Author: David

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.

Japan and the NSA

I’ve been combing media for any mention of Japan’s involvement with the NSA, and so far, as I noted a while back, there hasn’t been any. But finally an agency story came out recently, reported in the Japan Times and this is what it said:

The U.S. National Security Agency sought the Japanese government’s cooperation in 2011 over wiretapping fiber-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data across the Asia-Pacific region, but the request was rejected, sources said Saturday.

The agency’s overture was apparently aimed at gathering information on China given that Japan is at the heart of optical cables that connect various parts of the region. But Tokyo turned down the proposal, citing legal restrictions and a shortage of personnel, the sources said.

“The NSA asked Tokyo if it could intercept personal information from communication data passing through Japan via cables connecting it, China and other regional areas, including Internet activity and phone calls, they said.

Faced with China’s growing presence in the cyberworld and the need to bolster information about international terrorists, the United States may have been looking into whether Japan, its top regional ally, could offer help similar to that provided by Britain, according to the sources.

Based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, British newspaper The Guardian reported that the agency had been sharing data intercepted by Britain’s spy agency, GCHQ, through transatlantic cables since 2011.

But Tokyo decided it could not do so because under current legislation, it cannot intercept such communications even if the aim is to prevent a terrorist act. Japan also has a substantially smaller number of intelligence personnel, compared with the NSA’s estimated 30,000 employees, the sources said.

A separate source familiar with intelligence activities of major nations said the volume of data that would need to be intercepted from fiber-optic cables would require a massive number of workers and the assistance of the private sector.”

(Kyodo News Agency in Japan Times)

I’m not sure who the ‘sources’ are, but they are either practicing the art of disinformation or they simply don’t know what they are talking about. The basic data gathering and processing is done by automated systems not human beings. And, as to what special ‘permissions’ the NSA needs, I’m not sure why they need more than they already have under the existing secret agreements. I can only guess that this is a pre-emptive story that is designed to assuage any public or political concern in advance of possible information being released by Greenwald and Snowden in the same vein as that recently released about Brazil, Germany and Spain.

If you see this alongside the new law that has been introduced into the Japanese Diet by the current government that would extend government secrecy in Japan (including longer sentences for whistleblowers – more about this tomorrow) then it seems pretty clear that Japan is still one of the USA’s most loyal subjects not a nation that can say ‘no’.

Why I’m finished with Facebook

In changing its rules so that we can no longer exlude our private data from searches, Facebook has now gone too far down the lines of exploiting our apathy and/or good will, and I will very soon be deactivating my Facebook account. This has been a long road, and Facebook has gradually encroached further and further on the unacceptable in its quest to squeeze every possible drop of commercial value out of the personal data of its users.

It’s always difficult to leave a system that feels as if it has become central to your social life, but this is exactly the feeling that Facebook relies on for its users not to leave, however much they exploit them. As Kirstie Ball and I wrote in our piece ‘Brandscapes of Control’ earlier this year:

“It should be recognised… that brandscapes remain both an emerging apparatus and an attractive apparent solution to risk and complexity in a world where data underpins everything from purchase to social relations, and where those data are too numerous and complex for any individual to parse. Thus it is not so much a ‘logic prison’ (Mitchell, 2003) but, if it is analogous to confinement at all, it is an affective prison, not because one openly emotionally identifies with it, but because it begins to mark the boundaries of emotional range and becomes simply too inconvenient or uncomfortable to be without. Outside the brandscape, the world might seem not just dangerous but also painful, dull, limited and lacking in content: the dead, heavy ‘meatspace’ of William Gibson’s retired cyberspace jockeys in the Sprawl Trilogy, or the reality without compulsory drugs in Huxley’ Brave New World” (Murakami Wood and Ball, Marketing Theory, 2013 – but you can find a pre-proof verison on academia.edu).

Maybe I should pay more attention to my own work! However, it’s undeniable that social networking adds something positive to life. The questions are what you are prepared to give up for that or, if that is a question you refuse to accept is necessary, whether there is a better socio-economic model for social networking than relying on basically sociopathic corporations to provide it for us. I have tried to persuade people to join Diaspora but it’s too badly designed and unattractive to use easily. Linked In is dull, but for professional notifications etc., it works just fine and that’s all I use it for. I do have a Twitter account, though I’ve hardly used it and in general they’ve shown themselves to be a little more concerned with users’ rights and feelings. Maybe I’ll have to look at Google+ again, but Google isn’t fundamentally better than Facebook just not quite as bad.

And, in the end, all of these corporate systems are entirely infliltrated by National Security Agency surveillance systems and so Brazil’s suggestion of a non-US internet is interesting here as are murmerings about a DiY version, mesh-nets that would link together on a more ad-hoc basis. I’ll be writing about some of these suggestions soon. But in the meantime, it will soon be ‘So long, Facebook…’

Japan and the NSA: no cause for concern?

(This is an article that I wrote for The Japan Times; they never made any reply to my submission… sources are listed after the article)

Given the friendly relationship that the Japanese state enjoys with the USA, and the equally cordial relationship the Japanese media has with its government, it comes as no surprise that few questions have been raised about Japan and the recent revelations about the Internet surveillance operations of the US National Security Agency (NSA). Yet, undoubtedly, there are questions to be asked.

One of the sources from 2010, revealed by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, confirmed that the NSA was wiretapping Japanese diplomatic communications, as well as those of 37 other countries including South Korea, the European Union, India, Mexico, Turkey, France, Italy, Greece and Middle Eastern countries. The reports could not shed light on any specific reasons for the tapping of these nations’ official communications, but contrary to some Japanese media reports of this story, it would not be the first time that information had come to light that documented US spying on Japanese diplomatic channels.

According to New Zealand-based writer and researcher, Nicky Hagar, in his book, Secret Power, the NSA had involved the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) in “a project targeting Japanese embassy communications” back in the early 1980s, and since that date all the ‘first party’ countries in the UKUSA Signals Intelligence alliance (USA, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ) “have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring”. So although Snowden’s revelations are recent, many of the programs, including the tapping of Japanese diplomatic communications, are not.

Likewise PRISM. PRISM is in many ways simply the Web 2.0 version of an earlier system, commonly known as ECHELON. With the explosion of social media and other online systems, it would more surprising if an agency like the NSA had not developed systems for collecting data from these new forms of communications. And despite the denials of major service providers like Microsoft and Google, nor is their involvement new. It was documented in a major report for the European Parliament in 1999, Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information that Microsoft was installing ‘backdoors’ in its software for NSA use in the 1990s and that export versions of many important pieces of US software had deliberately reduced cryptographic functions to make NSA snooping easier.

So it is very likely that the NSA is collecting metadata (and much more) from Japanese electronic communications, both official and unofficial. How does it do it? The answer is not to be found overseas but in Japan itself. Japan has a substantial US military presence, and not all of the US bases are dedicated to basic warfighting operations. While most of the US presence is in Okinawa, it is at the other end of the country, in the northern region of Tohoku that we have to look to find the NSA’s main Japanese centre of operations. Misawa Air Base in Aomori is one of the largest US intelligence bases outside of the USA itself. According to the GlobalSecurity website, Misawa was originally an Imperial cavalry training center in the Meiji period, converted into an air base in 1938 and also used as a communications site from 1941. Following the US invasion in 1945, it was converted into a US air base and from 1948, Misawa operated as a High Frequency (HF) Radio interception station targeted mainly at the eastern part of the USSR. This was upgraded in the 1960s with AN/FLR-9 “Elephant Cage” antenna, a huge circular array which remains a significant visual component of the base.

From 1972, when the US removed its jet fighters, Misawa was primarily a reconnaissance and intelligence site and major investments occurred in the late 1970s when a lot more NSA activities were moved outside the USA following US congressional inquiries into its activities. According to the official Brief History of US Air Force Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), Misawa was designated as one of a network of satellite interception stations, known as Operations LADYLOVE, which came online in 1982. Misawa now has 19 satellite antenna, all covered by geodesic radar domes (radomes), which provide protection from both the elements and observation of the direction of the antenna, which help determine which satellites’ transmissions were being received.

