Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies by Susan Landau Page A

protests organized through texting.70

    When it comes to text messaging, the United States is out of sync with
the rest of the world. The U.S. marketplace-based approach to cell phones
meant that unlike in Europe, there was no government mandate of a cell
phone standard. Carrier interoperability for SMS messaging did not occur
until 2002. Text messaging took off more slowly in the United States than
it did in the rest of the world and is, relatively speaking, expensive."
    SMS is not without limitations. There is no guaranteed message delivery.
Furthermore, depending on the type of routing the message takes, the text
message may not receive the privacy protections of regular telephone communications but instead have only the lesser protections typical of email.72
    2.8 Who Calls-and What Do They Communicate?
    For a time, the telephone was the communications medium of choice. In
1960 people in the United States made about 100 billion domestic telephone calls73 and only 42 million international ones annually.14 By 1990
those numbers had increased to 402 billion and 984 million respectively.75
In 2004, the increase was not particularly striking; the numbers went up,
respectively, to 420 billion calls domestically and 10.9 billion overseas.76
That was because Americans were turning to wireless: Americans used
thirty-one billion minutes of wireless in 1995 and seventy times as much
by 2008 (2.23 trillion minutes annually)." Meanwhile during the period
from 1990 to 2004, more than 70 percent of the U.S. population began
using the Internet.78 Texting finally caught on, going from 75 billion text
messages sent in 2005 to 600 billion in 2008.79
    The design objective behind the PSTN was to maximize voice quality
throughout the network. Depending on the language and emotions being
expressed, human speech appears in many patterns, and the human voice
in many timbres. Yet regardless of whether the conversation is in Chinese,
Aramaic, English, or Hindi and whether the speaker is an adult male, a
small child, a young woman, or an older one, speech and voices fall into
a fixed acoustic range. The same PSTN equipment can be used in Beijing
as in Bangalore without an effect on the quality of transmittal of the
speaker's utterances. Data are simpler but more fluid. Bits are Os or Is, yet
they can be used to represent nearly anything: a laundry list, an Instant Message conversation, course grades in a database, a blueprint, a photo
from Mars, the results from a search query, the census.

    Because data varies tremendously, Kahn's design principles were simple:
deliver the data and do so efficiently. Or to put it another way: assume the
recipient herself will know how to maximize quality for her own particular
application. That "the function in question can completely and correctly
be implemented only with the knowledge and help of the application
standing at the endpoints of the communication systemi80 came to be
known as the end-to-end principle. It is the guiding principle of Internet
design, and this essential idea underlies the network's versatility.
    Application designers do not need to negotiate with the Internet developers or ISPs to launch an application; they just need a communications
endpoint-a PC, a laptop, or even a cell phone-and they can be in business. Put another way, no changes were needed in the underlying Internet
infrastructure to enable the most important Internet application of all: web
browsers. All that took was the development of html, the computer language used to create documents on the web, and http, the protocol that
enables linking and web browsing.81 The same is true for other Internet
applications, like VoIP, RSS feeds, and so on. And because html and http
were made available patent and royalty free, in order to develop Amazon,
Google, Flickr, or Facebook, engineers simply wrote code and launched.82
    As a communications medium, the Internet has had an immediate and
profound