Life at the Cellular Level

     No, this isn't some esoteric treatise on biology. It's about my experience with cellular telephones. The first time I had access to a mobile cellular phone was as a field supervisor for a security company. Because we had a contract with an alarm company to provide armed response, and no central dispatch, the field supervisors got to lug around this hefty piece of technology that was almost the size of a military man-pack radio like the AN/PRC-77 we used in Vietnam. 

AN/PRC-77 radio                   

       

Nokia Senator 21 lbs.

     In the military, there was usually someone to tote the 13+ pound PRC-77 around for you. I got to carry my own phone. We weren't supposed to use it for anything but alarm response calls, but since it was our only link to the office, it got used, with explanations and justifications, for other things as well. When I went to another security firm, that anchor was a part of my past.

     I by-passed the classic brick phone for a Motorola MicroTac, which looked like the communicator in Star Trek. (Not an accident, I later learned. A Motorola engineer I met doing tours told me that they used the familiar form factor to make adoption easier.)

Classic '80's brick phone  

     We started using the Motorolas in the Institutional Police and officers were able to get them for their own use at the same price and with the same deal as the City, so I ended up with two of them, one for department use -- all of us on "special details" got one -- and one for personal use. When I left the IP, I quit using mine and it sits in a box somewhere with a couple of spare batteries and the charger.

     I managed to live without a cell phone for a few years, but I did buy a Palm III to keep information, calendar and so forth upgrading to a slimmer Palm (actually a Handspring Visor Edge, a Palm-compatible device. Handspring was acquired by Palm shortly thereafter.) I got a great deal, since they were offering a deep discount if you gave your older Palm device to someone and they filled out the paperwork. I gave mine to my girlfriend Ana (now my wife) but she never used it.

     And then I was forced back into the cell phone world. When I started driving for California Jeep Tours, the boss was surprised to learn I didn't have a cell phone. I told him that I had been encumbered with a radio and two cell phones as well as a couple of pagers when I was a cop and wanted no part of the tethered world, thanks all the same. One day, he handed me a small cell phone the size of a bar of soap. I was back in the cellular world

    At some point, I realized that carrying two electronic devices -- my Visor Edge PDA and the cell phone -- made little sense, and I bought a Palm Centro, their latest smart phone, in 2007. I had expected that I could just port all my Visor Edge information over to the Centro, but that wasn't going to happen since the OS on my old Visor was one generation too old for that.

     I kept the Palm Centro-- and the service -- even after business slowed down and I was seldom needed to drive. I will confess to a rather selfish act. I kept the service with AT&T even after I moved to New Mexico, meaning but never getting around to changing over my service and getting a New Mexico number. And then, a month ago, my service ended. I wasn't all that surprised and can't fault my former boss for terminating my service. I had what I called my "Census burn phone" a Virgin Mobile phone I got when I was taking census back in 2010, so I bought some minutes, reactivated it and began the search for a new service and solution.

     I wanted to keep my Palm Centro. I had a lot of information on it, much of it no longer relevant, but enough that was to want to keep it in use. My old service -- and Ana's -- was with AT&T, so we looked to them first. Now, the serious drawback to the Centro is that it has a terrible browser, so I never used it to search the web. But because it is a smartphone, AT&T made a data plan at $20 a month mandatory. There was, apparently, no way around it. They also wanted a chunk of change to move Ana's service from California to New Mexico with a delay of a week or more. Needless to say, we were both . . . miffed, perhaps? Only more than that.

     One of the providers would sell me a SIM card to unlock my Centro, but, again, since it was a smartphone and technically capable of going on-line, they all wanted to make me take a data plan, even if I never used it. If I was going to have to pay for a data plan, I wanted to be able to use it, and that meant a phone with a significantly better browser. I was looking at Android phones, but they were pricey. And then I saw the LED signage at the "cricKet" store near us advertising "Free Android Phones." Well, free under certain circumstances. And it looked as if it would apply to us, although it wasn't going to be free for the phone I wanted. But at the discounted price, if I ported my phone number from Virgin, it was a good deal.

