I'm David Murakami Wood. I'm currently Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. I like reading, cycling, running, and I am slowly coming to the realization of the limits of getting older.
It’s taken a lot of time and effort but finally we have… a New Website, New Automated Submissions System, New Calls for Papers and a NEW ISSUE OUT NOW!
New papers from Chris Williams, William Webster, Francisco Klauser, Dietmar Kammerer and Jeremy Douglas, insightful comment from Mike Nellis, a police surveillance film from 1935, and loads of book reviews.
Still to come this year: 6.2 Surveillance and Medicine; 6.3 Gender, Sexuality and Surveillance; 6.4 Open Issue; 6.5 Surveillance and Resistance.
Calls for Papers:
Surveillance, Children and Childhood (ed. Val Steeves and Owain Jones) – deadline August 31st 2009;
Performance, New Media and Surveillance (ed. John McGrath and Bill Sweeney) – deadline March 30th 2009.
Check the Announcements section of the website for details. As always, we have an open call for submissions on anything related to surveillance. And if you’re a postgrad or an early career researcher, you can even qualify for our new prizes! We also have a new video stream to handle films and slideshows.
Got a great idea for an issue? Any other questions? Get in touch. Contact our Editorial Assistant: Emily Smith.
Do you have a book that would be of interest to S&S readers, or want to review for us? Contact our Book Review Editor: Kevin Haggerty.
…and we are still completely free of any charges for publication or access. Want to support us? Join the Surveillance Studies Network, which runs Surveillance & Society and supports the development of Surveillance Studies worldwide.
I’ve been keeping quiet about this on the blog so far because it’s too close to me and probably of little interest to anyone who’s reading this, but what’s been occupying just about all my so-called spare time, and driving me crazy, for the last few months has been finally getting Surveillance & Society converted to a new website which runs on the really rather excellent Open Journal System, run by the Public Knowledge Project.
If it’s so excellent, why has it been driving me crazy? Well, being a piece of Open Source software, there’s a lot that is down to the user in terms of trouble-shooting and fixing unexpected problems. And unfortunately, despite being someone who often researches software, and computer systems, I am not massively geeky (ok, so my Geek Quotient is probably higher than some but that’s mostly down to teenage role-playing activities!). I originally taught myself HTML to design the original site, but using OJS has meant that I have had to develop a familiarity with CSS, XML and PHP. If I’d known how simple it was at the beginning it probably would have only taken me a few days, but I had periods of utter despair just looking at the site every so often over days and then weeks, and wondering why the <bleep> it wasn’t working… by the end I was just wondering how I could have been quite so stupid.
Well, there’s still lots to do but the site works. That makes me happy. And, more importantly it confirms both my and Surveillance & Society‘s commitment to open flows – Open Source, Open Access and the Creative Commons. The latest issue has even been produced entirely on a Linux-driven netbook from here in Brazil using Open Office (ok, maybe I am getting just a tiny bit geeky!). There is still a perception especially amongst those who buy into the corporate model of publishing that online journals are just pale imitations or easier to get published in, but Surveillance & Society is no weak online version of anything else, it is a proper academic journal with proper academic standards. Of course it is free to publish in and free to access. We aren’t going to go down the route of pay-to-view or pay-to-publish. Knowledge should be free. The downside is that our organisation has been literally amateurish and our ability to keep to deadlines has depended way too much upon my timetable and state of mind: the new issue was the result of another overnighter – I haven´t slept for 36 hours…
What has kept the journal just about going until this new website was developed has been time given mainly by me, but also by the other members of the Editorial Board and our Editorial Assistant, oh and also Nilz, and the techs from all-inkl.de and the OJS Support Forum who have really been very patient! It is sometimes like an extra full-time job for which I don’t get paid… hopefully now, with a site that is at least partly automated and to which many people can contribute, that will no longer be the case. Surveillance & Society will finally be able to stick to a timetable, and I will be a lot less stressed.
