David

Occupy the Internet!

I’ve been writing for several years now about the creeping attempts by nominally democratic governments to control or even close the Internet (see here for example). This week the biggest such step for some time occurs as the world’s most powerful democracy, the USA, begins a new process of introducing such controls. There are two bills before the House of Representatives (the Stop Online Piracy Bill, SOPA) and the Senate (the Protect IP act), which essentially do the same thing (although the House bill goes further): assert a wide-ranging heavy-handed jurisdiction on the Internet even beyond US borders.

Of course, the US bills do not do this as China does, in the name of political and social order, but in the name of commerce. The bills are supposedly about protecting American intellectual property, however their effect is likely to be severely chilling to free expression and the dissemination of ideas and to innovation, social and economic. The bills, amongst many other provisions, will allow corporation to sue website owners and ISPs for even unknowingly hosting or communicating copyrighted materials illicitly.

As Michael Geist has shown, SOPA in particular also asserts US jurisdiction over vast swathes of the Internet on the grounds that any site whose name is registered with a US registrar is considered a ‘US site’ regardless of the location of its server and given that name-registration of top-level (.com, .org, .net etc) names is entirely controlled from within the USA, the provisions mean that every top-level domain is considered to be ‘US’. Further it claims that IP addresses (the numerical address of site) within the whole North American region (ARIN) which includes Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, are also ‘domestic’ for the purposes of this law. Basically, the USA is asserting a kind of Munro-doctrine for the Internet.

I wrote, half-jokingly, some time ago that the US state invented the Internet, but they don’t like how it’s being used and now they want it back: this is the demand in writing. The big problem in opposing this is of course the fact that US citizens have already been thoroughly bombarded with propaganda that has told them that they are ‘under threat’ from pirates and hackers and even cyberwar – and that openness makes them insecure. They’ve been told that the Wikileaks model of accountability through openness and transparency is an attack on the USA. In an age of economic insecurity, no doubt the protection of American jobs will also be wheeled out as an excuse.

But this is quite simply another manifestation of immoral corporate greed. Intellectual Property is in itself a kind of information-age enclosure, a concept that, while it may have some use in limited forms, has become so far-reaching that it is ludicrous, and through which financial and legal strength can simply steamroller traditional or alternative visions of fairness, sharing and openness – even though these things have been shown to be vital in real innovation. If this is an infowar, I know which side I am on, and which side you should be on, and it is not the side of Protect IP and SOPA and the negative politics of closure, it is with Anonymous and the Pirate Party, with open flows, open source and open access. We have to tell them that they can’t have the Internet back, it’s ours now. We have to occupy the Internet, to build around these attempts to stifle innovation and sharing and we have to do it now.

In the meantime, you can express your displeasure here: http://americancensorship.org/

See also: The Internet Must Be Defended! Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Rio police invade favelas ahead of FIFA World Cup and Olympics

As I, along with many others, predicted as soon as it was announced that Rio de Janeiro would host the two most globally important sports mega-events, the Rio authorities have launched a major drive to occupy and ‘pacify’ a growing number of the most significant favelas (informal settlements) in the city.

The rationale behind this is to drive out the gangs which control many of these communities. To this end a series of special police units has been created, the UPPs, which attempt to gain control of the settlements. Early experiments were in three favelas, one of which, Santa Marta, I visited in early 2009, when, along with Paola Barreto Leblanc, I conducted interviews with community association leaders and police.

Just last week the police moved into the largest favela, Rocinha. Unusually with police raids of this kind, there was little overt violence and ‘collateral damage’. This is certainly an improvement on some previous operations. However, not everyone was that impressed. This video from ITN News shows the stage-managed nature of the event, which seems to have been largely a demonstration of the ability of the Rio authorities to produce security on demand. As the reporter notes, only one person was arrested which means that hundreds of gang members (in this case of the Amigos dos Amigos, AdA, or ‘Friends of Friends’) will either have fled or remain in the favela.

The plan is apparently for the net to be widened still further, with Sergio Cabral, the Governor, claiming that 40 UPPs will be established, including very soon in the Mare Complex, 16 favelas with over 130,000 in all, which is vital to the preparation for the mega-events as it is close to the international aiport and other major transport links from Rio to the economic hub of Brazil, Sao Paulo. Many AdA members from Rocinha may have fled to the Mare Complex and at some point the pacification is bound to be become violent and less media-friendly. There are also, at least two other alliances of gangs who occupy other important favelas.

The current authorities have also started to emphasize the ‘community-building’ intention of these pacification measures, but it should not be forgotten that almost the first act that Cabral and his sidekick, the Mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, implemented on coming to office was to cancel the internationally-praised slum-upgrading program, favela bairro (see some thoughts I had on this after my interviews in 2009) of the former Mayor Cesar Maia, which was aimed at a much deeper and longer-term improvements not just at appeasing middle class voters and impressing the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. We will also see whether, like in Santa Marta, the initial community building efforts are undermined (or perhaps aided) by the installation of surveillance cameras…

Oxford taxi cabs will record your every word…

Just when you thought that having just about your every move recorded in the UK was bad enough, Oxford City Council, which runs the city I once called home, has decided that all taxi cabs in the city will record both sound and vision, and these records will be kept for up to 28 days, just in case.

People often ask me ‘where do you draw the line?’. Well, you absolutely draw the line at recording private conversations without a specific justification. Generalized audio surveillance is not just a step over the line, it leaps over the line, lands far beyond it and keeps running.

This is just wrong. No qualification.

It seems that despite having got rid of one government with authoritarian surveillance tendencies, the same impulses are alive and well in local government in Britain. Perhaps the councillors who voted for this would first like to have audio surveillance in their offices, cars and houses, you know: just in case…

GPS tracking goes mainstream

There is increasing evidence that US police forces are now using GPS tracking devices regularly and with impunity. Following court rulings at different levels which have left the legal situation unclear with only the Supreme Court left (this coming week), police forces across the country have been slapping GPS trackers on thousands of private vehicles, without warrants, and until recently, without the knowledge of those being tracked.

However, Wired‘s Threat Level blog has been reporting on the growing numbers of cases of Americans who have discovered GPS trackers on their cars, and in one particularly bizarre case, a device that was replaced by undercover officers while the Wired reporters were in the vicinity, having just removed and photographed the original device!

There are many pictures and manufacturers’ detail on Threat Level. Here are a couple…

GPS tracker in place:

GPS tracker disassembled showing souped-up longlife battery, including manufacturer’s details:

One of the more perplexing things about the use of these devices is what recourse the US citizen has when they discover them. If they are placed ‘legally’, do you have the right to remove or indeed to disassemble them? What would be done if they are removed? The experience of Wired would suggest that the device would be replaced, but how many times could this go on? At what point would the state take some kind of legal action to attempt to prevent the removal of a device? In the case of location tracking devices that are known about but unable to be legally removed, surely you have a situation that becomes equivalent not to simple (if it is even simple) unwarranted surveillance, but to electronic tagging.

Unlawful Access

The campaign video a lot of us were involved in, to raise awareness of the dangers to Canadian communication rights posed by potential new ‘lawful access’ legislation, is now out. Lawful Access legislation was proposed last year but came up against the time limit of the election. It was then proposed to be included in the new Omnibus Crime Bill, C-51, but was split from this and is now likely either to be introduced separately, or attached stealthily to another bill. It isn’t going to go away…

Watch, learn, act…

Please also sign the petition, and there are also further resources and news here, here and here.

Body-scanners in railway stations in the UK?

Victoria Cohen writing in her column in The Observer, UK, on Sunday mentioned that she had read of body-scanners being used at Bath railway station. She used this as the starting point for a standard kind of warning on increasing surveillance.

Now, normally, I would thoroughly approve, and such diffusion of technologies of surveillance would fit with the trajectories we outlined in the Report on the Surveillance Society a few years back. However, it didn’t take a lot of digging (and I am probably not the only person who has discovered this) to find that she was basing her column on a misinterpretation of what had gone on in Bath. According to an Avon and Somerset Constabulary press release, what was happening was a temporary exercise conducted jointly with the British Transport Police, using not a body-scanner but a metal detector (or ‘knife arch’ as they are sometimes termed) and sniffer dogs. This was apparently part of a policy to raise awareness of nightlife safety.

There are of course still many issues with the routine use of both sniffer dogs and metal detectors, but we need to be very careful to get the facts right when we are making comments about the spread of surveillance. Get things wrong, and the whole issue can get tarnished as alarmist.

Body-scanners are not being used in UK railway stations. Not yet, anyway…

Billions wasted on airport ‘security’

A new report from the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) say that the industry is wasting billions on unnecessary and ineffective security procedures which are slowing down travel and damaging the whole sector’s economic prospects, according to The Guardian. This comes only days after the German government decided not to introduce body-scanners after trials showed them to be unreliable.

The argument is not particularly surprising, but there seem to be interesting aspects of the issue (apart from the basic human rights problems which we should never forget). The first is that clearly someone is benefitting economically, even if it is not the air transport sector, and that someone is the security industry – although as it happens, a whole range of people and companies have benefitted from the aftermath of 9/11. The Guardian article mentions that UK-based scanning company, Smiths, has tripled its profits this year to near $1Bn, despite the problems with scanners. However, it isn’t all bad. In European domestic and regional markets, airlines have lost out to railway travel, and this can only be a good thing in terms of environmental concerns.

The second aspect is that IATA is using this to push the revival of integrated ‘trusted traveller’ plans coming out of the USA. Many countries have bilateral schemes, but the idea is for travellers with ‘nothing to hide’ to submit personal information to a central body that would validate them without the need for time-consuming checks on the airport. So far, such schemes have been largely restricted to business-class passengers, raising the strong possibility of confusion between really improved security and simply buying more convenience. However, there is another problem from the point of view of security here too: one of the major concerns for security is so-called ‘clean skins’, terrorist who have never triggered any suspicion because they are either entirely new converts to the cause, or have been deep undercover for years cultivating an unblemished record.

