David

India to issue biometric ID cards

According to The Times (and many other sources), this week, India is to create a central database, a unique identification number and biometric ID cards for all of its citizens. The scheme will be run by the newly-created Unique Identification Authority and cost an estimated £3 Billion (or around $5 Billion US).

As in Brazil, there is a felt need for such a system because of the proliferation of IDs and the dangers of anonymity and invisibility in a society where this can be a life or death issue. None of this, of course, means that the particular measures chosen will achieve their aims or will not create other problems. The Times with predictable journalistic cliche, calls this the largest Big Brother scheme in the world and the leader of the project is talking about a “ubiquitous online database” . However, it is rather difficult to see how it will be anything like that when most of India’s chaotic multi-level bureaucracy, especially at local level, still ‘works’ on the basis of paper-based filing systems.

There are suggestions too that this has purposes in crime-fighting and anti-terrorism, although the Indian government website on the scheme makes no such claims (which have in any case been discredited in the discussion about the proposed UK National Identity Register and ID card). It instead focuses on how ‘the Unique ID will be helpful in reducing identity related fraud and allow only targeted people to get the benefits from the government’ (MIT website).

Discussions on listservs has also served to question claims made in The Times article. The paper talks about ‘1.2 Billion’ people being enrolled, but in fact the scheme would only cover over-18s, which would be less than 2/3 of that number It also seems unclear exactly how the cards will be biometric. If it is just a photograph and fingerprint, this would be much the same as the Brazilian scheme. Of course the UK had more ambitious plans, but these were scrapped due to cost and reliability concerns.

Japan, where I am now, has instituted its own central database, and unique ID number, juki-net, and I will be talking to one of the people responsible for dealing with the technology that enables local governments to use the system this coming week…

(Thanks to John Bredehoft for pointing out the problem with the figures).

Community Safety in Shinjuku

As well as trying to interview officials at national and city level here, I am also looking at a few different areas of the city, including Shinjuku, where I have done some work before. Shinjuku is a central ward of Tokyo that includes the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) buildings, part of a growing high-rise district, possibly the busiest railway station in the world, one of the most extensive entertainment districts in the city (not just Kabukicho, the conventional ‘red light’ district, but also a lot of gay clubs and bars), and substantial Korean and Chinese communities.

We had an interesting interview this week with the two officials seconded from the Metropolitan Police Department (keishicho), to run the efforts in Shinjuku (as usual there is a lot more than I can summarise here). We met in the Emergency Control Room, a cramped space full of monitors old and new, walkie-talkies and lots and lots of yellow telephones. We had a brief chat about emergency planning, but as we there to talk security and surveillance, we moved on.

Anzen anshin (or bohan) machizukuri (community safety (or security) development) in Tokyo derives from a TMG ordinance (jourei) of 2003 which encourages all ku (city wards) to implement it. The main reason was that recorded crimes had reached a record high in the city in 2002 (I’ll consider crime figures in Japan and their reliability in another post). There were a patchwork of existing community safety organisations but these appear to have been separate from the chounaikai (local community associations). What the 2003 ordinance did was to make community safety the responsibility of the chounaikai with co-ordination, information and encouragement from the ku administration.

The Shinjuku authorities are very keen on this, much more so than some others, for example, Arakawa-ku where we are living and which I am also examining, which tends to rely on much more conventional policing. This may be a matter of money (Arakawa is nowhere near as wealthy as Shinjuku), but it may also be down to the attitudes of the public and local state officials. This kind of community safety work is time-intensive, and requires a substantial commitment in order to carry out things like citizen patrols (which seem to be one of the core elements).

We also talked about CCTV, which Tokyo started to implement in 2003 as well for the same ostensible reasons. Of course Kabukicho is one of the city-centre pilot areas (along with Ikebukuro, Shibuya, Ropongi and the later addition of Ueno), with over 50 cameras operated by the city police. Given their position it is hardly surprising that they had little time for talk of a ‘surveillance society’ (or indeed even the idea of ‘surveillance’ – the word kanshi provokes quite a strong reaction here – no, no – they are definitely not doing surveillance). They also talked about the co-ordination of shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ association) CCTV systems. It seems that despite their large numbers, these systems are generally not monitored, i.e. there is not control room and no-one is watching. The officials were also certain that the shoutenkai operators themselves were not even allowed to view footage without permission from local police. This is something I will have to investigate more as I have read in the past of shoutenkai representatives claiming the opposite – that they had to give permission for the police to view footage. It seems that both shoutenkai and chounaikai are being encouraged to install CCTV systems, and there are grant systems in place – basically one third comes from the city, one third from the ku, and one third has to be found by the organisation itself from its members.

