Category: academic

Bar talk

Brazil can’t really be called a surveillance society… talk of surveillance is just science fiction. It doesn’t mean anything to the people at the bar.

Back at the bar last night I got talking with the regulars – in the limited way I can manage to in Portuguese – about all sorts of things particularly the upcoming carnival – I’m invited – and the football: Brazil beat Italy yesterday in a friendly match. But it was how these ordinary guys – one is a factory worker, one works in an office, and another runs his own one-man business that seems to do anything and everything to do with IT – talked about fear and danger, security and safety, in the city that really interested me. We got talking about where they lived, and the centre of Sao Paulo and how they felt in each place. I told them what I had been advised about not going out at night here, and despite the fact that we were all out at night, Milton, the IT guy, a chunky black man in his 40s, agreed that this wasn’t bad advice for the centre. The area, he said, was full of thieves and drug-addicts, and whilst anyone would be safe amongst friends (and here he gestured expansively to include me and practically everyone else at the bar), even he wouldn’t want to spend much time alone. Milton is from out east – he’s a Corinthians fan; the centre-west is Palmeiras territory, and the red Metro line goes from one to the other – and in his own neighbourhood he says he doesn’t have much to worry about, although of course he has security. Everyone has security. You have to. Joao, the fat, slightly lugubrious office worker, nods in silent agreement.

I tell them I’d quite like to talk to some women. This prompts laughter and a lot of nudging and punching of arms: of course you do, don’t we all? No, no, I mean I’m interested in what women think about all this – what about her? I ask, gesturing to a handsome black women probably about the same age as Milton. Carla? No, you don’t want to talk to her. Not without paying. Open your eyes! (he makes an eye-opening signal with his right hand). Of course I could see that Carla wasn’t just here for fun. And that’s exactly why I wanted to talk to her. She agreed with the guys about the danger, but added that it was much worse for her, not because she was working nights, but because she was black. Being a black woman in Brazil is not good. Everyone, she said, pinching the skin of her forearm, just sees the colour of your skin. especially if you are on your own. With her white friend, people don’t care. I told her that some people think that Brazil isn’t racist or dangerous for black people. She laughed and not in a happy way. Those people didn’t know her life. I asked her if Lula had changed things – it is something I try to ask everyone at some point – in particular with the Programa Bolsa Familia since Carla had told me she has three kids, one grown up and two still at home. She shook her head. No. Nothing. Nothing has changed. It may be pessimistic or cynical but it’s what everyone seems to be thinking apart from the government and the World Bank.

All this bar talk might be casual and fueled by beer (and it is often difficult to understand exactly what people are saying) but it is a useful corrective to the formal interviews and other research I am doing here. It also tends to add to my growing certainty that Brazil can’t really be called a surveillance society at all in terms of how people experience their lives and relationships with the state. Talk of surveillance is just science fiction. It doesn’t mean anything to the people at the bar. The reality is all about danger (not risk in the bland sociological terminology, but actual danger) and security.

(All the names in this piece have been changed…)

Britain is a surveillance society and it must change: detailed anaysis of the Lords Constitution Committee report

This is probably the best parliamentary report on surveillance I have ever read, and if only half of the recommendations are given any attention by the government, then Britain will be a much better place.

It’s 3.00am here in Brazil, and I have just spent the last four hours reading, analyzing and writing about the House of Lords Constitution Committee Report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. My expectations of the work of the committee have generally not been disappointed. This is probably the best parliamentary report on surveillance I have ever read, and if only half of the recommendations are given any attention by the government, then Britain will be a much better place. However it is not only relevant to Britain. The UK seems to have come to be regarded as some kind of model for other democracies to follow in terms of surveillance and security – at least by governments. