Abstract :
One morning, on a recent trip, as I settled down at an airport hotel to my morning glass of orange juice, a headline from the front page of that day´s The Wall Street Journal grabbed my attention. No, it was not about a Superman sight ing over the New York skyline. Rather, The WSJ reporter Devlin Barrett was breaking news [1] of a Department of Jus tice project to scoop data from unsuspecting mobile phones by lowfl ying aircraft equipped with a device called a ???dirtbox.??? The story was picked up rapidly by international news media, e.g., The Guardian [2] in the UK, and Le Figaro [3] in France. A one-line definition of the term dirtbox appeared on Wikipedia [4] with more ???fast facts??? about the gizmo listed on another Web site [5]. So what is this hullabaloo all about? And, what really is a dirtbox?