     Well, for some reason, which no one can explain, my number wasn't portable. But, I was told, the discount will hold. We'll see. It seems that one of the salespeople and the manager are of different opinions on the matter. And when Ana decided to upgrade to an Android phone, we got a run-around and she decided against it. 

     So, I find the Samsung Vitality smartphone I chose is pretty amazing, compared to what I was used to. When I came out from California with my stepson, Chris, he with an iPhone, I suffered a bit from phone -- and app -- envy. The Samsung does most of what his iPhone does, enough for me, at any rate. It is so far in advance of my old Palm Centro that I don't care that it lags behind the curve and isn't cutting edge. It does what I want, cost -- it would seem -- a reasonable amount and has enough "coolness" factor to keep me happy for some time.

Six years ago I wrote a piece for the Lew Rockwell site. Recently, I got a request from a gentleman in Romania, asking to be allowed to translate the piece into Romanian. I gave my permission. Below is the original piece. Here is a link to the translation: http://webhostinggeeks.com/science/lewrockwell-comorig-ro

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Listening for a Sound That Won't Be There by Jamie Fraser-Paige by Jamie Fraser-Paige Once upon a time we fought a war in Southeast Asia, a war we pretty much lost, no matter what Nixon said. Let's not get into the whole set of lies and half-truths that got us into that war. Nor the lies that kept us there or the lives thrown away and the patriotism squandered. All on an unwinnable war far from our shores whose end result was a peace that we could have had thirty years before. I mention the war only to provide context for a small glimpse into how we fought that war in the intelligence arena and why so much of today looks so very, very familiar to me. I was drafted in September of 1965, one of the 50 thousand that Johnson requested to escalate the war in Vietnam. I didn't have any strong feelings one way or another about the war. I wanted to believe that we were doing something good and noble over there. Call me naïve, I probably was. I grew up reading about World War Two and watched Korea unfold on the screens of the local movie houses in the newsreels – I'm of the last generation so privileged. I felt it was my duty to serve my country when asked. I admired the writing of Robert Heinlein and found the premise of granting suffrage only to veterans that he put forth in Starship Troopers to make some degree of sense. When I went down for my induction, I opted to enlist, choosing the Army Security Agency as my branch. I made this choice because my cousin had been in the ASA and several of my other friends had served either in that branch or in the Air Force equivalent. I had a facility for language and was fascinated with the world of intelligence. Blame Ian Fleming and Graham Greene for that. I tested well, too well in fact to be trained in any of the languages I really wanted like German (which I'd studied along with Spanish in High School) Russian, Czech, Hungarian and so forth. I scored in the top one percent on the Army Language Aptitude Test, the ALAT. I was doomed to be sent to learn an Asian language. Even that might have been alright. Chinese, Korean, Japanese – Japanese, especially since I liked the culture and had some family history in the area. But no. The Army had other ideas. I was selected to be trained as a Lao linguist and area analyst. I spent thirty-nine weeks in the Foreign Service Institute – or rather in a contract class taught in some anonymous high-rise in Alexandria, VA – on civilian status learning the language of Laos, a language spoken by only about six million people. I did reasonably well, spending six hours in class each day and an additional two to four in the language lab working with tapes. My classmates and I spoke Lao among ourselves, sitting in bars and clubs in the District and being enigmatic. I went up to Ft. Meade, assigned to the ASA unit located just outside the grounds of the NSA headquarters known as the Puzzle Palace, America's codebreakers. America's eavesdroppers, phone tappers, cable interceptors. It's called Signal Intelligence – SigInt – and it was considered a very important part of our defense against the great enemy against whom we were struggling, World Communism. I learned my trade there under a very informal Navy Chief Petty Officer who insisted we all call him "Bob." It was anything but glamorous, but you knew that, right? Intelligence is mostly a lot of drudgery unless you're a field agent and even then there's more paperwork than anything else. For that matter, that's true of a lot of jobs that people who don't do them consider