David

The downside of Brasilia

on foot, you are immediately confronted by the unpleasant reality of what is to the pedestrian effectively a huge expanse of carpark and highway separating the areas you might want to be. The functional split between the ‘zones’ only makes this worse.

Again, this is urbanism rather than surveillance, but here are some more musings and pictures on the urban form of Brasilia. Yesterday, I posted a lot of conventionally attractive shots of the buildings around the monumental axis of Brasilia. However, leaving aside the wider question of whether Brasilia outside of the planned centre functions as a city, there is a rather less beautiful side to the core.

This mainly has to do with the practical consequences of the philosophy behind the plan and particularly with functional separation and transport. As I noted when I first arrived, the city is dominated by roads. 5-lane highways run down either side of the monumental axis, and it is crossed by two major motorways in deep cuttings, with all the attendant slipways. These probably look very attractive as bold curving lines on a plan. They may even function if you are traveling by car (or bus). But on foot, you are immediately confronted by the unpleasant reality of what is to the pedestrian effectively a huge expanse of carpark and highway separating the areas you might want to be. The functional split between the ‘zones’ only makes this worse. Say you are in the hotel zone that I was staying in and you want to go out for a meal and a drink. Well, that’s 30-minutes walk to the nearest residential centre (where most of the evening options are located). Sure, you can take a taxi, but why should you have to? All the sports clubs are in separate ‘club zones’ even further away from either hotel, commercial or residential districts.

Now, okay, so the residential districts have most of their facilities (not including clubs) within walking distance – I said in my first impressions blog entry that I could actually imagine living here with a young family. And I still could. Natives of Brasilia are fanatical about the place. The residential districts work. You don’t really have to go anywhere near the soulless and secured shopping centres or take your chances running across massive motorways with uncaring drivers trying their best to ignore you. There is a simple metro system which runs between the districts and the centre (though it was largely closed for the building of new stations when I was there). You can walk around, between and under the blocks. They don’t appear to be totally obsessed with security in the manner of Sao Paulo or indeed most other large Brazilian cities. The blocks have concierges but not fences, walls and gates. Most of the windows do not even have bars.

But there is a reason and a price for this too. The residential zones are simply not socially mixed. Just about everyone who lives in the big blocks is a government or big corporate office employee. The ordinary workers and the poor live elsewhere entirely, in one of the satellite cities of Brasilia, and are bussed in and out via the busy central bus station every day. At the bus station, you find glimpses of the ‘ordinary Brazil’ – the cheap lanchonetes and pastelerias (in fact probably the best pasteleria I have found in Brazil so far)!, sidewalk vendors of DVDs and knock-off jewelry, the beggars, the hungry and the desperate. In many ways I felt more comfortable there than in the dry Le Corbusian dreamspaces of the government buildings.

Anyway, here’s some pictures of the ‘real Brasilia’ – or what it looks like if you stop focusing on the architecture and take a wider view!

Battle lines being drawn in UK surveillance debate

there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK…

The UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the influential think-tank that was behind the New Labour project, has released a report on intelligence and national security that argues that privacy and human rights will have to take second place in the War on Terror. The report, National Security Strategy, Implications for the UK Intelligence Community, is written by former civil service security and intelligence coordinator, David Omand, is part of the IPPR’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, whose rather unimpressive launch event I attended last year.

The Guardian newspaper’s story on this is trying to build this up into an ‘end of privacy’ / ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ story and Omand certainly comes down firmly on the side of security over liberty. He recognises that his arguments are contrary to ours and go “against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society.” But he is not actually making a total ‘by any means necessary’ argument. Even the Guardian’s own report quotes his rather qualified statement that “in some respects [new intelligence methods] may have to be at the expense of some aspects of privacy rights.”

The report is simply not as strong or even as interesting as The Guardian‘s story suggests. Most of it is simply a description of how intelligence works (and not even a very comprehensive or insightful one at that). Much, as we predicted in our recent book (see My Publications), it tries to set the creation of ‘resilience’ as a key rationale for reducing civil liberties, as if resilience in itself was a good thing that needed no justification when in fact it is being used as a bland container for all sorts of questionable policies – from the use of torture and imprisonment without trial to the everyday use of intrusive high-tech surveillance. The references to the political controversies over surveillance are rather cursory and don’t really say much other than that people are worried and really they shouldn’t be. These are just the usual ‘trust us, we know what we are doing’ and ‘these are exceptional circumstances’ arguments that we have heard many times before, and they are as weak and old-fashioned coming from Omand as from anyone else.