The jets returned in 1985, and the site is still nominally controlled by the US Air Force, with several American fighter and reconnaissance squadrons, and some Japan Self-Defense Force planes. However, its US intelligence presence is so large that this is really its primary function. Several of the operational units present betray Misawa’s identity as an NSA field station, particularly Company E, Marine Support Battalion, a cryptologic and electronic warfare unit that reports to the NSA. There are also intelligence units from all three other US military branches, in particular those relating to space surveillance and other military satellite operations, many of which connect to, or are the under the ultimate control of, the NSA.

What is more, in all the previous reports on the NSA’s telecommunications interception activities, particularly on ECHELON, Misawa was always listed as a key component site in this international snooping system, along with more famous (or notorious) sites like Menwith Hill in the UK, and British investigative reporter, Duncan Campbell noted that declassified US military intelligence sources agreed that by 1994, Misawa was part of the ECHELON system, with the number USA39.

With the combination of the Snowden revelations and Misawa’s historic and contemporary importance to NSA operations in the Pacific region, it would seem very surprising if the NSA was not operating programs like PRISM in Japan. And certainly, the revelations that the NSA specifically gathers social media, e-mail and other Internet communications metadata from citizens of allied and friendly countries, which have electrified Germany and Brazil, most recently, should give cause for concern to Japanese citizens too, particularly given the protests that periodically hit better known but more ordinary US bases in Okinawa, for example.

So where’s the fuss? It would seem to be a combination of two things: firstly, the Japanese government and mainstream media appear to be successfully managing information on behalf of their US allies. The stories about the Snowden revelations on Japanese news almost always refered to Snowden (incorrectly) as a CIA employee and rarely mentioned the NSA, and no reference to US intelligence operations in Japan, despite the fact that the media regularly carries stories on all manner of controversies relating to US conventional forces here. Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, there does seem to be a distinct lack of knowledge and concern amongst Japanese people not simply about the NSA and US intelligence operations but surveillance and privacy more generally. The combination leads to the USA facing very little scrutiny over its international surveillance activities in Japan compared to that faced in other parts of the world

Sources:

When your employer knows what you are eating

Way back when we published the Report on the Surveillance Society in 2006, one of the things we included in our vignettes of the future surveillance society was that companies would have extended their interests in their workers into their private exercise and dietary habits. And, lo and behold, the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and others are now paying employees to gain access to health and diet data “to lower health-care and insurance costs while also helping workers.” The measures include blood-pressure cuffs and other kinds of 24/7 medical monitoring, with the promise of special health and weight-loss programs for those showing signs of high blood pressure and obesity in particular.

The problem is not so much the authoritarian nightmare of order – that such schemes might become formally compulsory – but more that they will from being simply voluntary experiments to being informally expected or appended to employee performance assessments and reports, just ‘to help’. The ‘helping of workers’ via the monitoring of health and diet then becomes a form of soft control, an insidious organisational blackmail which incorporates private personal decisions into the purview of not just the employer but also the insurance industry which provides the health benefits in employee packages (in the USA at least).

(Thanks to Jenn Barrigar for the link)

The computer did it…

It seems that ‘the computer did it’ is becoming as much a cliché in the early twenty-first century as ‘the butler did it’ was 100 years ago. There’s an interesting link by Cory Doctorow on bOING bOING to a blog post by one Pete Ashton about the already infamous ‘Keep Calm and Rape A Lot’ T-Shirts being sold through Amazon’s marketplace.

Computer-generated 'Rape' T-shirts sold via Amazon
Computer-generated ‘Rape’ T-shirts sold via Amazon

Only the explanation given is incomplete in important ways. This is not to encourage people to attack Pete who, as his post explains, is not in any way connected to or responsible for the T-shirts or the company that produces them. However the explanation that ‘it was an algorithm that did this and the company didn’t know what was being produced until it was ordered’ is inadequate as an explanation. Here’s why.