This means that coverage is very uneven and tends to be restricted to wealthy and / or particularly committed –kai. Shinjuku has many, many shoutenkai systems. Nippori, in Arakawa, in contrast has three cameras – not three systems, but three cameras…

(Thank-you very much to Mr Takahashi and Mr Yabe for their time and patience with my questions).

USA builds massive new space surveillance system

My headline is a slightly more accurate version of the way that news of the new ‘Space Fence’ system has been headlined, for example here in Computerworld. The Space Fence system, whose first stage is a $30 Million US project for Northrop-Grumman, will replace a 1961 VHF radio infrastructure known as the Air Force Space Surveillance System built in 1961.

Although the spin is that the system is all about tracking space debris, this is actually part of the DoD’s satellite tracking operations – which certainly does cover debris, insofar as they are a threat to US satellites, but is also crucially to make sure that an accurate picture of the increasing number of smaller ‘micro-satellites’ from an every-expanding number of countries can be obtained. In that sense, this program is indeed a ‘fence’, a further attempt to enforce the notion that space is effectively US territory.

Data Protection in Japan

Comprehensive data protection in Japan is fairly recent. Until 2003, data protection was still governed under much two earlier ‘ information society initiatives: firstly, the Act for the Protection of Computer Processed Personal Data Held by Administrative Organisation (1988) and secondly, the Protection of Computer Processed Personal Data Act (1990), which are based on the 1980 OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data. These laws were limited an applied only to the state, and within that, only to some national government organisations rather than all of them.

Lawyers and those concerned with privacy within and without government were well aware of these limitations, and in the late 90s, a special Privacy Issues Study Working Group was set upby the Electronic Commerce Promotion Council of Japan (ECom). This committee issued Guidelines Concerning Protection of Personal Data in Electronic Commerce in the Private Sector in March 1998. The Chair of that committee, Professor Masao Horibe, provides an account here.

Subsequently, a Personal Data Protection Legislation Special Committee was established in January 2000 under the Advanced Information and Telecommunications Society Promotion Headquarters (now the IT Strategic Headquarters), a body responsible directly to the Japanese cabinet. This body has issued all the laws and directions regarding IT, e-Japan etc.

The need to “protect personal data” (kojin deta) was mentioned in Article 22 of the Basic Law on the Formation of an Advanced Information and Telecommunications Network Society within the rubric of ‘security’. This was followed up by the e-Japan strategy of January 2001, which under the section on the Facilitation of E-Commerce, recommended that “Necessary legislative measures should be taken to win the confidence of consumers, including submission of a bill to protect personal data to the ordinary session of the Diet in 2001.”

The Bill was introduced in March 2001, but as a result of concerns about its effects on the freedom of the press, was left to fall by 2002. However the Personal Information Protection Bill was passed in 2003, one of five bills with implications for data protections to be passed in that Diet session.The bill came into force in 2005. I’ll discuss the content and operation of the bill later, but there’s a good summary in English from when the Bill was passed here.

The one particularly interesting thing to note here is that it doesn’t designate or establish any one body to oversee the operation of the law or the enforcement of rights, or deal with complaints as in European countries and Canada, for example, Instead it keeps data protection as an internal matter for designated government ministries (and for companies), with legal action an option if all else fails. The law is generally on the side of data flow and commercial / administrative convenience, which is not surprising given its origins in industry-led e-commerce promotion organisations.

Tokyo Elections and Urban Development

Pretty much as predicted, the LDP lost badly in the Assembly elections for Tokyo. They ended up with only 38 seats to the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) 54. The LDP will continue to be part of the largest bloc in the Assembly thanks to the 22 seats held by the Komeito, the party of the Soka Gakkai, a lay organisation of the large Nichiren Shoshu evangelical Buddhist sect. The Komeito have almost single-handedly kept the LDP in power in Japan for years now, and seem to have no point to their existence at all, apart from ensuring that laws on religious organisations are kept as light as possible. Nevertheless, even as a bloc, the LDP / Komeito no longer have a majority in the 127-seat Assembly.

