Unintended consequences and the Madrid bombings

Back in 2002, Cory Docterow wrote a piece for O'Reilly entitled The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences: Jewish grandmothers terrorising the Motion Picture Association of America with their rampant use of VCRs and so on.

"The fact of the matter is that no group of engineers in a boardroom can ever anticipate what normal people will do with their inventions," Docterow wrote..."Indeed, the measure of a product's success is how far it diverges from its creator's intentions."

The VCR became a tool of the amateur porn industry - I came across a fireman who developed a whole second career for himself copying porn films and selling them to punters in his considerable off-duty hours - as well as of the corner shop owner with a need for a low-fi security system.

This week has highlighted some consequences of the mobile phone. A mountaineer recounted on BBC radio how she had been rescued from a Swiss mountain top thanks to her trusty mobile. This is the kind of predictable consequence that we could expect mobile operators to proclaim as exemplary benefits.

Yesterday morning, I was asked to speak on various BBC radio stations about the bombings in Madrid. So I made sure I was completely up to date by reading Spanish newspaper reports about ETA over the last few months, and then talking to people in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain.

I found that Thursday's bombing was not the first time that terrorists in Spain planned to use multiple rucksacks containing bombs to be set off siultaneously by mobile phones; it was just the first such plan that had succeeded. To take a recent example, last Saturday two individuals were picked up near Madrid with more than 500kg of explosives. They told the police of a plan to plant some twelve rucksacks in the Spanish ski resort of Baquiera Beret last December, each to be equipped with mobile phone timing devices that would result in a synchronised bombing across the resort (where the Spanish royal family often skis). This was the same strategy to that deployed in Madrid this week, though the December attack was called off for various reasons.

Mobile phones are great, but just like anything else they can be used for bad: as a quick means of taking pornographic pictures of children in swimming clubs, or as timing devices for bombs. As William Gibson wrote, "the street finds its own use for things".

The law of unintended consequences is often referred to in favourable terms, with ordinary people finding exciting uses for new technologies. The deaths provoked by the unintended consequences of the mobile phone in Madrid this week demonstrate that technological advance, even involving seemingly harmless artifacts, can also have a dark side.

Security companies have developed devices that can jam phone signals within a given area, a tactic that is often used to protect individuals passing through high-risk areas. These work by broadcasting white noise to counteract the mobile phone signals, so stopping the receiving phone from getting the detonation signal. But how can we protect public transport? This would involve blocking all mobile phones all of the time, so defeating the very purpose of mobile phones themselves.