1. This was not simply a product of computer generation nor do algorithms just spring fully formed from nature. All algorithms are written by humans (or by other programs, which are in turn produced by humans) and the use of an algorithm does not remove the need to check what the algorithm is (capable of) generating.

2. There was a specific number of verbs included in the algorithm for generating these T-shirt slogans (621 verbs in fact).  Even if they were generated by selecting all the 4 or 5 letter words in a dictionary of some sort, it’s not that hard to check a list of 621 verbs for words that will be offensive.

3. There words following the verb were not even as random as this. In fact, they are specifically A LOT, HER, IN, IT, ME, NOT, OFF, ON, OUT and US. Several people have checked this. There are some very interesting words missing, notably HIM. This list is clearly a human selection and its choices reflect, if not deliberately misogynistic choices, at the very least a patriarchal culture.

Algorithms, as cultural products, are always political. They are never neutral even when they appear to be doing entirely unremarkable things. The politics of algorithms may be entirely banal in these cases, but in some, as in this case, the politics of algorithms is accidentally visible. T-shirts may be a minor issue, but what’s much more important is not just to accept the idea that ‘the computer did it’ as an infallible explanation when it comes to rather more consequential things: all the way from insurance and credit rating through police stop-and-search and no-fly lists to assassination by drone. Otherwise, before we know it, the opportunity to question the politics is buried in code and cabling.

Drones Over America

EPIC has obtained evidence under the Freedom of Information Act from the US Department of Homeland Security that is has fitted Predator drones with domestic espionage capabilities. The document, Performance Specification for the US Customs and Border Protection Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Version 2.4, dated March 10 2010,  includes the following technical requirements: infra-red sensors and communications, plus either synthetic aperture radar (SAR), Ground Moving Target Indicator mode (GMTI – tracking) or signals interception receivers (page 7). The UAV should:

be “capable of tracking an adult human-sized, single moving object” with sufficient accuracy “to allow target designation at the specific ranges.”(page 28)

“be able to maintain constant surveillance and track on a designation geographic point.” (page 28)

The section ‘target marking’ is redacted in EPIC’s version however the CNET website managed to get hold of a non-redacted version, which say that the system “shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,”  and specify “signals interception” technology for mobile phone frequencies as well as “direction finding” which will enable the UAS locate them.

And in case people are wondering whether this is just for border patrol, the documents specifically states that it is for collection of ‘Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) data in support of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and CBP missions” (page 1). I hope all you US people know exactly how you can challenge drones flying at 20,000 feet up that might be breaching your 4th Amendment Rights…

Implants vs. Wearable devices

Printed Electronic Tattoo (Wired)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why it is that implanted tracking devices have never really taken off in humans. Just a few years ago, there were all kinds of people laying out rather teleological versions of technological trajectories that led inevitably to mass human implanantation – and not just the US Christian right, who saw RFID as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy.

I think there are many reasons, including negative public reaction (implants really are a step too far, even for the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ crowd) and the fact that a lot of the promotion of human RFID implants was actually the PR work of one very loud company (Verichip) and did not actually have a lot of basis in either social reality or market research. But the other major reason is to do with other technological developments, particularly in wearable computing and sensor networks. In most cases, implants solve a problem that doesn’t exist (the idea that people want to remove a tracking device that might be there for very good – although I am not saying, indisputably good – reasons, usually medical ones). And where there are no good reasons, there’s probably no case for tracking at all.

So devices like this – temporary, printed or stick-on and removable – are far more what is likely to become the solution to any actual problem of tracking or monitoring for medical reasons. And the relative ease with which it can be removed by the wearer does at least mean that there is some room for negotiation and consent at more than just one point in the process. Of course, such removable, wearable tracking are still not somehow free of ethical and political considerations – and some may argue that the very appearance of consent actually hints at the generation of a greater conformity and self-surveillance, but the issues are of a slightly different nature to those raised by implanted devices.

Illegal UK blacklists now being shared with the USA?

