David

Drone Britain

Despite the supposed anti-surveillance tendencies of the new coalition government in Britain, one kind of surveillance would seem to be expanding, as it is almost everywhere in the world: that of surveillance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Micro-unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) or flying drone cameras. There are so many previous stories on this blog about drones you’d be better off searching than me providing links here!

The Guardian reported on Friday that a growing number of different agencies are either ordering drones or have plans to do so, including he Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), four police forces (Merseyside, Essex, Staffordshire and the British Transport Police), the Environment Agency, and even some Fire Services (West Midlands and South Wales). This follows the story in January that there was what seemed to be an evolving secret national strategy for drones.

So far, their use has been limited not by ethical concerns but by the requirements of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) which insists that they must be “licensed when flown within 50 metres of a person, property or structure.” This remains its position, but it will be interesting to see how stringent are the licensing requirements as drones increase in number and whether the expansion in UAV use is in any way affected by the government’s stated policy aim to bring CCTV under stricter regulation.

(thanks to Charles Raab for this)

The Tools of Personal Surveillance

There’s always something interesting on BoingBoing, and it was via that site that I came across this story in Salon magazine about one woman’s decision to track down the man who had robbed her. Now, most of the commentary about this has focussed on her commitment and determination and the usual stuff about how the police let criminals prospers etc. However, what interested me was the techniques and technologies that she was able to employ to find this guy: basically not only did she use a whole lot of techniques and technologies that not so long ago would have been the preserve of the intelligence services, police or private investigators, but also the thief in question was also an inveterate social networker and was about as careless with his online personae as most of us are. Of course, what it also shows is that it takes an awful lot of effort to do this, and this kind of obsessive hunt takes over lives, so it would not be a practical option: individual surveillance is not a substitute for the power of the state. It’s a fascinating read…

Dawn of the Surveillance Dead

My second zombie story today may be (at least for anti-surveillance advocates) a more positive one. Every since the global credit crunch hit, I have been wondering about its effects on the expansion of the surveillance industry (see here, here, here and here). On the one hand, it could be hit as hard as any other sector, but on the other, security tends to be the one sector that thrives in recessions as crime, or at least fear of crime, rises in these periods. I saw on the UK industry site, Surveillance Park, a story about a report by Plimsoll Analysis, conducted over the summer this year, saying that of 960 companies surveyed in the surveillance field in the UK, 143 have been left in a ‘zombie’ state by the recession. Essentially these companies are the living dead: they look like active companies, they have an offficial existence, but in reality there is nothing alive inside – they stumble on merely to pay off existing debts.

However, whilst this may seem like a significant blow to the ongoing expansion of the surveillance industry – that’s 21% of the companies in the sector in trouble – the industry analysts argue that in fact this provides a further opportunity for market consolidation. They say that 79 of these companies are in fact ripe for take-over.

This is part of a trend we have also been witnessing in the research we are doing currently for the Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner on the involvement of private companies in border control – see e.g. this story. In my view, what is emerging from the recession is a global surveillance and security industry that will be composed of bigger, more diversified companies – a ‘rationalization’ of the proliferation of small start-ups and spin-offs that started in the 1990s but really took off after the US (and international) response to the 9/11 attacks, which made it clear that there would be long-term state investment in and purchasing of high-tech surveillance and security ‘solutions’. The thing is that for those interested in challenging the onward march of surveillance, this may not be such good news after all – bigger companies with their own institutional structures and cultures, and lucrative guaranteed state contracts, are likely to be far less amenable to influence from the outside.

Night of the Surveillance Dead

In one of those curious synchronicities that occasionally emerge out of the chaotic foam of the internet, I came across two stories (of an entirely different nature) featuring surveillance and ‘zombies’ this week.

