Some years ago I heard a fascinating presentation by John Almonds, then Director of Security at BT; he was describing (among other things) cases of fraud prevention involving mobile phones and premium-rate phone lines. The setup his staff discovered in one building was a rack of mobile phones, all dialling out (unattended) to premium-rate numbers. The phones were stolen handsets with cloned SIMs. OK, so why would anyone want to dial a dozen dubious chat lines at a time? Easy - it makes a lot of money at the SIM-owner's expense... provided you are the owner of the premium-rate number.
Conclusion: if you're prepared to turn some of your starting assumptions upside down, you will often find a perfectly rational motivation for subverting an existing system.
Wind forward a few years, and on this blog you will several times have heard me ranting about the lack of a truly anonymous ballot system in English elections.
Starting assumption: a voter in a democratic election, provided they can be confident that their vote will count once and only once, will want that vote to be anonymous - that is, it should not be possible to link a given ballot paper back to the identity of the person who cast it. Turn that assumption on its head: why would a democratic voter positively want to be able to prove that they had voted one way rather than another?
Answer: because someone might be prepared to pay them to do so, if they could prove how they had voted.
Hence the ban on camera-phones in polling booths in the recent elections in Italy.
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