The Ghosts Who Watch Children Sleep
This article was originally published under the name “The Guardian Grandmas” - a title assigned to it by a publisher without my permission. It is my belief that this strongly misses the point of the entire article, so it is listed here with its original title.
It is every parent’s worst nightmare.
Marie and Vincent Berger were celebrating their anniversary one Saturday night in their small town house just outside Paris, France. Vincent had cooked a fancy meal, they had watched a film, and now they sat together idly chatting over glasses of wine. 2014 had not been an easy year for the two of them. Since the birth of their daughter, Annabel, 9 months before, Marie was beginning to grow restless at home and missed the career she had put on standby. Vincent had found the gruelling hours as an accountant, followed by late-night baby shifts, exhausting. However, they were beginning to finally settle into a routine and with Annabel now sleeping through the night, both parents had enjoyed their evening.
As Vincent took their wine glasses through to the kitchen, Marie headed upstairs to get ready for bed. As she reached the landing, she heard something that froze her blood and stopped her heart beating in her chest. A cold, sharp, white panic flushed through her. There was a voice coming from her daughter's room, the voice of a man.
“Go to sleep, silly baby,” the voice purred in English with a thick Eastern European accent. “Go back to sleep or your mama will be cross at you! Yes she will!”
Marie found herself unable to move with the panic of an intruder in her house, in her baby's room, talking to her daughter. She managed to whine a guttural yelp to her husband, but from the kitchen he was unable to hear her. As quickly as the paralysis had risen in her, it was gone. Marie scrambled for the door and burst in to her daughter's room.
Annabel stared up at her from her crib, one hand clutching at the mobile that was hanging above her.
“Now look, naughty baby, mama is here and she's cross!” the voice laughed from the baby monitor. Marie grabbed her daughter and ran down the stairs crying hysterically as the voice called after them. “I see you mama, I see you with baby! Naughty baby! You have a naughty baby!”
The widespread application of WiFi is probably one of the most influential movements in internet history. What began as the domain of laptops and desktop computers, quickly spread to a host of other devices. Cell phones, tablets and gaming platforms were quick to use WiFi for convenient, on the move internet access. WiFi is now so ubiquitous in much of the world, that it is used by devices that would previously have had nothing to do with the internet at all. My thermostat, my fridge, even the lights in my house have WiFi accessibility enabled and can be controlled from my cellphone.
This is, not always, a good thing.
In 2014, reports began to appear of a Russian website which had began cataloguing and streaming footage from literally thousands of WiFi devices around the world. Security cameras from the USA, Europe and even developing nations were available to watch by anyone. The site operators had even provided search functionality which allowed a viewer to sort streams by location or device type.
Much of what was shown was harmless enough – one of the most popular video streams on the website was a camera being used within Melbourne zoo to monitor some newly hatched parrots. Most of the streams however, were shocking invasions of privacy. A number of offices around the world had security systems in boardrooms streaming live images and audio. Gymnasiums, pubs, clubs and restaurants were all unknowingly broadcasting their customers up to 24 hours a day.
“I remember reading about it in the newspaper,” Diane Summersby tells me.
Diane is 78 years old. Her and her husband live in one of the so called 'Silver streets' in California – gated communities created and maintained for the elderly. Diane's house has built in wheelchair access and a number of features aimed at the older person, but the house remains her own. She feels safe and secure in her little community, surrounded by people of a similar age and with additional medical care and monitoring on site. Diane is a bright-eyed, tiny little figure hunched over her desk and beaming at me via Skype. Strands of shining white hair are secured atop her head in a messy bun, and her skin is the colour of a walnut's shell. She may be nearing 80 years old, but Diane is everything that modern women strive to be – she is intelligent, sharp, and formidably fierce.
“The people who owned the website said that they were doing it to draw attention to it. They told the news that they wanted to make people safer. I don't think it was true. It's like, heck, if you wanted to help then why not shut the website down once everybody knows about it?”