The first is one that Ars Technica first publicized recently – the creation of new undeletable cookies. Cookies, for the still unaware, are little bits of code that sit on your computer and store information, usually relating to websites you have visited – so, passwords and the like. Originally they were simply a tool to make it easier to handle the proliferation of sites that needed login details from users. And in most cases, they used to be both moderately consensual (i.e. you would be, or could be, asked if you wanted to have you computer download one) and relatively easy to remove. However, in recent years, this has changed. For a start there are so many sites and applications using cookies that it has become inconvenient to ‘consent’ to them or to manage them in any unautomated way. The new development however is a system that uses the database capabilities in HTML5 rather than being a traditional cookie. The major problem with this, and you can read more about the technical details in the story, is that these cannot ever be deleted by the user, as when they are deleted, they respawn themselves, and recreate the data profile of the user by reaching into other areas of your computer (and even stuff you thought was also deleted). The company concerned, Ringleader Digital, which specializes in ‘targeted, trackable advertising’ for ‘real-time visibility’, says users can ‘opt-out’ by using a form on their website, but this so-called ‘opt-out’ is hedged about with terms and conditions.

Now, Ars Technica reports that an open-source developer, Samy Kamkar, has created ‘evercookie‘, a virtually indestructible cookie designed as an educational tool to make users aware of the presence of these new internet zombies that do their master’s bidding. It’s a neat idea but I wonder – and I hope you will excuse my taking the zombie metaphor just a little further here – whether in raising the dead to show that necromancy is bad, good wizards like Samy Kamkar might in the end just be contributing to the problem. It isn’t as if most ordinary users understand these strange powers. Perhaps the people who need to witness the power of these occult rites are the regulators. It’s not clear to me whether these kinds of programs would be considered in any way legal in most places with strong data-protection and privacy laws, like Canada and the EU – as the controversy over the similar British Telecom system, Phorm, showed. So I would be very interested in what the Canadian Privacy Commissioner has to say about it, for example. I will be asking them.

(The second zombie story I will add later…)

Bigger than Brazil

So says a new IMS report on the surveillance market in Latin America, according to industry site, Surveillance Park.

Brazil’s emergence as an economic power means that there is increasing demand for surveillance both in individual applications and for larger infrastructure projects like the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. But Brazil already has what the report terms “an established eco-system of suppliers” so, in the face of this strong competition, foreign surveillance companies are advised to look elsewhere, particularly Argentina, Chile and Mexico, whose surveillance markets should provide “long-term double digit growth.

‘Friendly’ Surveillance and Intelligent Socks

I missed putting this up last week, but MIT’s Technology Review blogs had a good summary of a talk by Intel’s Justin Rattner, who was arguing for a new era of more ‘friendly’ surveillance. By this he means an emphasis on ubiquitous computing and sensing technologies, or what the Europeans call ‘ambient intelligence’, for personal and personalized assistance and support. He is quoted in the piece as saying “Future devices will constantly learn about you, your habits, how you go about your life, your friends. They’ll know where you’re going, they’ll anticipate, they’ll know your likes and dislikes.” Rattner himself was wearing some new ‘intelligent socks’ (well, sensors in his socks) during the talk, which can sense whether the wearer has fallen or experienced some other unexpected movement. Of course, the problem with this, apart from the issue of whether we want even our socks to anticipate our movements and more, is that the constant stream of data needed to inform the intelligent systems has to go somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ is ‘the cloud’, i.e. the most intimate data about you, whatever level of security is in place, would be just out there and far more accessible than the forms of biomedical information currently held by, for example, our doctors.

The city where the cameras never sleep… New York, New York

The Gothamist blog has a brief report on the massive upgrading and expansion of the video surveillance system in the New York public transit system. Like Chicago, which I’ve mentioned several times here, the cameras in New York are really just collection devices to feed an evolving suite of video analytic software, that can track suspects or vehicles in real-time or search through old footage to find multiple occurences of particular distinctive objects or people.

The other notable thing is that the new camera system is just completely overlaying the old – in other words there is no attempt to connect the older cameras which are not compatible and have far poorer image quality. As cameras and software gets cheaper, this option looks like being the one many urban authorities will pursue, so cities like London, which pioneered widespread video surveillance, but which, with their disconnected mosaic of incompatible systems, have started to look increasingly ineffective and out-of-date, could deal with this not by expensive and unreliable fixes but simply by sticking in an entirely new integrated algorithmic system on top of or alongside the old ones. Technological fallibility and incompatibility can no longer be relied on as protections for the privacy rights of citizens in public spaces.

