Remote control of people by mobile phones for nefarious ends?
I just noted the Virginia phone-yakking robber story at Smartmobs, but wanted to focus on one piece of it here, as another haunted technology story. One theory about the robber's tactic of talking on her phone throughout each robbery is that she was receiving information from a spotter. This makes all sorts of sense, if we think about a confederate elsewhere in the bank, or monitoring the streets.
But note that the robber's end of the conversation was minimal, like a Socratic interlocutor:
The tellers have not been able to hear much of the conversations, police said. Troxell said the chat from the robber's end on Nov. 4 was mainly a bunch of "okays."
Recall the unsolved Erie neck-bomber case, where the poor guy was ordered to perform a series of criminal acts. Now, it's a classic crime trope to have a criminal mastermind compel an innocent person to do crimes through some threat or blackmail. We should expect to see more of these cases, with the mobile phone serving as the visual emblem of outside, sinister control. It's an extreme form of the corporate idea of cell phone as employee leash.
Indeed, the idea of some Doctor Mabuse puppet-mastering nice folks dates back to Jacobean revenge tragedy, dwelling on the process of driving an innocent man to commit horrors.
There's already one film on this subject, the Japanese (of course) Snake of June (2002). A blackmailer uses a cell phone to control and warp the life of the heroine. He thinks this is therapeutic, unblocking her psychic problems (i.e., sexual restraint). The film keeps the two characters physically separated until the end, connected only by the iconic keitai.
Back to the Virginia case, above. I'm struck by the woman's face, its calm demeanor. If this is puppet mastery, she shows... acceptance, or at least fine acting. It reminds me of the calm on Brian Wells' face. Rather than going berserk, or frantically trying to get the bomb off his neck, he appears resigned. This is scary in itself. Think how hard it is to not answer a ringing phone.
Perhaps we'll see more of this as a criminal m.o. Perhaps there's a budding criminal organization of mobile phone Mabuses, already selecting more stooges for operations across the United States. If not, it's a good story for this time of year, as the nights grow longer.
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