It is worth noting that there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK. I reported yesterday on David Blunkett’s conversion to the cause of limiting surveillance society, and a few days ago, Stella Rimington, the former Head of the Security Service, MI5, condemned the current government’s approach to liberty and security in even stronger terms, arguing that the approach that Omand typifies would lead to ‘a police state’.

Surveillance has finally become an issue on which it is becoming less possible to be unengaged, apathetic or even neutral. That in itself is a good thing, however it does not guarantee a good outcome even if more major public figures suddenly discover their enthusiasm for liberty once they leave office. However, I hope this reflects a split which is growing within the current government too – normally when retired politicians and civil servants speak out, they are conscious of the way in which they speak on behalf of friends and colleagues who feel they cannot be so candid.

Brazilian modernism (2)

Not surveillance-related, but here’s some of the many, many pictures that I took whilst getting very sunburnt walking around the big open spaces under the huge skies of Brasilia last week. There are a couple more pictures of the Parliament complex in my report from my meeting there last week. My first set of photos of Niemeyer’s work from Sao Paulo can be found here.

David Blunkett Attacks Surveillance!

I know. Pause. Take a deep breath…

You read it right. The former UK Home Secretary, with a reputation as one of the most authoritarian of recent years (though it is hard to chose in that regard), will condemn the growth of surveillance in a speech at the University of Essex today. He will also, according to Tom Young at VUnet, call for the ID card scheme (which he introduced!) to be scrapped, and for the information-sharing powers that were hidden in the new Coroners and Justice Bill, to be reduced. He also argues that the latter will happen as he knows the Justice Minister, Jack Straw, recognises the problem.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Certainly it is fantastic when a prominent figure like this changes their mind and is prepared to admit that they were wrong, I just wish that sometimes they listened to the arguments against what they were doing when they were in office. In addition, of course Blunkett spent several years after leaving office writing very strong pro-surveillance, pro-ID card pieces for the populist, right-wing tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and is (or was) according to the Register of House of Commons Members Interests, paid £25-30,000 ($35-40,000 US) as the Chair of the International Advisory Committee of Entrust Inc., a company that works on digital certification and Internet surveillance, and which was involved in consortia for the ID card contract. Perhaps they have had enough of him.

But let’s hope he really has had a genuine change of heart.

German Corporations in Trouble over Surveillance

t seems that there is a mood in Germany for much stronger action, and a growing awareness that the country cannot, unlike in the UK at present, or indeed Germany in its own recent past, be allowed to slip into a situation in which surveillance becomes normal…

There is a major ongoing storm in Germany over the behaviour of its major corporations in spying on workers. There is a nice summary news report from the BBC which you can watch here.

The newest scandal emerged in January when it was revealed that the railway company, Deutsche Bahn, had conducted surveillance operations against thousands of its staff, both workers and management, possibly over years. The operations, with names like ‘Squirrel’, involved all kinds of intrusive internal espionage including tracking family members. The company’s aim was apparently to do with corruption and links to other rival corporations but the management have now admitted they went too far.

Internal security was also the reason behind the massive surveillance operations at Deutsche Telekom, the communications giant, possibly dating back to 2000. Here journalists and managers were targeted by a private detective agency. And of course then there was last year’s scandal over the way that the Lidl supermarket chain created a kind of Stasi-style operation at many of its stores and warehouses in Germany and the Czech Republic with secret cameras and operatives making detailed notes on the movements (especially toilet breaks) of its employees. According to The Guardian, the level of personal detail recorded by the store was incredible, one entry read: “Frau M wanted to make a call with her mobile phone at 14.05 … She received the recorded message that she only had 85 cents left on her prepaid mobile. She managed to reach a friend with whom she would like to cook this evening, but on condition that her wage had been paid into her bank, because she would otherwise not have enough money to go shopping.”