Chipping Pre-School Kids in the USA

ACLU is reporting that nursery schools kids in Richmond, California are being issued with jerseys embedded with RFID chips. GPS-enabled and/or RFID-chipped clothing has been available for a while now, and there have also been (pre-)schools in other countries that have issued tracking devices to kids, notably in Yokohama in Japan, but this appears to be the first time in the USA. RFID is a very simple, insecure technology, and this type of initiative gives a false sense of security and is about at once raising and appeasing social anxiety and parental paranoia about the incredibly rare instances of child kidnapping. ACLU note correctly that this is just likely to make stalking and kidnapping easier as harder, but really all this does is enable the school to know where the jersey is – like left on the back of a bus, swapped with a friend or thrown in a ditch. It’s more pointless security theater, but at a more intimate level than the kind we are used to at airports and public buildings.

America’s Surveillance State

I’ve posted several times over the last few years on how the USA is rapidly overtaking Britain as the leading democratic ‘surveillance society’. It seems like some commentators in the USA now agree – Glenn Greenwald writes on the Salon magazine site, about his essay published by the libertarian Cato Institute, and the responses it has received from different parts of the US political spectrum. It’s all worth a read, although for British activists and academics in this area in particular, it will sound like what Yogi Berra famously described as ‘deja-vu all over again’… and it’s hardly new even in the States (see the work done by ACLU, Wired’s Danger Room, experts and academics like Bill Staples, Bruce Schneier and Torin Monahan, and popular books by Christian Parenti and Robert O’Harrow, for just a couple of examples).

Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: Call for Participation

Call For Participation: Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life

Digitally mediated surveillance (DMS) is an increasingly prevalent, but still largely invisible, aspect of daily life. As we work, play and negotiate public and private spaces, on-line and off, we produce a growing stream of personal digital data of interest to unseen others. CCTV cameras hosted by private and public actors survey and record our movements in public space, as well as in the workplace. Corporate interests track our behaviour as we navigate both social and transactional cyberspaces, data mining our digital doubles and packaging users as commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Governments continue to collect personal information on-line with unclear guidelines for retention and use, while law enforcement increasingly use internet technology to monitor not only criminals but activists and political dissidents as well, with worrisome implications for democracy.

This international workshop brings together researchers, advocates, activists and artists working on the many aspects of cyber-surveillance, particularly as it pervades and mediates social life. This workshop will appeal to those interested in the surveillance aspects of topics such as the following, especially as they raise broader themes and issues that characterize the cyber-surveillance terrain more widely:

social networking (practices & platforms)
search engines
behavioural advertising/targeted marketing
monitoring and analysis techniques (facial recognition, RFID, video analytics, data mining)
Internet surveillance (deep packet inspection, backbone intercepts)
resistance (actors, practices, technologies)

A central concern is to better understand DMS practices, making them more publicly visible and democratically accountable. To do so, we must comprehend what constitutes DMS, delineating parameters for research and analysis. We must further explore the way citizens and consumers experience, engage with and respond to digitally mediated surveillance. Finally, we must develop alliances, responses and counterstrategies to deal with the ongoing creep of digitally mediated surveillance in everyday life.

The workshop adopts a novel structure, mainly comprising a series of themed panels organized to address compelling questions arising around digitally mediated surveillance that cut across the topics listed above. Some illustrative examples:

