Soob

I've been thinking more about counter-netwar scenarios through "tactics of nonexistence." I'll focus on one idea I had at the technological level. I need a technological tool that is somehow invisible to the network but will also exploit it. One such tool that I thought might fit the bill is a mobile phone. A mobile phone without a SIM card is an untrackable tool. It cannot, in most countries, make phone calls. Although, in a few western countries taking out the SIM card still allows the mobile to dial emergency. However, the phone does not have subscriber details. A SIM-less mobile phone is an anonymous tool that can jack into a specific network of control whilst remaining "nonexistent."

So how do you turn SIM-less mobile phones into exploits? Two ways:

(1) Multiple SIM-less mobile phones that dial continously acting as low tech electronic warfare jamming devices.
(2) Using the phones as a platform for voice-based rumor that exploits the target's preconceptions (I'll leave that up to your imaginations, but if you want specifics ask in the comments and I might discuss them).

Is it fully nonexistent? Well I could see two ways that you might track a person down.

One is direction finding (DF) to find its geographic location. However, this would be very hard to perform. A phone with an identity of some kind would pop up on the cell system after a DF. One without an identity would be hard to identify as an attacker. These SIM-less calls come in to emergency dispatchers with a high frequency. With nothing to identify the phone but its non-identity -- among countless other non-identities -- you are left with a fruitless endeavour.

Secondly, you could use voice recognition on the voice-based rumor calls. This is a more powerful option for gaining information on the nonexistent phone. I don't know much about the battle between voice recognition and voice concealment technology to answer this question specifically. One might say that if the voice concealment tech beats the voice recognition tech then the non-existent mobile caller has nothing to worry about. However, if the voice recognition guys win out then they are still in a bit of a conundrum. They have a voice, and other voices if there were more than one call. That is all they have for the moment without some high-powered, voice database that the voice recogniser can perform data mining with to search for corresponding voice patterns.

I think this idea has a number of cons. This technology targets highly specific networks that are mostly found within the western world. A SIM-less mobile phone would have no effect against a terrorist network or a transnational criminal network. Though, there might be scenarios where an anonymous mobile phone might be put into good use against them for example, imitative networks.