In the BBC report, the conclusion seems to be that better data protections laws are needed. Certainly this is true. But the cases involving corporations are important because they provide clear and comprehensible examples of how people ‘with nothing to hide’ can be targeted anyway and do have to be worried. There are enough of them too to show that this is not a series of isolated cases, but a part of a ‘culture of surveillance’. However it seems that there is a mood in Germany for much stronger action, and a growing awareness that the country cannot, unlike in the UK at present, or indeed Germany in its own recent past, be allowed to slip into a situation in which surveillance becomes normal. This means more than stronger DP, it means not allowing corporations and government to reduce fundamental liberties with arguments about ‘exceptions’. There seems to be growing awareness from the strong German Trades Unions in particular about this, we will see if this translates into wider social, and state, action.

Newcastle University CCTV comment

Not a million miles away from my office at Newcastle University, back in the UK, this stencil has appeared (“nothing to do with me, guv, I was in Brazil, honest…”)

Claremont Bridge, camera and comment (photo: Jon Swords)

They want us to trust them…

Maybe what Jacqui Smith needs is a dose of ‘Chinese democracy’ to go with her Chinese-style attitude to security and surveillance…

In the last fortnight there have been interesting developments that have reminded us, as if we needed reminding, that those who want to infringe on the liberty of others need to be absolutely squeaky-clean themselves or risk severe censure, and that those who introduce systems which encourage suspicion and spying should not be surprised if people no longer trust them and start to investigate their activities.

The first of course was the saga of Jacqui Smith’s apartment. The basic facts are that the UK Home Secretary has been claiming £24,000 (around $35,000 US) per year in allowances for an apartment that she does not actually live in. The particular irony (and we love a bit of irony in Britain!) was that she has been reported by a neighbour – in other words she was a victim of the kind of suspicious, back-stabbing, trust-no-one society that she has been encouraging. Of course she should resign if she had any intelligence or integrity, but we already know to the cost of our civil liberties that she does not.

Funnily enough, it is to China we go to another example and one with, it seems, a rather more accountable outcome. This is almost the second time in a row that I have unfavourably compared a western country to China – this is getting rather disturbing particularly as I am no friend of the Chinese state, being a long-term Free Tibet supporter. However, Variety (of all places) is reporting that Yu Bing, who is director of the internet monitoring department of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau, and therefore a major figure in the infamous Golden Shield, and surveillance of journalists, bloggers and net democracy activists (as well as those just trying to access unapproved content), has been arrested for taking bribes from a contractor.

Admittedly it is a lot more than the sums in the Jacqui Smith case (40M Yuan, or about $5.8M US), and corruption is endemic within the Chinese state at all levels, but it does show a rather different attitude to the establishment towards top officials who fail to live up to the standards we expect of them. Maybe what Jacqui Smith needs is a dose of ‘Chinese democracy’ to go with her Chinese-style attitude to security and surveillance?

In transit

I am just on my way back from Brasilia to Curitiba, so there won’t be anything from me this Sunday. The next few days are also ‘Carnaval’ here in Brazil 🙂 so not much work will be happening, and certainly I won’t be in the university (as it is closed!) and I may take a trip or two out of town. I might also try to catch up on a few things which I will post here – but probably there won’t be more than a post a day over the coming week…

Chicago: the future of US CCTV?

…despite Britain’s reputation as a surveillance society… the USA is now eclipsing the UK. The post-9/11 surveillance surge has seen to that.

Back in the USA again. Chicago has been featuring a lot this week for its CCTV system. Newspapers generally offered glowing assessments of its capabilities based around homey anecdotes of pretty harmless incidents ‘solved’ by CCTV – in this case the stories, for example those in the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Times, featured a theft from a Salvation Army kettle, which sounds like it is straight from a Mayoral press release. It is depressingly poor journalism and once again, all very reminiscent of the situation in the UK in the 1990s before academic and even government assessments dampened the enthusiasm for CCTV. There’s also a depressing naivety (and factual incorrectness) about the insistence from the authorities and from some ‘experts’ that these cameras have nothing to do with human rights like privacy as they are all in public spaces.

But there is one very important difference. Chicago, with massive investment from the Department for Homeland Security, has gone much further than most UK cities, not only in coverage but also in capabilities. First of all, Daley and police-chief Orozco have promised that “We’re going to grow the system until we eventually cover one end of the city to the other” in other words they do want, as the Chicago Sun-Times subheading claims, ” a camera on every street corner.”

