David

Science Fiction post-9/11

I’m writing a piece right now on Science Fiction since 9/11, based around, but not entirely limited to, the themes of security and surveillance. I’ll be giving this as keynote at the Images of Terror, Narratives of (In)security conference in Lisbon on the 23rd and 24th of April this year – I am not sure where I will send it for publication yet. Because of this, I have been reading and rereading a lot of SF, but I thought I’d mention two recent works that have most impressed me. I will probably add more thoughts in the weeks to come on this topic.

The first is Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion (Orbit, 2012). Ken MacLeod was a welcome participant at Mike Nellis’s excellent split location Glasgow / Jura workshop that marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four back in 2009, and many of his books have dealt overtly with security and surveillance themes, notably his near-future / alternative world novel, The Execution Channel (Orbit, 2007). Coming out of a period spent not only engaging with surveillance scholars, but more importantly being a Writer in Residence of the UK Research Councils’ Genomics Network, Intrusion takes place in a subtly nightmarish near-future Britain of oppressively caring forced medical intervention (in the form of a compulsory pill to cure genetic illnesses) and ongoing but nebulous terror threats, where even being seen to look too long at a piece of pro-terrorist graffiti is grounds for arrest and ‘torture-lite’ interrogation over where your loyalties lie. For a writer who has a well-deserved reputation as a pretty hardcore materialist and socialist, there are also unexplained hints of myth and magic at the edges of this work, and there is also a strong sense of what architects would call genius loci, the spirit of place, in both its London and Scottish island settings, which make the book all the richer and more satisfying as a piece of fiction. I think it’s his best novel ever, and that is coming from someone who was already a big admirer of MacLeod’s work – all of which is well worth reading.

In contrast, Lavie Tidhar’s Osama (PS, 2011) is all edge. It is slippery, slipstreamy and dreamy and reading it generally makes you feel like you’ve been drugged or waterboarded. This novel is dominated by the image of Osama Bin Laden, but not the ‘real’ Bin Laden, for this is a world separate but somehow connected to our own in which 9/11 (and subsequent attacks) never happened. As the novel progresses one realises its alternative earth is profoundly anachronistic, even non-modern: trains still seem to be steam-powered and there is no Internet. In that world, ‘Osama’ is the vigilante protagonist of a series of hard-t0-find cult pulp novels which detail Al-Qaeda’s fictional exploits, but which fill their most fanatical readers in this other world with the belief that somehow the events of the novels are more real than their own. There is a divergence point where everything changed, but it isn’t actually 9/11 at all, it’s much further back and has to do with the Sykes-Pichot agreement which formalized the settlement of the ‘Middle-East question’ in WW1. And Osama Bin Laden, it hints, is inseperable from the history of our own world, inevitable even. Osama is reminiscent of writers like Philip K. Dick, in particular, The Man in the High Castle, and much more so, the surrealism-influenced writers who came out of the 1960s British ‘New Wave’ of SF like J.G. Ballard and Brain Aldiss (I was reminded of that very underrated post-9/11 Aldiss novel, H.A.R.M) and particularly Chistopher Priest, both in terms of his slippy alt-history, The Separation, but also the atmosphere of earlier works like A Dream of Wessex and his ‘Dream Archipelago’ sequence of stories, which he recently added to with The Islanders. But at the same time, Osama is something quite unique, rich with pop cultural allusion, irony and bathos, and frequently seems to invert or counteract its own apparent intentions.

What I’m reading, January 2013

I am going to try to do a reasonably regular round-up of books on surveillance and security that have come across my desk.

First up is Harvey Molotch’s new one, Against Security (Princeton, 2012), published just at the back end of last year, which is an excellent and wise demolition of contemporary US security culture. Wisdom is a quality that I am rather wary of attributing to any work, but Molotch’s book really has the intelligence, consideration and compassion that constitute wisdom. Plus he’s a lovely man in person, who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time last year at the Association of American Geographer’s Annual Conference in his native New York.

Second is Zooland, by Irus Braverman (Stanford Law Books, 2013). Just out is this great book from one of the most uncategorisable and free-roaming young scholars around. Irus has written on all kinds of things from the use of trees in the Israel-Palestine conflict to the surveillance and security dimensions of automated public washrooms, and in this book, she deals with zoos, but from a governance perspective, dealing with the management and global flows of human and animal bodies, materiel and increasingly importantly, data, that make them up. There will be a glowing review of this by Kevin Haggerty in the next (double) issue of Surveillance & Society 10(3/4), out very soon.

