David

Internet Surveillance in Brazil

At the same time as the UK government is pressing ahead with its plans for a massive database of all communications (that even the European Commission doesn’t like), and the US Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review has ruled that warrantless Internet surveillance is constitutional, Brazilian lawmakers are also attempting to restrict Internet liberties in the name of security.

In particular Senator Eduardo Azeredo last year pushed a ‘cybercrime’ bill through the upper house of parliament, that includes measures to create fixed identities for ISPs and IP numbers – see this blog post from my host, Rodrigo Firmino back in October when this first came to light. The struggle over this bill has been going on since 2006 and there are a whole host of other controversial measures particularly around cracking mobile phones which also seem to be not much more than ways of putting more money in the pockets of telecoms companies… there are more details,links to legal analyses, and a translation of the law into English here.

The Brazilian anti-Internet Surveillnce Campaign — The Brazilian anti-Internet Surveillance Campaign

Whatever the justifications or political objections – and there is a widespread campaign now ongoing as the bill still has not cleared the other chamber of parliament here – this would seem to be technically difficult, could effectively destroy the productive and collaborative use of the Internet in Brazil, but would also be very expensive with little actual benefit. I will be trying to arrange an interview with Senator Azeredo while I am here – as well as talking to the objectors.

Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America Symposium

Some people are probably wondering what I am actually doing here. I sometimes feel like am not quite sure myself, but I will write more on my research over the next few days. One thing my hosts and I are doing is organising the first gathering of surveillance studies scholars in Brazil, the symposium on Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America here at the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana, Curitiba. Hopefully this will form the nucleus of the Surveillance Studies Network in Latin America. We’ve selected 46 papers for presentation, although actually we could do with some more Spanish language contributions… we may issue another extended call soon.

European Parliament Agrees to Biometric Passports

The European Union’s plan to introduce biometric passports (with fingerprint images) will go ahead from the end of June after the European Parliament finally agreed to the proposal. This means that all states of the EU will now have to construct new databases of fingerprints for the entire population (including the UK and Ireland who, although outside the Schengen agreement on internal borders, voluntarily follow the same passport standards).

The Parliament did manage to introduce one major ammendment which rejected the European Commission’s plan to have children under 12 years-old fingerprinted as well – although some countries already do this. However, this vote was a rubber-stamping exercise by a ineffectual body.

The unreliability of fingerprint identification, which is mentioned in this report by PC Worldremains a major issue. Having talked to European Commission people at many different events, my general opinion of them is that, whilst well-meaning, they are seriously lacking technological expertise and knowledge of the research in the area, and generally fail to listen to those who know except where they will confirm their existing opinions. Like most governments.

Winnipeg gets CCTV

Well, another city authority is apparently paying no attention to the continuous stream of assessments of CCTV systems in practice. This time, it’s Winnipeg in Canada. The cheif of police is hopeful that the small 10-camera system will work and is already saying he hopes it will be extended… before we know whether it will or won’t work. As usual the story is nothing but boosterism and contains no contrary view at all. I can predict a stream of (police) anecdotes about crimes ‘solved’ by the cameras for a few months and how much safer the town is, and then a couple of years down the line, a report showing that nothing much has changed in reality…

In Brazil

Just a quick post to say that I’ve arrived in Curitiba safely – the Brazilians seem to have the nice kind of border controls that now seem long gone in the UK. It is raining incredibly hard now, and we already had a massive electrical storm that knocked out power in our neighborhood for a couple of hours.

Note: this post was interrupted by another power cut last night!