I’ve written here in the past about British blacklisting organisations that compile lists of ‘troublemakers’ (mainly union activists) and sell them to building firms and share them with police. This has led to people being unable to get jobs and all kinds of hassle. In theory, the notorious Economic League which started this activity back in the 1920s is now disbanded but their mantle was taken up by a number of other private bodies, including the Consulting Association, which was the subject of an unusual raid by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) back in 2009.

Now it seems that in the era of transnational information sharing for ‘security’, such lists have found their way to the US Homeland Security complex. According to a report in the London Evening Standard, his certainly seems to be the case for major British mainstream environmental campaigner, John Stewart, formerly of the anti-road building lobby, Alarm UK and now of the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise (HACAN).

If such private politically motivated lists are now circulating internationally and being treated as reasonable grounds for refusing entry to other countries, it makes a mockery of the fact that they have already been found to be in breach of British and European laws, and it is likely that such data will continue to circulate entirely decontextualized from the circumstances and motivation of their collection. So an illegal anti-democratic trawling operation to stop legitimate political activity becomes the basis for security decisions to err… safeguard democracy. It would be funny if it wasn’t already so common and will continue to be so as security relies increasingly on risk assessments derived from the indiscriminate mashing together of information into ‘big data’.

Mozilla stops ad-network cookies

Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web-browser, has decided that voluntary compliance by advertisers with its ‘Do Not Track’ settings is not working. Advertisers have basically been ignoring what is essentially a request by users, so instead of giving up, Mozilla has taken the right step and will simply not allow ad networks to install cookies on user’s computers or phones. This will of course cut ad revenue to some sites that rely on it, but it will also be a major step to slowing the proliferation of online tracking.

Of course, it can also be seen as a new negotiating position in a long conflict, as the Centre for Democracy and Technology points out, it could be a negotiating position that is all about trying to force companies to implement Do Not Track requests as a compromise from wholesale cookie-blocking. But I’m fully on board with Mozilla here either way. I very much doubt that Microsoft will take a similarly ethical stance on user control – because that’s what this is really about, not privacy as such but who has the right to control information about themselves.

A Culture of Pornography and the Surveillance Society

The student newspaper here at Queen’s carried a disturbing story this week – a hidden camera disguised in a towel hook was found in a women’s washroom*. Apparently a search was carried out and nothing else was found. I would be very surprised if this was something unique and isolated. Voyeuristic footage is a staple of both private perversion and Internet pornography, and I suspect that this is much more common than we realise. I remember at my old university in the UK a private landlord being prosecuted for having virtually his whole house, which he rented out to female students, wired up like this. Cameras are now so small (and getting smaller), and readily available disguised from shops that deal in equipment (largely intended for industrial espionage and spying on nannies, spouses etc.) and can of course now be wirelessly connected, so could be almost anywhere and everywhere.

We’re also immersed in a culture of pornography: it is what spurred the immense growth of the Internet in the 90s (a subject that remains to be given a proper historical analysis), and it is changing the nature of sexuality, especially in teen boys, in ways we’re only just beginning to understand. I’d hesitate to make any sweeping generalizations, but it would seem that if one puts together the kind of normalization of pornographic understandings of bodies, desire and sex with the rape culture alleged to pertain at Queen’s (as the same paper detailed the week before) and a surveillance society, you end up with not the hopes of an empowering exhibitionism put forward by more utopian feminist thinkers on surveillance like Hille Koskela, but something infinitely more seedy and alienated.

Perhaps if Nineteen Eighty-Four was written today, then O’Brien’s answer to Winston Smith on what the future would look like would not be “a boot stamping on a human head, forever” but “a man masturbating over a mobile phone, forever”. I’m not sure which is worse…

*As a note, the newspaper described it as a ‘co-ed’ washroom, a term so archaic, it made me wonder how much of the culture that engenders such behaviour is down to the continued underlying patriarchal belief that women being in education on an equal footing with men is still unusual, provocative and somehow so exciting to men that they cannot control themselves. And of course ‘co-eds’ is exactly how online porn sites that publish this kind of voyeuristic footage would describe the unwitting participants.

(Thanks to Aliya Kassam for the story)