I’ve just received a copy of Surveillance on Screen, by Sébastien Lefait (Scarecrow Press, 2013). He’s not someone I had ever come across before, but this looks to be the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study so far of surveillance cinema. I’ll be reviewing it for Surveillance & Society…

As someone who was originally a historian, I am still always drawn to approaches which take a long view. Endless Empire, a collection edited by Alfred McCoy, Josep Fradera and Stephen Jacobsen (Wisconsin, 2012). A set of essays by leading historians of imperialism which adds to the longstanding debate about whether the USA is in decline as an imperial power and they are very much on the ‘decline’ side. McCoy has become one of my favourite historians largely due to Policing America’s Empire (Wisconsin, 2010), his work about US neo-imperialism, surveillance and control in the Philippines.

My other favourite working historian is Mark Mazower, and I’m just finishing his recent book, Governing the World (Penguin 2012) a major synthesis which examines the intellectual and political history of attempts to create global governance in the modern period. This was published just as I was starting to revise my article for Geoforum on global surveillance and it has helped a lot with how I have been thinking about my revisions. Among the gems in the book for surveillance studies scholars, or indeed anyone interested in government – Jeremy Bentham’s design for the Panopticon is pretty much unavoidable in this area, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that he also invented the word ‘international’…

The Mark of the Beast?

I’ve been following a case in San Antonio, Texas, over the last few months in which a couple with literalist biblical Christian beliefs had challenged their daughter’s school over its introduction of RFID-enabled name tags and here are some random thoughts. The latest news is that the pupil, Andrea Hernandez, has lost in the US District Court – it could still be taken higher. The case has attracted plenty of coverage internationally, all largely emphasizing the fact that the student concerned had been threatened with expulsion for her (or her family’s) stance, and the ‘mark of the beast’ rhetoric deployed by the parents and the organisation that enabled them to bring the case, the evangelical Christian civil rights organisation, The Rutherford Institute.

A standard Surveillance Studies analysis might be that this was another case of security at all costs in a risk society, and surveillance as the silver bullet for a non-existant problem or a at least an actual problem that might have been solved by other methods. But actually things are rather more complicated and perhaps more mundane here, and the answers seem to lie, as Francesca Menichelli has suggested in her recent (and as yet unpublished) PhD on the installation of CCTV camera systems in small towns in Italy, in regional political economy and local government competition.

According to the local newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, when the scheme was introduced, the plan by Northside Independepent School District was essentially not a security or an organisational issue but a matter of gaining access to extra finance. Although the scheme was estimated to cost $525,065 to implement and $136,005 per annum in administration and maintenance, the extra-detailed attendance information resulting from the chip cards could enable them district to access around $1.7 million in state grants.

Essentially, surveillance here is simply something that circulates in competition between entities -whether school districts or cities – for resources. Of course the scheme has not been studied in its actual practice yet so we don’t know what actual difference (or lack of difference) it would make to any pupil in the way that we do for Menichelli’s case-study cities, where CCTV is described as being almost entirely useless because it was never really intended to be used as anything other than a way of winning resources. However it would seem that the ‘surveillance’ is almost entirely secondary or perhaps even irrelevent. However I certainly do not dismiss the possibility that nefarious or even unintentionally damaging things could be done with the location data gathered from the chip cards.

It is also the case that the school district attempted to compromise with the pupil by offering to remove the chip from her ID card, essentially limiting the surveillance that could be conducted of her to conventional visual methods. The rejection of this compromise is the reason the District Court threw out Andrea Hernandez’s case. However if the School District is accepting that there is an opt-out possible on grounds of belief then they are potentially undermining the whole scheme – which relies on the generation of accurate attendance and circulation data. Again, one interpretation could be that they aren’t really interested in the data for itself, which reinforces the argument about the instrumental nature of the surveillance scheme in the state funding context, but the other interpretation could be that the school was banking on her exception being the only one, or one of a tiny number, that would not significantly undermine it. The other question here is: is it really the RFID chip that’s the problem, or the surveillant assemblage of which it is but one tiny part? In rejecting the compromise, Hernandez and the Rutherford Institute seem to be suggesting the latter, and here we are a long way from Christian eschatalogy and the ‘mark of the beast’.

(Thanks to Heather Morgan for initially pointing out to me that it was all about the money!)

East Asia Drone Wars

In one of my only posts last year, around this time, I argued that 2012 would be in the ‘year of the drone’ – and it certainly lived up to that. But we’re still only just beginning. This is already the decade of the drone. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are going to be everywhere in the coming few years (and of course not just in international disputes – I am writing about the spread of domestic surveillance drones for a major report on Surveillance in Canada that we’re producing right now).

Media outlets are reporting that the dispute over maritime territory between China and Japan is ramping up through the use of UAVs. At the moment both countries rely heavily on conventional naval or fisheries surveillance vessels, which are limited in terms of speed of deployment and numbers. However, surveillance drones could enable a more consistent presence over the disputed islands (and more importantly the sea around them, whose fisheries and below seabed mineral resources are the real underlying issue here).