But to do this we need some income and the main way we get this is by membership and donations. If you are interested in surveillance studies and want to support us, you can join Surveillance Studies Network or give us whatever you want – we’re a registered charity that owns Surveillance & Society and works to develop Surveillance Studies worldwide. That, and the income from reprints of articles in books, is about the only income we have.
Chris Pounder of Amberhawk information consultants sends me his Top Ten Problems with the British government´s new information-sharing proposals that are to be found buried deep in the Coroners and Justice Bill, where perhaps they thought no-one would notice… these are part of much lengthier and more thorough analysis submitted to the Joint parliamentary Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), which explains why the proposals ignore or conflict with the recommendations of 2008´s Data Sharing Review conducted by Richard Thomas and Mark Walport for the Ministry of Justice itself. These are sumarised by me here, and any errors and omissions are therefore my own:
Lack of scrutiny. There is no provision for the JCHR to scrutinise this (or any other) wide-ranging statutory power which impacts on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), nor any attempt to explain how this provision is consistent with human rights legislation.
The extension of information sharing beyond personal data. The use of “any person” in the Bill means that it applies to information sharing by any public or private body or individual. “Information sharing” powers are not limited to personal data and the person who receives the shared information might be a foreign government or organisation. [for example the FBI´s proposed Server in the Sky]
The “exceptional” may become the routine The Data Sharing Review recommended that the sharing of personal data should be legitimised in exceptional circumstances. However, in the Bill there is instead a legitimation of general information sharing, whenever it falls within a “relevant policy objective” [which is basically anything a Minister decides].
The generality of an Information Sharing Order. There is no limit as to how “person”, “purpose” and “information class” are specified in an Order. There is no explicit requirement for the purpose of the information sharing to be one of those specified in Article 8(2) ECHR.
The prospect of unlimited data sharing from large Government databases. The Bill appears to facilitate data sharing from any Government database without Parliament being explicitly informed of this sharing when an Order is before Parliament. The prohibition in the clause only relates to Part 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). By implication, sharing from other national databases (e.g. the national identity register of the ID Cards Act) does not need to be explicitly mentioned in an Order. This means that unlimited data can be shared from these other national databases by means of a general order-making provision.
The exclusion of critical comment on the purpose of the processing. In the Bill, the Information Commissioner is not allowed to comment on whether “the sharing of information enabled by the order is necessary to secure a relevant policy objective”. The effect is to inhibit the Commissioner from commenting on the purpose of the processing, which is the main purpose of the Information Commissioner! Plus, because this applies to more than personal information, much of the proposed sharing is outside his remit.”
The range of the powers. The powers are widely drawn and their application is very broad. There is no explicit provision in the main sharing provisions which would facilitate data subject rights and freedoms (e.g. right to object ; need to obtain consent). Instead, these provisions can “modify” the application of any law (including the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act) which will weaken the protection afforded to data subjects.
The lack of transparency. There is no obligation to disclose to the Information Commissioner or Parliament any background document or legal advice about a proposed Information Sharing Order. There is no obligation to answer any formal request for information from the Commissioner. There is no obligation to engage the public on the subject of a draft Information Sharing Order.
The irrelevance of the proposed Code of Practice. There is nothing in these information sharing clauses which expressly states that the sharing of personal data has to be consistent with the proposed non-statutory Code of Practice. The Code is not subject to approval by Parliament; rather, it is subject to approval by the Secretary of State (SoS).There is no provision which sets out what happens if there is a disagreement between SoS and Information Commissioner about the content of a Code. There is no active role for Parliament in relation to the content of a Code.
Orders can be implemented to achieve purely administrative objectives. For example, suppose Ministers are told by civil servants that the problems associated with one of the Government’s big database projects would be resolved if they used criminal convictions from the Police National Computer. The Bill allows the Minister to argue that the sharing was necessary to secure a policy objective, it was proportionate as there was no other way of securing the policy objective (abandoning a large IT project is not an option), and it was in the public interest to secure the policy objective (given the amount of money committed to the project). This means that sharing which could be excessive and disproportionate in terms of Article 8 becomes necessary and proportionate in terms of realising a policy objective.