We regularly hear about ‘cyber-surveillance’, ‘cyber-security’, and ‘cyber-threats’. What constitutes cyber-surveillance, and what are the empirical and theoretical difficulties in establishing a practical understanding of cyber-surveillance? Is the enterprise of developing a definition useful, or condemned to analytic confusion?
What are the motives and strategies of key DMS actors (e.g. surveillance equipment/systems/ strategy/”solutions” providers; police/law enforcement/security agencies; data aggregation brokers; digital infrastructure providers); oversight/regulatory/data protection agencies; civil society organizations, and user/citizens?
What are the relationships among key DMS actors (e.g. between social networking site providers)? Between marketers (e.g. Facebook and DoubleClick)? Between digital infrastructure providers and law enforcement (e.g. lawful access)?
What business models are enterprises pursuing that promote DMS in a variety of areas, including social networking, location tracking, ID’d transactions etc. What can we expect of DMS in the coming years? What new risks and opportunities are likely?
What do people know about the DMS practices and risks they are exposed to in everyday life? What are people’s attitudes to these practices and risks?
What are the politics of DMS; who is active? What are their primary interests, what are the possible lines of contention and prospective alliances? What are the promising intervention points and alliances that can promote a more democratically accountable surveillance?
What is the relationship between DMS and privacy? Are privacy policies legitimating DMS? Is a re-evaluation of traditional information privacy principles required in light of new and emergent online practices, such as social networking and others?
Do deep packet inspection and other surveillance techniques and practices of internet service providers (ISP) threaten personal privacy?
How do new technical configurations promote surveillance and challenge privacy? For example, do cloud computing applications pose a greater threat to personal privacy than the client/server model? How do mobile devices and geo-location promote surveillance of individuals?
How do the multiple jurisdictions of internet data storage and exchange affect the application of national/international data protection laws?
What is the role of advocacy/activist movements in challenging cyber-surveillance?

In conjunction with the workshop there will be a combination of public events on the theme of cyber-surveillance in everyday life:

poster session, for presenting and discussing provocative ideas and works in progress
public lecture or debate
art exhibition/installation(s)

We invite 500 word abstracts of research papers, position statements, short presentations, works in progress, posters, demonstrations, installations. Each abstract should:

address explicitly one or more “burning questions” related to digitally-mediated surveillance in everyday life, such as those mentioned above.

indicate the form of intended contribution (i.e. research paper, position statement, short presentation, work in progress, poster, demonstration, installation)

The workshop will consist of about 40 participants, at least half of whom will be presenters listed on the published program. Funds will be available to support the participation of representatives of civil society organizations.

Accepted research paper authors will be invited to submit a full paper (~6000 words) for presentation and discussion in a multi-party panel session. All accepted submissions will be posted publicly. A selection of papers will be invited for revision and academic publication in a special issue of an open-access, refereed journal such as Surveillance and Society.

In order to facilitate a more holistic conversation, one that reaches beyond academia, we also invite critical position statements, short presentations, works-in-progress, interactive demonstrations, and artistic interpretations of the meaning and import of cyber-surveillance in everyday life. These will be included in the panel sessions or grouped by theme in concurrent ‘birds-of-a-feather’ sessions designed to tease out, more interactively and informally, emergent questions, problems, ideas and future directions. This BoF track is meant to be flexible and contemporary, welcoming a variety of genres.

Instructions for making submissions will be available on the workshop website by Sept 1.

See also an accompanying Call for Annotated Bibliographies, aimed at providing background materials useful to workshop participants as well as more widely.

Timeline:

2010:

Oct. 1: Abstracts (500 words) for research papers, position statements, and other ‘birds-of-a-feather’ submissions

Nov. 15: Notification to authors of accepted research papers, position statements, etc. Abstracts posted to web.

2011:

Feb. 1: Abstracts (500 words) for posters

Mar. 1: Notification to authors of accepted posters.

Apr. 1: Full research papers (5-6000 words) due, and posted to web.

May 12-15 Workshop

Sponsored by: The New Transparency – Surveillance and Social Sorting.

International Program Committee: Jeffrey Chester (Center for Digital Democracy), Roger Clarke (Australian Privacy Foundation), Gus Hosein (Privacy International, London School of Economics), Helen Nissenbaum (New York University),
Charles Raab (University of Edinburgh) and Priscilla Regan (George Mason University)

Organizing Committee: Colin Bennett, Andrew Clement, Kate Milberry & Chris Parsons.

University of Toronto & University of Victoria.