However, there are big differences in the politics and the political economy of each state’s strategic trajectory here. Japan is relying on its longstanding ‘alliance’ with the USA, and is likely to purchase US-made Northrop-Grumman Global Hawks, further emphasizing the military dependency Japan still has on the USA. China, on the other hand, is speeding up development of its own UAVs, in multiple different models. US industry sources seem more worried by alleged breaches of intellectual property rights in the drones’ design than by strategic issues – but of course, China has almost certainly had access to both hardware and software from downed US drones, which is all part of what some analysts are terming a ‘drone race’ with the USA.

and the Chinese version (Chengdu Aircraft Co.)

But this isn’t just about surveillance. Like the USA’s models, many of China’s UAVs are armed or can be weaponized very easily, and again like the USA, China has also been looking to export markets – most recently, Pakistan has been discussing the purchase of several armed drones from China, following the distinct lack of success in its own UAV development program.

The Global Hawks that Japan is buying are not armed, but this doesn’t mean that Japan is acting less aggressively here or will not in future used armed drones. Despite the post-WW2 US-imposed but popular ‘pacifist’ constitution of the country, the recent return to power of rightist PM Shinzo Abe might will mean both more heated rhetoric over territorial claims and attempts to increase the of the country’s self-defence forces: a review of Japanese military spending – with a view to increasing it – was announced just yesterday.

Drones would seem to be a politically popular choice in this regard as they do not involve putting Japanese lives at risk, or at least not directly; however the longer term outcomes any drone war in East Asia would not likely favour a Japan whose regional economic and political power is influence declining relative to China’s.

Anti-surveillance clothing

I just received notice of a fashion show: not the kind of thing I used to blog here back when I was blogging regularly – hello again BTW, this will be the first post in a revival of this blog, apart from anything else I miss the combination of disciplined regularity and almost random new directions that blogging brings – anyway, the fashion show is by a New York artist, Adam Harvey, who will present various items designed to counter surveillance of different kinds.

There has been a growth in both surveillance and anti-surveillance clothing over the past few years. Back in the 2000s, we saw items like the Bladerunner GPS-enabled jacket – supposedly to enable parents to keep track of their kids but which would probably be more likely to tell them which bus they’d left it on or which friend they’d lent it to – and even earlier, Steve Mann‘s lab had been creating artifacts that combined engineering and art to subvert or reflect surveillance in ways both serious and humorous. More recently we’ve seen anti-surveillance make-up – another art project. But while artists have explored anti-surveillance and sousveillance, the general trend does seem to be towards clothing enabled for surveillance or at least connection into systems which require surveillance of the item or its wearer as part of some augmented reality / ubiquitous computing scenario.

Surveillant Landscapes

There is a fascinating little piece on Bldg Blog about ‘security geotextiles’ and other actual and speculative surveillance systems that are built in to, underlie or encompass whole landscapes. The argument seems to support what I have been writing and speaking about recently on ‘vanishing surveillance’ (I’ll be speaking about it again in Copenhagen a the first Negotiating (In)visibilities conference in February): the way in which, as surveillance spreads and becomes more intense, moving towards ubiquitous, pervasive or ambient surveillance, that its material manifestations have a tendency to disappear.

There is a standards kind of alarmism that the piece starts with and the assumption that such things are malevolent does strike one as an initial impression, perhaps not surprising given that the piece is inspired by yet another security tech developement – this time a concealed perimeter surveillance system from Israeli firm, GMax. Perhaps if it had begun with urban ubiquitous sensory systems in a universal design context, it might have taken a very different direction. However, what’s particularly interesting about the piece is that it doesn’t stop there, but highlights the possibilities for resistance and subversion using the very same ubiquitous technologies.

But whether hegemonic or subversive, the overall trajectory that post outlines of a move towards a machine-readable world, indeed a world reconfigured for machines, is pretty much indisputable…

geotextile2 — A buried and ultimately invisible magnetic passive perimeter security system, from Israeli security company, G-Max.

(Thanks to Torin Monahan for alerting me to this)

War on Terror corrupts US justice

On January 1st this year, US President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that, amongst other many other provisions, allows for the US military to indefinitely detain without trial anyone suspected of terrorists acts inside the United States and, the same for anyone captured in battle wherever it is in the world. Even the UK’s provisions, which were widely criticised, were nothing like this, indeed the argument was not about indefinite detention at all, but simply over how many days someone suspected of terrorism should be allowed to be detained without trial: 14 or 28. That’s some way short of indefinite.