Under pressure, unpopular LDP Prime Minister, Aso Taro, has now called elections to the national Diet for August 30th. Normally one would expect a wipe-out of the LDP, but that’s not how Japanese politics works. With very strong rural and regional support, the LDP will most likely win again, but a different faction will get their man (and it will most probably be a man) into the PM’s office. There has been a non-LDP government before, but it happens so infrequently as to be almost unheard of…

Whilst Aso is unpopular and LDP’s response to the recession has been both predictably unimaginative and unsustainable (in short, “more concrete!”), this wasn’t just about national issues, despite what LDP spokespeople in Tokyo would have us believe. There are some serious economic and urban development issues in Tokyo. More people seem to have lost patience with long-standing Governor Ishihara, who is backed by the LDP on the whole, and in particular the almost collapse of Ishihara’s subsidies for Tokyo banks affected by the global collapse of financial services, and the latest mega-scheme to free up land for private sector redevelopment, the proposed move of the famous Tsukiji fishmarket from its convenient and historic location at the edge of fashionable and expensive Ginza to some remote toxic waste dump in the middle of nowhere. 20 years ago, even 5 years ago, such ridiculous schemes to aid private capital were routinely forced through, but in the current climate, this may not be possible. Finally, like Rio de Janeiro, where I was earlier in the year, Tokyo is candidate city for the 2016 Olympics with all the financial (and social and security) implications that bidding for and hosting such a mega-event implies, and people are starting to wonder whether the city can afford it.

Still, the relentless march of redevelopment continues elsewhere: the old Koma Theatre in Kabukicho, which I predicted would be targeted by developers as soon as they started trying to secure the area with CCTV cameras and intensified policing a few years back, is now almost demolished (pictures soon)… apparently Shinjuku’s red light district is now officially safe for more mainstream and less obviously dirty forms on capitalism.

Tokyo Elections

Tokyo goes to the polls today. I have to say that there doesn’t seem to be much excitement, although it is widely expected that the almost permanently-in-power Liberal Democratic Party (who, as is the way of these things, are neither particularly liberal nor overly democratic!) will be given a severe kicking by the electorate. This may even cause the Prime Minister, Aso Taro, to step down. Aso is perhaps the most unpopular leader in the democratic world, with personal approval ratings that threaten to drop into single figures. He makes Gordon Brown looks charismatic, and has been best known overseas (although not so much within Japan) for making silly, often verging on the racist, remarks.

However, while these elections may be nationally very significant, they will have no bearing on the real power in Tokyo itself, Governor Ishihara Shintaro, an independent populist. He’s tough on crime, tough on the supposed causes of crime (foreigners, of course) (who has also pushed CCTV quite hard) and seems to have been Governor forever. The main reason he got elected originally was connected to the fact that he had a more famous brother, Yujiro, who was a very well-known film star, but it’s Shintaro who’s been the leading man for over a decade.

Met Police finally admit photography is not a crime

After protest and parliamentary questions, The Register reports this week that the London Metropolitan Police have finally got round to reminding their officers that it is not in fact a criminal offence for ordinary people to take photographs or video in public places, nor even to take pictures of police officers. The way that many Met officers had been acting over the past couple of years with harassment of photographers, even tourists in some cases, and arrests under the Terrorism Act, there appeared to be a deliberate attempt to change or extend the meaning of the law by police policy. This was at the same time that the Met had been running campaigns stating that it was suspicious for anyone to be interested in CCTV. Part of this is also the fault of the Act (and others like it, including the recent Counter-Terrorism Act), which are very broadly drawn and easily subject to extreme interpretation by those who would want to abuse them to attack individual liberties.

This isn’t over yet however; there are many other police forces in the rest of the country and also quasi-police (community support officers, town centre managers etc.) as well as private security, who need to recognise that the public have a right to take photographs in public, and should not be harassed, assaulted or threatened with some non-existent sanction for a perfectly legal pastime.

UK newspaper phone-tapping scandal

Back in the UK, the Sunday newspaper, The News of the World, known largely for its obsession with minor celebrity scandal has been itself the subject of rather more serious investigations, following revelations that it has paid out over £1 Million (around $1.4 M US) to people whose phones it secretly tapped in its search for dirt. Proprietor, Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, is known to satirical magazine, Private Eye, as the ‘Dirty Digger’, and given this showing, he seems to be earning his nickname.