Upon reading about the streams in the news, Diane did something that a lot of people must have been tempted to do. She went to the website and started looking around.
“I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little bit of a thrill in it! I was watching all these people who had no idea they were being watched. I felt bad, but I think it's only human! Society and the rules should stop us from doing that sort of thing.”
Driven by curiosity, Diane took the next step that many people took after news of the website broke.
“I started searching for things near me,” she tells me. “The website was all in Russian but it was very very simple. I just searched for California and put in my zip code and I could see all the cameras that were on near to me. That's when I saw that most of my street was visible. I could have walked out my door and gone twenty feet and waved and I would have been visible on my laptop screen waving away like a loon.”
The idea of her image being broadcast across the internet didn't phase Diane very much. She told me that it was even sort of funny, the idea that anyone would want to watch her slow walk to the store and back. What upset Diane was the stream immediately beside the one showing her quaint little retirement community.
“It was a baby. She was maybe a year old, so more of a toddler really. She was standing up with her hands on the edge of her crib and bouncing on her legs the way that babies do.”
The baby monitor owned by Marie and Vicent, and the baby monitor owned by the neighbour of Diane Summersby were entirely different brands and models. Both utilised entirely different software that allowed parents to monitor their children via a WiFi link to their computer or mobile phone. Both suffered the same vital flaw, the same flaw suffered by security cameras, alarm systems and refrigerators around the world. There is little or no password protection for the streams.
Dianne's neighbour was using a baby monitor which had never prompted her to enter a password. It had simply sent a link to follow to her phone which she could use to access the monitor at any time. The Horand Group, the company behind the device in question, later defended themselves by claiming that it had been impossible to predict that anyone would enter random codes until they connected to working baby monitors. The device used by Marie and Vincent had been password protected, but the password was the same on every identical unit and there was no option to change it. Anyone who had purchased any of their baby monitors could access any of the company's monitors (and many other devices) with the same password.
After the story of Marie and Vincent hit the news, as well as many others like it, several governments promised to act on the information. In general, companies that produce wireless baby monitors in particular have far better security now, although cheaper models still often suffer from the same issues.
For Dianne though, these changes weren't enough.
“The idea of these poor children, all alone in their beds with strangers watching them. It's horrible. Who knows who is out there? You only have to open a newspaper to see the perverts and the monsters out there. I couldn't sleep worrying about it. I told my friends and they agreed, something had to be done.”
They call themselves the Guardian Grandmas. “Like guardian angels!” she says. There are currently nine of them, with more interested in joining. Diane and her friends consider themselves warm-hearted vigilantes of baby monitors.
“There are so many poor little babies out there,” one of the Guardian Grandmas who wished to remain nameless told me. “All alone and left for hours whilst their parents do god knows what. They need looking after. They need love and attention. They need a grandma to check in on them now and then.”
Despite ever increasing improvements in security, the guardian grandmas continue to access baby monitors around the world.
She shows me the list she keeps by her laptop. It is written in beautiful cursive. Loops and swirls of blue pen detail a list of manufacturers beside the default password used in their products. She has used the photocopier at the office of her gated community to make replicas of the list and share them with the others.
“When I find a monitor and I can't get in, I'll chip away at it for a while, really try my hardest. I'll try lots of passwords about babies and parents and 1111 and things like that. God knows that the perverts out there would keep trying, so I can't give up. If I really can't get in then I thank the lord that there's still parents with some sense out there and I move on to the next one.”
An increasing number of the monitors are now from developing nations who are using older models (many of which were taken from the market by their creators in the wake of the Vincent and Marie Berger case, before being quietly shipped abroad for sale).
“I sang a song to a beautiful little boy in Pakistan last week,” she tells me with pride. “I'm sure his parents got quite the fright when they heard me belting out Bette Middler! But the baby knew in that moment it was loved and cared for. If the little boy's parents had cared enough to look after him in the first place, then I wouldn't have had to, poor little thing. It's not nice to feel alone.”