The Hindu Business Line : Think twice before you IM

THIS is an age when current technology becomes obsolete faster than you can chronicle the state-of-the-art. Stability has been replaced by mobility, just as much as Napoleon Bonaparte found `impossible' as deserving a place `only in the dictionary of fools'. But mobility seems to be taking a different toll too: Mobile phones are driving away ghosts.

According to Tony Cornell, of the Society for Psychical Research - a `ghost' expert in the UK - things are drying out on the occult front. His study has revealed that reports of ghost sightings had started to decline when mobile phones were introduced 15 years ago. "Ghost sightings have remained consistent for centuries. Until three years ago we'd receive reports of two new ghosts every week," he has said. Now, these sightings have declined to the point to almost zero.

What is the economic impact? For some it means that the `haunted tourist attractions' would lose their sheen. But others perceive the whole thing as a big hoax. For this school of thought, most ghost sightings are actually "unusual electronic activity"; and mobile phones could be "drowning out" that electronic noise.

It is a different issue altogether that it looks too surreal for people to be walking and talking, gesticulating and laughing, as if to themselves, ignoring even the near and dear, be it in a concert hall, temple, or restaurant, with only a mobile phone to link them to apparent lunacy.

If the law of survival holds good, we should soon be seeing the affected phantoms adapting themselves to the new reality where you cannot wish the mobiles away. Would they switch - from simply moving the curtains, piping up smoke or casting shadows - to sending messages?

But shadows are falling over instant messages (IM). A report in the USA Today talks of how, for the first time, investigators digging into a major Wall Street trading scandal will have a new chain of evidence at their disposal: the instant messaging records of licensed brokers and dealers.

This is possible because it has become routine for many companies to archive IMs, in compliance with regulatory requirements. For instance, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASD mandate that all IMs exchanged between member firms and their customers be retained for three years, very much like written correspondence and e-mails. This is not paper threat because recently five Wall Street firms were fined $8.3 million "for failing to preserve e-mail communications". The SEC is already mulling the idea; soon it would be compulsory for public accounting firms to retain all electronic communications associated with company audits, and that could include IMs too.

Why this fuss over IM, one might wonder. The answer lies in Enron, a ghost that would never leave the accounting world. When the regulators and investigators examined l' affaire Enron, they found that "Wall Street energy traders used cell-phones and instant messages to bypass employer surveillance of their desk phones and e-mail". The advantage of IM is that it is direct one-to-one and unless the company's computer servers have appropriate software to sieve out the IM, it can simply escape detection like a low-flying craft that doesn't show as a blip on the radar screen.

"I think therefore I am." That is a Descartes statement, perhaps the most famous in the history of philosophy. To rephrase, "Think twice before you IM."

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

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