The Friday Fillip

I used to read John LeCarré and Len Deighton. There was something about the closed-in, mirror-in-mirror world of spies that appealed to me, and, of course, there was the pleasure of fiction (i.e. lying) about lying. Nowadays, spy books are fewer — and lying is so very much easier, having leaped free of the genre, thanks to the internet. So I thought I’d take a brief look at the sorts of web tools that are available to, well, create false impressions and in so doing perhaps make your life easier.

First there’s the fake mobile phone call, typically designed to spring you free of a meeting — or, presumably, any sticky situation. If you’ve got an iPhone, you can purchase MagicTap for 99 cents, and arrange for your phone to ring at any point in the future and to display a false caller ID — with the extra added bonus of it’s not taking any of your minutes because it’s not actually a phone call. If the BlackBerry is your tool of choice, you can do pretty much the same thing if you’ve downloaded FakeCall ($9.95 — because you know you’re worth ten times any iPhone user!).

There are times when you simply don’t want to respond to email, perhaps pretending you’re ill or otherwise indisposed. Yet, if you simply ignore it, there it will be in your inbox, nagging you or revealing to anyone else who has access to your email that you’re skyving off. What you need in such situations is Hit Me Later. Simply forward your email to them, fix a time, and they’ll send it back to you at the end of that time. A meagre $12 a year will let you divert any number of emails for up to a month; and $30 gets you a year’s grace.

Spies were forever needing drops — places known only to the poster and the addresee of the message meant to be private. Now, instead of looking for a hollow tree, you can simply post any file to drop.io and tell your handler where to pick it up. No one else need ever know. It’s the ad hoc nature of these drop boxes that makes them relatively secure, as well as the ability to set an expiry period ranging from a day to a year. And spies needed disappearing ink or notes that burst into flames when read. Privnote is the internet equivalent. Here you create a note, send the link to it to your intended recipient (getting notified when the note is read, if you wish), and know that the note will “self-destruct” after being read.

Notice, though, that a lot of this furtiveness depends on email, which, you might think, is a weak link in the chain of deception. It would be if you weren’t able to set up a “fake” email account whenever the need arose. Fake Mail Generator will do that for you. Simply visit the site and copy off the email address that your visit automatically generated; your mail is received on the same web page. Do this as often as you like, changing email addresses at will.

Harder, in Canada at least, is a disposable phone number. But if you’re prepared to pay anywhere between $7 and $30 a month to TossableDigits, you can have “virtual numbers” that are routed behind the scenes — aka a “cut out” — to your chosen destination number.

And that, dear readers, is all I’m allowed to tell you. But you should feel free to whisper in our collective ear any secret ways and means you know about to use the internet to construct a less than accurate reality.