Previously, I commented that No2ID were overstating their case that this proposal was the greatest threat to information rights after the ID Register. After reading Chris´s analysis, I think they might be underestimating its importance. The creation of a generalised and weakly accountable ability for the state to share information of any kind with any one they wish, is a far greater threat than the creation of any single database, however extensive. I disagree with their views on the Data Sharing Review, but No2ID’s data sharing site still has the best summary of proposals and action people can take…
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is calling for President Obama´s administration to release secret files that would shed light on the previous US government´s security and surveillance policies, including the now use of torture and warrantless surveillance. It´s a good move of course, but as I´ve previously remarked, the NSA and others have been doing this for almost 50 years, either directly or indirectly through UKUSA allies, warrants or no warrants, so what makes anyone think that they only started doing this under Bush or will stop if such information is released? As intelligence researcher, Loch K. Johnson, remarked about the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, one thing they showed was that, when it came to illegal intelligence activities, the office of the President was an irrelevancy. Bush was probably even more irrelevant than most. Still, sunlight is the best disinfectant… but if Obama can change the internal culture of US intelligence, he will truly have performed a miracle.
Several years ago, during my postdoctoral work on algorithmic surveillance, I was warning of the problems associated with the development of heuristic (learning) software applied to surveillance systems. I argued that their popularity would grow as the amount of data acquired through growing numbers of cameras that could not possibly be watched by human operators. Today in CSO Security and Risk, a magazine for ´security executives´, there is a piece by Eric Eaton which summarises the current state of the art, and which makes exactly that argument as a reason why operators of surveillance systems should consider using such learning software. As Eaton says,
¨Various tools have emerged that not only “see video better,” but also analyze the digitized output of video cameras in real time to learn and recognize normal behavior, and detect and alert on all abnormal patterns of activity without any human input.¨
Judge, jury... and executioner (IPC magazines)
The key issue here, and one which I mentioned in my post about angry robots the other day, is the automated determination of normality. As French theorist, Michalis Lianos, argued inLe Nouveau Contrôle Social back in 2001, the implementation of these kinds of systems threatens to replace social negotiation with a process of judgement and sometimes even the consequences (which in some border control systems can be fatal – Judge Dredd as computer).
Eaton identifies the first part of this conundrum when he says that ¨the key to successful surveillance is learning normal behaviors¨and he believes that this will enable systems to filter out such activity and ¨help predict, and prevent, future threats.¨ He does admit that in many cases the numbers of actual instances of systems detecting suspicious behaviour is very small and therefore the cost of systems may not be economically justified, but there is as usual amongst his ´5 musts´ for security operators, no place to be found for ethics, human rights (or indeed humanity outside of systems operators) or consideration of the wider social impacts of the growth in use of learning security machines.
No doubt he would say, as most developers and operators do, that this is simply a matter of how systems are used in compliance with best practice and the law, which in itself ignores the possibility of already consciously or unconsciously programmed-in biases, but the more that systems become intelligent and are able to make decisions independently of human operators, the thinner this legalistic response becomes. I´m not saying that we are about to have automatic car park CCTV cameras with guns any time soon, but it´s about time we had some forward-looking policy on the use of heuristic systems before they become as normal as Eaton suggests…
The claim that Brazil is a surveillance society, or at least uses surveillance in the same fundamental organising way as the UK or Japan does, is based on the bureaucracy of identification around entitlement and taxation, rather than policing and security.
My previous post on the subject of whether Brazil was a surveillance society put one side of an argument I am having with myself and colleagues here: that the use surveillance in Brazil is fundamentally based on individual (and indeed commodified and largely class-based) security, rather than surveillance as fundamental social organising principle (as one might legitimately claim is the case in Britain). Now, I deliberately overstated my case and, even as I was posting, my argument was being contradicted by colleagues in the same room!
