“Having the police officers there won’t work, I told you… I’m going to kill you.”

Imagine receiving a call like that, as the television flickers itself back and forth between random channels while the remote control sits idle on the coffee table. For the Bethea family, this isn’t a late-night horror movie, it’s a daily occurrence.

The Bethea family brought in detectives to unmask the digital poltergeist. After searching the house for surveillance devices, they came up with nothing, leading them to check phone records next. What they revealed were calls linked to their 15 year old son, Antoine. Though this wouldn’t explain how it could be true when there are incidences of the calls being made with Antoine in the room and without his phone. The detectives admitted that they don’t have the technology to check for more modern devices that would be capable of hijacking someone’s cell number: a technique used by the journalist in the video, showcases how he can change his voice to a woman making a call from a different phone but with his own number.

Now, this could also just be a case of the young outsmarting the new, you know, with all that fancy technology those meddlin’ kids have nowadays – did anyone think to take his electronics away from him for a week and see if the harassment ends?

Paranormal activity and sub ordinance aside, what about the cable providers? In situations like these, do they bear any responsibility? Cable providers often hold monopolies in various regions and are the keepers of your home network security. How are consumers able to protect their own network with such few options or customizability? Clearly, in the case of the Bethea family, there is a situation where open knowledge separates the victims from the antagonists… how would a more open source approach prevent occurrences like this from happening?

This is where we get into the ol’ “security through obscurity vs security through visibility” argument.

“Open source software development’s security is often questioned on the basis of the availability of its source code to just anyone that wants it. The theory is that by examining this source code, a would-be security cracker can find flaws in the source code that constitute vulnerabilities, thus allowing exploits to be more easily created for those vulnerabilities. There is some basis in fact here, but not in the way people tend to assume.

The truth is that analyzing source code by eye to find and catalog flaws that create a vulnerability you can exploit is arduous and difficult work. If it was as easy as suggested by the notion that open source software is more vulnerable due to the availability of source code, almost nobody outside of Microsoft would ever find vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It is, in fact, such a difficult task for any nontrivial application that it is generally much easier to find vulnerabilities through reverse engineering techniques. These techniques involve poking at a working copy of the application, sending it malformed input and otherwise mistreating it, then examining its stability and output to determine how and when it behaves in a manner its programmers didn’t intend.” (TechRepublic)

So what does this mean for the Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Microsoft’s of the world? Could old world ignorance and corporate greed spur more security breaches in a struggling transparent future? When you invite something into your home, shouldn’t it be cooperative within your boundaries?

Or perhaps, if not, maybe it’s time to bring in reinforcements…