l4sfdrx

24
The New Age of Ubiquitous Computing
Mobile cell phones increased from sixteen million to 741 million
... Internet users went from about four million to 361 million.
General Michael Hayden, Director of NSA,
commenting on the 1990s 1
In the autumn of 1994, elite counter-drugs forces were searching
a compound in an affluent neighbourhood of the Colombian
city of Cali, home to some of the world's major cocaine cartels.
This time, instead of finding drugs, they uncovered a large
computer centre, with six technicians slaving over an IBM AS400
mainframe around the clock. The presumption was that this
had something to do with major underworld financial transactions,
so the computer was dismantled and taken to the United
States for analysis. In fact, the drug cartel had loaded all the
office and home telephone numbers of US diplomats and
counter-narcotics agents based in Colombia. They had then
added the entire regional telephone log containing the call
history of the last two years, purchased illegally from the
commercial telephone company in Cali. This was being systematically
analysed, using 'data-mining' software of the kind now
commonly used by intelligence agencies, to identify all the
people who had been calling the counter-narcotics officers on
a regular basis. The drug barons were engaged in sophisticated
sigint to uncover informants in their ranks. Chillingly, a dozen
had already been assassinated, and this was the machine that
had uncovered them. 2
At about the same time, a team from GCHQ were assisting
with an investigation into blackouts of the national power grid