So here´s the counter-argument – or at least a significant adjustment to the argument. In most nation-states, entering into a relationship with the state involves forms of surveillance by the state of the person. This relationship is more or less voluntary depending on the state and on the subject of the relationship. In most advanced liberal democracies, the nature of surveillance is based on the nature of citizenship, particularly:
the ability of citizens to establish claims to entitlement, the most fundamental to most being a recourse to the law (to protect person and property), secondly the ability to case a vote, and more something that is generally more recent in most states, the right to some kind of support from the state (educational, medical, or financial);
the ability of the state to acquire funds from citizens through direct or indirect taxation, to support the entitlements of citizens, and to maintain order.
I am not going to consider law and order, or indeed electoral systems, here but rather I will concentrate on the way that surveillance operates in an area I had previously begun to consider: the bureaucracy of identification around state-citizen relations particularly in the areas of entitlement and taxation. The claim that Brazil is a surveillance society, or at least uses surveillance in the same fundamental organising way as the UK or Japan does, is based on this rather than policing and security.
There are two broad aspects: on the one side, taxation, and on the other, entitlement. I´ll deal first with the latter (which I know less about at the moment), in particular in the form of Lula´s Programa Bolsa Família (PBF, or Family Grant Program), one of the cornerstones of the socially progressive politics of the current Brazilian government. The PBF provides a very simple, small but direct payment to families with children, for each child, provided that the children go to school and have medical check-ups.
Of course these requirements in themselves involve forms of surveillance, through the monitoring of school attendance by children – for which there is a particular sub-program of the PBF called Projeto Presença (Project Presence) with its own reporting systems – and epidemiology and surveillance of nutrition through the Ministério de Saúde (Ministry of Health). However underlying the entitlement is massive compulsory collection of personal information through the Cadastro Único para Programas Sociais (CadÚnico, or Single Register for Social Programs), set up by Lula´s first administration to unify the previous multiple, often contradictory and difficult to administer number of social programs. This is, of course a database system, which as the CadÚnico website states, ¨funciona como um instrumento de identificação e caracterização socioeconômica das famílias brasileiras¨ (¨functions as an means of identification and socioeconomic caracterization of Brazilian families¨). Like most Brazilian state financial systems, CadÚnico is operated through the federal bank, the Caixa Econômica Federal (CAIXA). The CadÚnico database is founded on ¨um número de identificação social (NIS) de caráter único, pessoal e intransferível¨ (¨a unique, personal and non-transferable Social Identification Number or NIS¨). I am unclear yet how this NIS will relate to the new unique identification system for all citizens.
The PBF Card
Entitlement is demonstrated with (yet another!) card, the patriotic yellow and green Cartão PBF. Like the CPF card, this is a magnetic strip card rather than a smart card, and is required for all transactions involving the PBF. Also like the CPF, but unlike many other forms of Brazilian ID, it has nothing more than the name of the recipient and the CadÚnico number printed on it. In this case the recipient is generally the mother of the children being claimed for, a progressive and practical measure shared with other family entitlement programs in Brazil.
Happy smiling PBF cardholders!
The PBF card in itself may not be enough to claim as you would still need at least the Registro Geral (national ID) card to prove that you are the named holder of the PBF card. The card itself may be simply designed to generate a sense of inclusion, as the pictures of happy smiling PBF cardholders on the government websites show consistently emphasise, although of course, like so many other markers of entitlement to state support, it could also become a stigma.
The information collection to prove entitlement is quite extensive, and here I have translated roughly from the website:
house characteristics (number of rooms; construction type; water, sewerage and garbage systems);
family composition (number of members, dependents like children, the elderly, those with physical handicaps);
identification and civil documents of each family member;
educational qualification of each family member;
professional qualifications and employment situation;
income; and
family outgoing (rent, transport, food and others).