Of course, the infinitely compromising and slippery Obama is trying to have his cake and eat by promising that he will not actually allow this power to be used except in strict accordance with the constitution. That may provide some temporary relief for US citizens accused of terrorism, at least and until a more gung-ho President is elected or Obama gives in to demands that he must use it – something military sources are looking forward to, it seems. However the provisions on the treatment of foreign captives effectively provide a legal footing in domestic law for the extrajudicial actions of former President Bush’s establishment of Guantanemo Bay and the associated global network of extraordinary rendition and torture / interogation sites. They undoubtedly contravene the Geneva Conventions (see 75 UNTS 135, for example)and several other aspects of International Law, notably the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

But, this is far from the only current assault on the rights of those who remain innocent in law of any criminal act in the USA. In New York, for example, the New York Police Department in conjunction with the CIA was last year revealed as operating a secret surveillance program against Muslims, titled ‘Ancestries of Interest’. It is unlikely to be the only such program. Like Obama’s indefinite detention provision, this is a perversion of the constitutional rights of US citizens. US police forces from the FBI downwards are not generally permitted to use undercover agents without there being some kind of specific allegation or exisiting evidence of crime. Essentially, this makes a whole community subject to categorical suspicion and permanent infiltration and investigation. It seems that every level of policing and justice in the USA from investigation to trial to sentencing has been indelibly stained by the War on Terror.

But this has all happened several times before of course, and happily not everyone has forgotten their history. Now black Christian pastors who remember the FBI/NSA COINTELPRO operations of the 1960s against black radical and civil rights groups, are reportedly joining with Islamic groups in opposing the NYPD’s racist and islamophobic surveillance program. Along with the challenges being mounted to Obama’s new law by ACLU and others, there are signs that Obama is no longer being given the benefit of the doubt by many of the groups who supported him first time around. How successful any of these moves will be is anyone’s guess but solidarity that moves beyond American Islamic groups having to defend themselves against the howling mob is something of a step forward.

Make like a Dandy Highwayman to beat Face Recognition Software

Spoofing biometrics has become a mini-industry, as one would expect as the technologies of recognition become more pervasive. And not all of these methods are high-tech. Tsutomu Matsumoto’s low tech ‘gummy fingerprint‘ approach to beating fingerprint recognition is already quite well-known, for example. I’ve also seen him demonstrate very effective iris scan spoofing using cardboard irises.

Facial recognition would seem the most obvious target for such spoofing given that it is likely to be the system most used in public or other open spaces. And one of the most ingenious systems I have seen recently involves a few very simple tips. Inspired by the increasing hostility of legal systems to masks and head coverings, CV Dazzle claims to be an ‘open-source’ camouflage system for defeating computer vision.

Among the interesting findings of the project, which started as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, is that the more complex and high-fashion disguise-type attempts to beat facial recognition did not work as well as the simpler flat camouflage approaches. The solution suggested thus involves many of the same principles as earlier forms of camouflage: breaking up surface patterns and disguising surface topography. It uses startling make-up techniques which look a bit like 80s New Romantic face painting as deployed by Adam and the Ants – hence the title of this post! The system concentrates especially on key areas of the face which are essential to most facial recognition software systems such as the area around the bridge of the nose, cheekbones and eye socket depth.

comparison_lg — Results from the CV Dazzle project

So, will we see a revival of the Dandy Highwayman look as a strategy of counter-surveillance? Or more likely, will social embarrassment and the desire to seem ‘normal’ mean that video surveillance operators have a relatively easy life?

Negotiating (In)visibilities

There’s an interesting new research network called ‘Negotiating (In)visibilies‘, one of those fascinating interdisciplinary collaborations (or collisions) that spans architcture, urban studies, cultural studies, arts and information (and probably). I’ve been asked to be an advisor and will also be giving one of the keynotes at what looks to be a really great opening confererence in Copenhagen, February 1-2 2012. Should be fun!

Will 2012 be the year of the drone?

My first post of 2012 – and, yes, my New’s Year’s Resolution is to blog regularly again – is not about a new subject. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, are already on their way to being a standard tool of national security and increasingly of policing too. However, given decreasing price of small Micro-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), it was also inevitable that NGOs, activist and citizen groups and even individuals, would soon start to operate them as a form of sousveillance or counter-surveillance, or simply as surveillance.

Some Occupy protestors in Europe and the USA had already made use of commercially available MAVs to broadcast footage of protest. And, the BBC reports today that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the radical direct action anti-whaling group, will this year use an Osprey drone aircraft to monitor Japanese whaling fleets operating in the southern oceans. Sea Shepherd has always been technically adventurous (and PR savvy), operating radar-invisible speedboats and even a submarine in the past.

But it all suggests that drones have made the leap from military to policing to civil use with remarkable speed, and I suggest that in 2012 we will see the proliferation of MAVs operated by non-government users. Let’s just see how fast governments now try to outlaw drones in response…