exciting and glamorous. Like being a cop. I've done that, too, for that matter. While I was at NSA, assigned to the Southeast Asia desk, clipping newspaper articles that mentioned my unit's target, the Lao Neutralist Army of Kong Le, there was a major flap in the Royal Lao Air Force. I was at my desk, going through the day's papers when I came across a front-page story about an attempted coup in Laos. At dawn of 22 October 1966, under the command of General Thao Ma, commander of the Tactical Air Force, eight RLAF T-28s set out to strike different targets in Vientiane. I was about to call my boss when some of the upstairs brass strode into the area demanding to know why they had to learn about something like this in the morning's paper. Since it was my desk they seemed to be gathering at, I attempted to answer. I said that, in all probability the coup attempt – Ma's second in a little over a year – had been a closely held operation with radio silence maintained. Since we had no real assets on the ground and no penetration of the Lao military, there was no way for us to know until it was fait accompli. They wanted to know how a Reuter’s correspondent had gotten the story so quickly and I told him that he was probably standing around the air field when the planes took off from Luang Prabang where he and his most loyal pilots had essentially been exiled. He'd seen the direction of flight – toward Vientiane, not Vietnam – and followed up. "How did he get this information and how could he follow up so quickly?" they asked. "Well," I replied, "they probably pay him a pretty good bonus for scoops like this." They were not amused. People were not all that amused with General Ma, either. His sortie attacked two ammunition depots and the main command of the armed forces along with the homes of several Generals. Thirty-six people died on the ground and dozens more were wounded. Then the American and British Ambassadors interfered and forced the general to give up. He and 12 of his pilots then fled to Thailand, where – after several months in prison – all were granted political asylum. The T-28s were repainted with the Royal Thai Air Force markings and flew missions in support of various secret wars in the area. Now, the relevance of this to the present situation is this: We have come to rely heavily on technology. We can eavesdrop on just about anyone, anywhere at any time. We have super computers and thousands of specialists in a variety of fields who can take any piece of Electronic Intelligence and process it, mine it for every bit of information and then make pretty good guesses as to what it means. But the best way to foil us is to use low tech. Meet face to face. Plan the operation before you start, meeting in small cells with little chance of penetration and then carrying out the mission with no further discussion outside that cell. No phone calls, no radio transmission, no email, nothing that requires technology or lends itself easily to technological interception. The concern currently over the illegal use of no-warrant intercepts of domestic conversations is certainly valid, but it's not the first time we've done something like this. In theory, NSA must have a warrant. Of course, the CIA isn't supposed to operate domestically either, but they do. The practical ex-spook, ex-cop some days yearns for the freedom to use any means necessary to do the job. There's been an internal struggle for years with the two sides of my personality and the civil libertarian always wins, damn his eyes. In my opinion, no amount of wiretaps, radio intercepts, fancy programs to sift among the millions of transmissions of all kinds, analog, digital or any combination legal or illegal will prevent or even warn us of the next terrorist attack if they are following good practice. That's the really sad part. And it makes you wonder – it certainly makes me wonder – if the Bush administration knows that. I think they do and that means that all of this is a ploy to be able to control the American people. And that's not how it is supposed to be. Well, I told you I was naïve. February 14, 2006 Jamie Fraser-Paige [send him mail] is a former member of the Army Security Agency, shorn of his Top Secret Crypto clearance for his political unreliability. He nonetheless served in the US Army honorably from 1965 to 1969 as a non-com. He is also a former police officer and security consultant who lives with his lady, a chef and their cat in the San Francisco Bay area. Since 1984 he has voted Libertarian and done volunteer work for the party. In 1985 he wrote the California party flyer on the Second Amendment and ran for a seat on the Berkeley City Council. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

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