In any case, it appears that the security companies are trying to get past the criticism by producing new seamless and less intrusive scanning technologies that would not require long waits and would be integrated into the architecture of airport corridors etc. Of course, the delays and inconvenience of obvious security and surveillance procedures have a purpose and are not just by-products. There is, theoretically at least, a consciousness-raising effect of what Bruce Schneier calls ‘security theater’. If these new gadgets work, and the German trial suggests that there is often more smoke than heat in claims about effectiveness, this effect would be diminished in favour of speed and convenience for an as yet unknown proportion of travellers and much greater inconvenience for the remainder. It’s an interesting conundrum for the authorities…

Who gets Freedom of Information?

UK transparency campaigner, Heather Brooke, writes a comment piece on The Guardian website today on why she believes that UK university cancer researchers should have to give up information to transnational tobacco giant, Philip Morris. The basis for the argument is that Freedom of Information law should apply regardless of who the applicant is.

I generally admire Heather’s single-minded work on FoI, but single-mindedness is not always a virtue, and can sometimes lead to overly extreme conclusions which lack a broader understanding of the political economics involved. As in this case. As a researcher and analyst rather than a campaigner, I can see that there are three important counter-arguments to her piece:

1. Corporations are not people. There is a serious and ongoing battle here. Although legal incorporation means companies are often considered as legal people, we should not start to think of them as having ‘rights’ like individuals, not should rights that come from citizenship or by being an individual voter apply to them. Recently, the US supreme court rejected the argument of a large telecoms company that it had privacy rights. The worrying thing is that several lower courts had accepted that it could have such rights. Rather than providing corporations with more equivalences to human rights, we need to be holding corporations to account. This brings me to…

2. The really important issue with large private companies and FoI is why those large private companies are not subject to the same kind of transparency. Corporate confidentiality makes no sense even in the context of liberal economic theory, however it makes even less sense if we think about FoI as a method of accountability. Corporations are unable to be held accountable via electoral processes and the markets are too diffuse and diverse (and spread across too many different countries) to work as a mechanism of accountability, so we need law that rebalances the power imbalances between corporations on the one had, and people, individually and collectively, on the other – through transparency. That is, after all, what is its main point when it comes to state transparency and FoI; it’s not really about ‘value for the tax payer’, it’s about power.

3. On that note, FoI is being increasingly used against academics and activists in particular as a form of intimidation by corporate interests. This is not to say that academics and activists should not be accountable, but it is not the case that all parties here of on a level playing field, and further, mechanisms of accountability are themselves not simply neutral or unequivocally always a good thing because of what they are supposed to do. Law has to embed intention, and be interpretable by the courts, in a way that clearly differentiates between legitimate use (for people holding organisations to account), poor excuses (as in the state claiming expense or lack of time as reasons for not releasing information), and blatant misuse of the law for purposes for which it was not intended. If it does not, it can simply become another method the intensification of organisational power against the interests of people.

Lives at stake for social media users

Al-Jazeera is carrying an excellent piece from the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminding social media network owners and regulators in their home countries that lives could be at stake because of the choices they make about security, privacy and anonymity.

Countries like Syria and Iran are purusing a plethora of surveillance and disruption tactics to identity and frustrate activists using social media to organise against their oppressive regimes, and the responses of the networks could be vital. This is something that Google in particular does not appear to have appreciated at all in its current insistance on ‘real indentities’ being the basis for all networking on Google+. Its attitude makes a very naive and dangerous assumption about the nature of states both present and future.

Security and Surveillance session at AAG 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 24-28 February 2012, New York

Geographies of Security and Surveillance

Convened by David Murakami Wood, Queen’s University, Ontario, and Steve Graham, Newcastle University UK.

This session will provide a space for the discussion of the growing interest in geographies of security and surveillance. We welcome submissions on any aspect of this broad area, but would particularly encourage papers on:

International comparative studies of security and surveillance
The political economy of security and surveillance
Surveillance, intelligence and the ‘war on terror’
The globalization, reterritorialization and rescaling of security and surveillance
Critiques of dominant theorizations of security and surveillance, and new directions from / in geography
Emerging geographies of surveillance and security, e.g. social networks, online gameworlds etc.
Historical geographies of security and surveillance
Security, surveillance and culture
Geographies of openness, transparency and exteriority
Geographies of closure, privacy and interiority

Potential presenters should first register for the meeting at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/register_to_attend

They should then send their name, affiliation, conference ID number, and a 250-word abstract to David Murakami Wood

The deadline for submission is: 21st September 2011

Successful submitters will be notified before 28th September 2011, when the full session will be submitted to the AAG