For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/technology/26ALIB.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=>

The New York Times

June 26, 2004

For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
By MATT RICHTEL

AN FRANCISCO, June 25 - Cellphones are chock-full of features like built-in
cameras, personalized ring tones and text messaging. They also gave a real
boost to Kenny Hall's effort to cheat on his girlfriend.

Mr. Hall, a 20-year-old college student in Denver, decided in March to
spend a weekend in nearby Boulder with another woman. He turned to his
cellphone for help, sending out a text message to hundreds of other
cellphone users in an "alibi and excuse club," a network of 3,400 strangers
who help each other skip work, get out of dates or give a loved one the
slip.

Assistance came instantly. A club member, on receiving Mr. Hall's message,
agreed to call the girlfriend. He pretended to be the soccer coach from the
University of Colorado at Boulder and said that Mr. Hall was needed in town
for a tryout.

"It worked out pretty good," said Mr. Hall, who signed up for the network
on www.sms.ac, a Web site that offers access to hundreds of mobile chat
rooms.

 Cellphones are usually used to help people keep track of each other and
stay in easy contact. But they are also starting to take on quite a
different function - helping users hide their whereabouts, create alibis
and generally excuse their bad behavior.

There is nothing new about making excuses or telling fibs. But the lure of
alibi networks, their members say, lies partly with the anonymity of the
Internet, which lets people find collaborators who disappear as quickly as
they appeared. Engaging a freelance deceiver is also less risky than
dragging a friend into a ruse. Cellphone-based alibi clubs, which have
sprung up in the United States, Europe and Asia, allow people to send out
mass text messages to thousands of potential collaborators asking for help.
When a willing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and
the helper then calls the victim with the excuse - not unlike having a
friend forge a doctor's note for a teacher in the pre-digital age.

Another new tactic is the use of audio recordings that can be played in the
background during a phone conversation to falsify the caller's whereabouts.
Phones can be equipped to play, at the press of a button, the sounds of
honking horns, ambulance sirens or a dentist's drill. An employee who is
actually sitting at the beach might be able to call his boss, play the
blaring tones of a traffic jam, and explain why it has been impossible to
get to work on time.

 "It lets you control your environment," said Harry Kargman, chief
executive of Kargo, a New York company that plans to begin selling in July
a variety of cellphone sounds for $2.99, including the rasp of a hacking
cough to simulate lung infection. "It's not necessarily malicious or
nefarious," Mr. Kargman said.

 Whatever the moral implications of these functions, they show that the
cellphone, with its increasing computing power, is taking on complicated
functions once associated with computers. And the advanced technology that
makes it possible to keep closer tabs on people, said James E. Katz, a
professor of communications at Rutgers University, also gives them a potent
tool for deception.

Mr. Katz said there was practically an arms race between the technology
used to locate people and track behavior - global positioning systems, for
instance, and caller ID on phones - and technologies intended to deflect
surveillance, like audio for fake background noises. At the same time,
constant surveillance may have increased the desire to get off the radar,
even if that means using underhanded tricks.

 Text messaging, for example, a popular cellphone function that lets people
send short e-mail messages to and from phones, has been adopted as the most
efficient means of contacting potential alibi abettors.

According to the Yankee Group, a market research firm, some 1.7 billion
text messages were sent in the United States during the third quarter of
2003, up from 1.2 billion during the first quarter. Text messaging can be a
major source of revenue for mobile phone companies, who charge up to 10
cents to send or receive a message, said Linda Barrabee, an analyst with
the Yankee Group.

Ms. Barrabee said the technology was particularly popular among teenagers
and 20-somethings, like Michelle Logan, a 26-year-old San Diego resident
who works for an airline.

Ms. Logan was traveling in Europe last year when she learned about a
network of several thousand mobile phone users who, through text messaging,
help one another establish alibis and make excuses.

In April, Ms. Logan returned to the United States and started an American
version of the club, which Mr. Hall later used and which charges users for
receiving e-mails. Through the site, phone users can sign on to mobile chat
rooms to send messages to each other over the Internet or by phone. There
are hundreds of such clubs focusing on subjects large and small, ranging
from animal rights to the question of whether pirates or ninjas are tougher.

 In Ms. Logan's case, she promptly used the alibi club she had started to
get out of a blind date. She sent out a text message asking for help, and
in came a response from a stranger in San Jose, Calif., who agreed to call
the blind date, pretend to be Ms. Logan's boss, and explain that she had to
go to Europe for a training seminar.

These days, Ms. Logan spends much of her time overseeing the e-mail traffic
and watching her club grow. It now has 3,400 members, with hundreds of new
members signing up each week. One member recently used the club to fool his
wife so he could stay at a sports bar to watch the N.B.A. finals. Another
member - the wife of a soldier stationed in Iraq - sent out a message
asking for help to conjure up an excuse after becoming pregnant by another
man. But in that case, many responders urged the woman to tell her husband
the truth, according to club members.

 The European alibi club which inspired Ms. Logan grew to 4,000 members,
but was shut down late last year by its founder, Kayle Hanson, 21. "I got a
new girl and she wasn't too keen on it," said Mr. Hanson, who lives in
Hamburg, Germany. "She thought it was immoral. Imagine that!"

Ms. Logan said she was not terribly concerned about lying. Still, she said
one reason she preferred counting on strangers to help her was that she did
not want her friends to know what she was doing.

"You wouldn't really want your friends to know you're sparing people's
feelings with these white lies," she said, laughing.

Another problem, which even alibi club members admit, is that other members
may not be entirely trustworthy. Mr. Hall, the student in Denver, said that
when he gave away his girlfriend's phone number to a stranger, he worried
that the stranger might do more than make an excuse.

"I didn't want him hitting on her or telling her what I was up to," Mr.
Hall said. But now he is a believer in the power of the cellphone-assisted
alibi. "It worked out good, actually."


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'