Although PBF is a Federal program, the information is collected at the level of individual municipalities, and there is thus the potential for errors, differences in collection methods, delays and so on to hamper the correct distribution of the money. So each municipality is required to have a committee called the Instância de Controle Social (Social Control Authority) which, whilst it may sound sinister to anglophone ears, actually refers to the control of civil society over the way that the government carries out its social programs. This is also quite a lot of information of the most personal kind and whilst, unlike in many countries there is no central authority of Commissioner for Data Protection in Brazil, there is particularly for PDF, an Observatório de Boas Práticas na Gestão do Programa Bolsa Família (Observatory for Best Practice in the Management of the PBF), which has a whole raft of measures to safeguard and protect the data, correct errors etc (what has been called habeus data principles). Effectively, this is a case of knowing exactly quis custodis ipsos custodes!
Now of course, such a large database of information about the most vulnerable people in society has the potential to be misused by a less progressive or even fascist government. Marxist analysis of early welfare systems has tended to colour our views of such programs as being solely about the management of labour on behalf of capital and the control of the working classes by the state to prevent them from more revolutionary action. For more recent times in Surveillance Studies, John Gilliom´s book, Overseers of the Poor, showed how much Federal assistance programs in the USA could impact negatively upon the lives of claimants, particularly women, in the Appalachian region, and revealed the everyday forms of resistance and adaptation that such women used to make the programs function better for them. I will have to examine more detailed anthropological studies of the PBF to see whether similar things are true of the Brazilian program. I don´t want to get too much into the effectiveness of this program now, although I am trying to examine the correlation of the PBF with apparently declining crime rates in Brazilian cities, but it is worth noting that the World Bank rates it as one of the most successful ways of dealing with extreme poverty in the world. As a general observation, it does seem that only those who object to redistributive policies full stop (or just dislike Lula himself) or those who think it does not go far enough, have any serious complaint about the PBF. But there is far more to consider here…
If I wasn’t still in Brazil in March, I would be at my friend and colleague, Torin Monahan‘s latest workshop, on Surveillance and Empowerment at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The aim is to reverse the usual way all too many of us think about surveillance as negative to “explore the potential of surveillance for individual autonomy and dignity, fairness and due process, community cooperation and empowerment, and social equality.” It’s a way of thinking that I have been trying to consider for a while, however unpopular it is with some Surveillance Studies scholars and anti-surveillance activists… should be controversial in the most productive way – and Torin’s workshops are always productive.
BoingBoing brings this piece from the Daily Kos to my attention. It’s a disturbing story of what has happened on a number of occasions to people who annoy flight attendants and end up being labeled as terrorists. These ridiculous rulings have been severely debilitating – in the most extreme case, one woman lost access to her children, and in a Kafkaesque twist was unable to argue the case because she could not reach the custody hearing (in Hawai’i) because she was banned from flying!
These rulings have all occurred through extreme interpretations of the provisions of the US PATRIOT Act. However both this tendency for laws to extend their reach is not unique to the USA, indeed Britain may be far more culpable in this regard but in its mundane, bureaucratic way. Examples include the way that the Harassment Act, designed to protect people from stalkers, has become a tool of corporations against protestors, and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which has enabled local authorities to employ intensive surveillance of individuals for such heinous acts as recycling wrongly.
The other issue here is once again, one of responsibilization, the enabling of ordinary people in minor positions of responsibility, or none, to use powers that would previously have been reserved to law enforcement officials or the court system. In the USA, it is flight attendants, whose role has increased markedly as post-9/11 provisions have ratcheted up expectations of passenger behaviour, but in Britain, the New Labour administration has enabled hundreds of bureaucrats to issue fines without any court process through the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanction Act, passed last year.