The particular innovation that the city is pushing here is the linking up of the law-enforcement aspects with emergency services through something called Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD). This is system that uses a live Geographic Information System to match camera location to reported incident location, so that when an incident is called in via 911, the nearest cameras can immediately turn to picture the scene. This is part of what Chicago calls ‘Operation Virtual Shield’, a fibre-optic cable system which links the cameras with other biological and chemical weapons-detection system in a “homeland security grid.’’

The Chicago control room (New York Times)

As part of the work we did for our latest book, Jon Coaffee Pete Rogers and I visited and analysed several different cities in the UK to assess their emergency-response and surveillance systems. While most had intentions to use the cameras for more active emergency-response purposes and particular local police were starting to try to install override systems for the multiple local camera systems that exist in the UK in the case of citywide emergencies (like a mass evacuation). And in particular, Manchester (whose high-tech control room looks like the Chicago one as seen in the NYT (picture above) and also often features in media PR for CCTV) has gone further down the Chicago route than most. But they still don’t come close. Britain’s systems are fragmented, ageing, generally not integrated with other functions and certainly don’t link to other kinds of sensors. Britain has introduced some stupid authoritarianism like the infamous ‘shouting cameras’ mostly as part of the Respect (sic) Zones initiative. But despite Britain’s reputation as a surveillance society I suspect that in terms of advanced integrated cameras systems, the USA is now eclipsing the UK. The post-9/11 surveillance surge has seen to that.

There’s two other points worth noting here. The first is that Chicago is bidding for the Olympics in 2016. I can almost hear multiple researchers in surveillance studies around the world, releasing a collective ‘of course!’. Mega-events like the Olympics, the World Cup – there will be a fantastic conference on this theme in November this year in Vancouver – or other non-sporting ones like world summits or the G-8 conference are often the trigger for the introduction of repressive measures and new surveillance systems. This was true in Japan (where state CCTV was first introduced because of the soccer World Cup in 2002), in South Africa (for various major world summits), and in Athens for the Olympics in 2004. Mayor Daley wants the city to be 100% free from the possibility of terrorist attack. Laving aside the actual impossibility of that desire, how far will he go to get there?

Well, the last Olympic venue, Beijing, might give some indication. For it is actually the plans in authoritarian, non-democratic China that seem most similar to what is going on in Chicago. Even the names have an eerie reminiscence: China’s Golden Shield, Chicago’s Virtual Shield. That is trivial, however the substance is not. The Chinese government, as Naomi Klein has written, is installing massive and comprehensive camera systems in every major city in China. It is also, of course, linking this system into its infamous Internet monitoring operation, with the ultimate aim of being able to track individuals in real and virtual space. Of course, the US, like most other nations is now trying to control Internet use too and the NSA already keeps massive data banks of communications traffic information as well as doing real-time monitoring as recent revelations have, once again, shown. But, it’s different in the USA isn’t it? The USA wouldn’t link up all these systems, would it? The Land of the Free? The home of democracy? I wouldn’t bet against it…

Could the US fiscal stimulus lead to a surveillance surge?

Largely unnoticed in commentary on US President Obama’s fiscal stimulus plan has been the $4Bn for the Justice Department. Now there are various very worthy programs nominated for funding including quite a large chunk to combat violence against women, but also a lot of cash washing around for rather more vague aims, in particular the $2Bn (i.e.: half the cash injection) for the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program “to fund grants for state and local programs that combat crime”.

The JAG program has already providing funding for many cities to install cameras as part of ‘demonstration programs’, as well as covert surveillance capabilities. However $2Bn is a massive increase in funding and will allow some rather more ambitious schemes to be funded. With the current popularity of CCTV cameras as a catch-all solution in the USA (regardless of negative assessments of their effectiveness elsewhere – see ACLU’s recent convenient US-focused summary), could one side-effect of the stimulus package be a massive ‘surveillance surge’ in the USA? After all, this is exactly what happened in the UK in the 1990s when central state funding through the ‘City Challenge’ program sparked a mania for installing city-centre CCTV systems – see the editorial and the articles by Will Webster, Pete Fussey and Roy Coleman in the special issue of Surveillance & Society on CCTV.

Those concerned with civil liberties and the intensifying push for videosurveillance in the USA should keep a careful eye on applications to the JAG program.