OPERATIONAL SECURITY OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION - Cyberwar-Netwar: Security in the Information Age - page 100

some kind of chaos and frustration. Let us take one more situation. I am a science
fiction type of person and I watched a movie called "Minority Report" where any
building a person enters, there is an automatic scanning of that person's retina and he
receives a message that his favourite T-shirt is on sale for only $9.95. It is a kind of
intrusion, but they know that you like it because they have built a profile on you. On the
other hand, if the government really wanted to find you, they would authorise a search
and when you are entering a building they can pinpoint you. You have no choice. There
is a balance to be found, but if it goes too far one way, the public will react against it.
There has to be responsibility with a new technology and the government has to manage
that responsibility.
Amaral : I am going to ask Mário Valente to share with us the marketing approach
for mobile phones with video camera. Can you share with us the success story that
happened in New York?
Valente : I was watching a television programme, and the current so-called "generation
why”, which is the one after me, the generation that lives with words such as web and
mobile phones, is extremely averse to marketing. So now we have companies doing
subversive marketing. Instead of doing a huge promotion for, say. a Michael Jackson
album, they just get twenty or twenty-five young people, already Michael Jackson fans,
give them free T-shirts and some free CD's and then get these young people on the
Internet, just chatting with their friends and all saying how great the new Michael
Jackson album is. They encourage them to put messages on bulletin-boards and send e-
mails. So, it is telemarketing, but not done by any hierarchical monolithical organisation.
It is done by a decentralised distributed network of people. The mobile phone with
camera marketing ploy started when they were not selling too many in the US. They
contacted actors and got couples to go around New York as if they were tourists taking
pictures of each other. A passer-by would be asked to help by taking a picture of the
couple. This would start a conversation about how great mobile phones with cameras
were. And the question is if we can fight telemarketing. We can identify the
telemarketing company, but how do we fight a couple of people on the streets of New
York or a horde of volunteers on the Internet saying that the last album of a pop star is
great? Volunteers can state beliefs or disinformation. How can we fight a decentralised
distributed network with a centralised hierarchically structured organisation? There is a
dissonance here.
Amaral : Do you have a solution?
Handy : Being an American and having the First Amendment which says “freedom of
expression”, from my perspective there is no way to stop unwanted marketing. But just
taking the example you used, it does scare me from a security standpoint because if I am
a terrorist activator I want to spread my message using the same type of marketing
strategies and I can do that and there is no way to control it.
Erez : It may be easier to use the net for propaganda and for warning threats; the same
as we did fifty years ago when we threw leaflets from aeroplanes. The aim is the same.
But concerning marketing, in our country there was a company that sold mobile phones.
It was the number one company but suddenly it found itself in third place. So it took
mobile phones with psychedelic colours to places like Hard Rock cafes and suddently