surveillance device, may not shock the technological cognoscenti who have long been aware, and suspicious of, the monitoring capabilities of machines which were purchased in their original vanilla forms for the purposes of phone calls or, for the more sophisticated, text messages.

The range of the victims of spy software is only now beginning to emerge, and its initial targets appear to be campaigning journalists, human rights lawyers, editors, whistleblowers, and political opponents.

While the scope of intrusion is still being defined, what is beyond argument is the technical capability that allows someone, perhaps thousands of miles away, to take root control of the personal computer that we think of as a phone. This delivers remote access to messages, photos, and videos. It can activate the camera, record calls, access your GPS and scrutinise your calendar and contacts.

Apologists may, weakly, maintain that none of this matters if you are “not one of the bad guys”, but we already live in a world of huge mission creep and increasing control of the rights of ordinary people.

If we add to this the extensive contemporary experience of phone-based fraud, what will happen to the telecoms companies if customers declare that enough is enough and that we no longer have confidence in the integrity of the network?

And what happens, also, to those ever-expanding plans for administering Government policies and communications through the installed base of handset ownership? 

If we can no longer trust what we use, then many may conclude that it is time to turn off. Forever.