Is your cell phone spying on you?

Long time readers may have noticed a recurrent theme in our various explorations of Spook World: Telecommunications. This piece from Washington's News Tribune delivers a particularly odd and frightening variation on that motif.

Three families in a town called Fircrest are getting death threats on their cell phones. Repeatedly. Even when the phones have been well and truly shut off, and even after they replaced the devices.

For four months, the Kuykendalls, the Prices and the McKays say, they’ve been harassed and threatened by mysterious cell phone stalkers who track their every move and occasionally lurk by their homes late at night, screaming and banging on walls.

Police can’t seem to stop them. The late-night visitors vanish before officers arrive. The families say investigators have a hard time believing the stalkers can control cell phones without touching them and suspect an elaborate hoax. Complaints to their phone companies do no good – the families say they’ve been told what the stalkers are doing is impossible.

It doesn’t feel impossible to Heather Kuykendall and her sister, Darci Price, who’ve saved and recorded scores of threatening voice mails, uttered in throaty, juvenile rasps stolen from bad horror films.

Price and Kuykendall have given the callers a name: “Restricted.” That’s the word that shows up on their caller ID windows: on the land lines at home, and on every one of their cell phones.

Their messages, left at all hours, threaten death – to the families, their children and their pets.

Did you ever see a not-terribly-good horror film called The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere? In one scene, Gere -- sitting alone in a hotel room -- receives a phone call from a mysterious, mechanical voice who seems to know everything about him, including the fact that he is holding a tube of Chapstick.

The filmmakers claimed that this scene was based on a real event -- a claim I've heretofore doubted. But perhaps my skepticism was premature. Consider:

The stalkers know what the family is eating, when adults leave the house, when they go to baseball games. They know the color of shirt Courtney Kuykendall, 16, is wearing. When Heather Kuykendall recently installed a new lock on the door of the house, she got a voice mail. During an interview with The News Tribune on Tuesday, she played the recording.

The stalkers taunted her, telling her they knew the code. In another message, they threatened shootings at the schools Kuykendall’s children attend.

And:

Messages received by the sisters include snatches of conversation overheard on cell-phone mikes, replayed and transmitted via voice mail. Phone records show many of the messages coming from Courtney’s phone, even when she’s not using it – even when it’s turned off.

McKay, a teacher in the Peninsula School District, said she and Taylor recently explained the threats to the principal at Gig Harbor High School, which Taylor attends. A Gig Harbor police officer sat in on the conversation, she said.

While the four people talked, Taylor’s and Andrea’s phones, which were switched off, sat on a table. While mother and daughter spoke, Taylor’s phone switched on and sent a text message to her mother’s phone, Andrea said.

Are such attacks technically feasible? Apparently so:

Cell phone technology allows remote monitoring of calls, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Known as a “roving bug,” it works whether a phone is on or off. FBI agents tracking organized crime have used it to monitor meetings among mobsters. Global positioning systems, installed in many cell phones, also make it possible to pinpoint a phone’s location within a few feet.

According to James M. Atkinson, a Massachusetts-based expert in counterintelligence who has advised the U.S. Congress on security issues, it’s not that hard to take remote control of a wireless phone. “You do not have to have a strong technical background for someone to do this,” he said Tuesday. “They probably have a technically gifted kid who probably is in their neighborhood.”

I question the "technically gifted kid" explanation, since a young prankster probably would not have the ability to do physical surveillance. Besides, the facts indicate a team at work. Amateurs might well have been caught by now.

Obviously, anyone who intends actual physical harm to these people would not indulge in such an elaborate charade. If we discount the "just for laffs" theory, what do we have left?

It is perhaps worth noting that Richard Price, a member of one of the affected families, is an officer at McChord Air Force Base. That factoid leads me to suspect that these attacks constitute a psychological experiment of some sort. The military has certainly engaged in even more bizarre studies in decades past.

(Anyone who scoffs at the suggestion should look up an old book by the respected British journalist Peter Watson, called War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, which is filled with strange-but-true anecdotes. In one chapter, the book recounts the tale of a small group of soldiers on an island who were led to believe that the rest of the world had perished in a nuclear war.)

Price's superiors and fellow officers would be in a position to track how the campaign has affected him. If the gambit succeeds in "breaking" his equilibrium and inducing paranoia, similar techniques may be applied to other targets -- for example, to a government whistleblower, or to someone like Cindy Sheehan.

Just a theory. Consider it.