BigShinyThing

The mobile phone has become the most ubiquitous symbol of our connected society, and worldwide, mobile telephony has a much broader presence than more ‘advanced’ digital technologies. But phone technology, traditionally, has been locked down and proprietary, with international calls hugely expensive — obstacles to the use of phones as tools to mobilise the global grassroots.

Two recent projects from the activist/hacker underground suggest that all that might be about to change.

Exhibit A: Blasterisk. Not only does this phone service offer global calls at local rates (from and to normal mobiles or landlines), but includes a (tiny but growing) pool of ’short-dial’ numbers which connect direct to IndyMedia news desks worldwide. Using Blasterisk, citizen reporters anywhere in the world can instantly – for the price of a local call – phone into IndyMedia with on-the-spot breaking news, updates, calls for action. And unlike email, the service is cheaply accessible to anyone with a phone — Blasterisk reaches places the Internet doesn’t, and does it in real time.

In a similar vein, Exhibit B: the Bureau of Inverse Technology’s Antiterror Line, a sousveillance tool for the collection of “live audio data on civil liberty infringements and other anti-terror events.” Anyone can call in and leave a message — a “spoken report or in-progress recording of an anti-terror attack”. The system uplinks your audio recording direct to the BIT online terror database: an “audio accumulation of micro-incidents which individually may be inactionable but en masse could provide evidence for a definitive response.” [via Textually]

Of the two, Blasterisk is clearly the most sophisticated, offering as it does both a networking tool for activists and a direct channel for media distribution (via IndyMedia). And it’s built on the industrial strength open source Asterisk telephony platform, so has plenty of scope for growth and tweaking…

“The street finds its own use for things”. Blasterisk and BIT demonstrate that it’s also finding a louder voice through creative hacking.