Basically, there are more and more people who, on a whim and with little or no evidence, can make life extremely difficult if you don’t conform to increasingly tight behavioural norms based on pre-established categories – ‘acting like a terrorist‘ being just one. Some of these norms we may even agree with – no-one likes rudeness – but what is happening is a process of desocialization and the replacement of what used to be matters of civility by narrow protocols.
although there are many forms of surveillance in evidence, Brazil is not fundamentally a ´surveillance society´
What I am doing here is a broad survey of issues around surveillance. I am trying to get to grips with as wide a range of indicators as possible. One impression I have already – which as an impression may be partly or entirely wrong – is that although there are many forms of surveillance in evidence, Brazil is not fundamentally a ´surveillance society´ in the way that the UK is, or in the rather different way that Japan is: Brazil is much more a ´security society´. This is not to say, for example, that there are not many CCTV cameras in the country: Marta Kanashiro´s article in Surveillance & Societylast year indicated that there are well over a million cameras (the total is hard to estimate because of the number of illegal installations).
However, surveillance here is very much tied into security. It´s not a ´security state´ – although it still retains reminders of its more authoritarian past – the concentration on security is largely private. Industry reports I have found, for example, this one from the Massachussets South America Office, indicate that the security industry is growing at rates of betwen 10 and 15% regardless of wider economic trends. Foreign companies are poised like vultures over the thousands of SME security companies that make up the huge private security sector, and positively salivate over the high crime figures.
If one talks in abstracts and absolutes, investment in security at a national level seems to make a difference to these figures. The Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (or Fórum Segurança, the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety), an independent network of local groups, experts and members of state and private secuirty organisations, has started to publish an annual report. The second report, available late last year, indicates a strong correlation between increased spending ($35 Billion US in 2007) and the decline in homicides. For example, in Rio there was an increase in spending of 4.4% and a decline in homicides of 4.7%. A summary in English is available here.
The big thing is not so much public space surveillance (although the industry report mentioned above estimates a $1Bn US market for electronic surveillance technology mainly for the private sector), but both fortification (especially the upsurge in the building of secure condominiums) and the increasing numbers of human security operatives. These may be private security, the new Municipal Guards – basically private security now employed by more than 750 local mayors – or even more worryingly, the urban militias, particularly in Rio. Despite the massive investment in public safety highlighted by Fórum Segurança, official police and other state agents of security and safety are still poorly paid, demotivated and not trusted. To remedy their perceived weakness, in particular in dealing with drug trafficking gangs, so-called Autodefesas Comunitárias (ADC, or Community Self-Defence) groups have emerged. These are paramilitaries made up of current and former police, soldiers, firemen and private security, who basically invade favelas to drive out traffickers in the name of safety, but which soon come to dominate the area and create a new kind of violent order. Now a report by the Parliamentary Hearing Commission into the Militias of Rio de Janeiro, has named names (including several local representatives), and various measures are promised.
A nice rant in The Register from Encyclopedia Britannica president, Jorge Cauz, who claims that Google deliberately prioritizes Wikipedia entries. The article by Cade Metz goes on to produce a pretty convincing back up argument that this is true, and the excuse that Google offers that its search algorithms just do their job is clearly bogus. As Metz reminds us ¨those mindless Google algorithms aren’t controlled by mindless Google algorithms. They’re controlled by Google.¨ This truism is something many people tend to forget when they think about automated systems… And this is the company that of course we all use, but is now taking this trust to try to persuade us to give them all of our files with it´s new ´Gdrive´, part of its cloud-computing initiative that is supposed to see personal computing become simply software.
And it´s not as if Wikipedia is a sound source of information. Take a look at the entry on surveillance – it´s a disjointed mess that shows evidence of all sorts of axe-grinding, self-promotion and personal pathologies, along with some increasingly burried attempts at co-ordination and making sense of it all. I generally tell my students to avoid it. The myth of Web 2.0 is that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters might be able to produce the complete works of Shakespeare but, in practice, a small number of apes with computers can´t even produce a coherent definition of surveillance. This doesn´t mean I am in favour of the proposals to flag revisions to Wikipedia for approval by editors. Wikis are what they are. All that people, including those who run Wikipedia, need to do is be aware of that and not think that Wikipedia is anything more than it is. Especially Google´s programmers.
And it´s not as if Wikipedia is a sound source of information. Take a look at the entry on 
ubisurv 