The Guardian editorial highlights this as another threat to privacy, but there’s much more here. Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in the world and his company, News International, covers far more than just Britain – they recently bought the Wall Street Journal, for example. His more ‘serious’ newspaper, The Times of London (for whom, I should declare, I have written a piece once) was very vocal in the past in attacking the recently-retired Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, first over his comments on ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’ and then later on his attempts to bring newspapers under the same regulatory regime over privacy as other organisations.

At the time, it was hard to know what the agenda was; but clearly it was more than the supposedly ‘honourable’ position of acting to protect journalistic independence and the rights of their sources. Now, I think, we can start to understand a little more about the view The Times advocated – perhaps it was simply trying to deflect public investigation into the illegal, underhand and privacy-invasive surveillance practices of other parts of the News International empire.

We should indeed be worried by this, not just because of the activities themselves, but because of the attempts to manipulate public policy and undermine the authority of one of the few people who was interested in, and capable of, attacking abuses of surveillance by the media by an increasingly powerful global private company.

So, does News International own newspapers in your country? Do you know what they get up to? Someone needs to dig the dirt…

More on CCTV in Japan

The slightly left-leaning Asahi Shimbun newspaper had a pretty balanced if uninspiring editorial this week on the spread of CCTV cameras in Japan. The English translation is available here.

The most important thing in the editorial is the recommendation of national laws for CCTV. This would be better than in the UK for example, where there still isn’t any national regulation of CCTV except for the Data Protection Act. The paper’s suggestions are:

transparent operational procedures with ‘rigorous conditions’ for the sharing of images
third party oversight for police cameras and a ‘help desk where people can complain about being caught on tape’

This is a start, but only a start, and the second one would probably prove completely unworkable especially if cameras become more widespread. It would be rather better for some kind of permission system to operate, where cameras were seen as an exceptional response to a proven need. The paper is already accepting the normality of CCTV cameras in public spaces regardless of the evidence of their effectiveness- which it acknowledges is equivocal (in fact it’s generally much worse than that in the UK) or indeed the wider social impacts.

Japan to introduce resident-monitored CCTV

One of the most interesting developments in recent years has been the way in which the state has attempted to adapt Japan’s traditional culture of responsibilized local community organisations (chounaikai) for the new surveillance society (kanshi shakai, in Japanese). Cynics may well argue that what is called here bohan machizukuri (or community safety development – or sometimes the similar anzen anshin machizukuri) is simply a way in which the government can attempt to save money whilst pretending to be tough on what is always claimed to be a worsening crime rate. It is also true to say that this is also a further perversion of the machizukuri (bottom-up community development) idea that came out of local environmental movements of the 1960s.

Nevertheless, the Japan Times reported that the Keisatsuchou (National Police Agency or NPA) appears to be pushing forward with plans to extend its rather small number of CCTV cameras* into 15 residential areas starting January 2010 (two of which, Higashiyamato and Musashimurayama, are suburbs of Tokyo, and I’ll be visiting these whilst I am here) at the cost of 597 Million Yen (around £3.85 Million or $6.3 Million US). There’s always an underlying fear that is played on when such systems are installed, and in this case it is a classic: the threat to children. The small camera systems(around 25 cameras in size) will be installed on streets that are commonly used by kids going to and from school.

The fact that the schemes are focused on child safety would certainly be one of the reasons why the use of local volunteer committees to watch the cameras and manage the data from local civic facilities like community centres, has been put forward. It could also be in response to opposition from some local residents to what they see as the imposition of unwanted state invasion of their privacy, although according to the Japan Times, the police say it “will help residents to secure safety by themselves.” Their big problem is that there do not appear to be many volunteers yet!

There are many questions here. One mystery is that in Japan most school runs already have several, often elderly, volunteers who look out for children in person,in a more genuinely machizukuri form of bohan machizukuri so why the more expensive cameras? Another massive question is the one around privacy and data protection. How will volunteers be expected to act as official data controllers, especially in such a sensitive area as surveillance of children in public space? Finally, what will the effect be on trust and community relations to have one set of people in the community monitoring others? How will they be held accountable?

These, and many other questions will be just some of the things occupying my time here for the next two months…

*There are just 363 NPA cameras in Japan, however there are more owned by local municipal authorities, particularly in Tokyo, and thousands more operated by private companies and shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ associations).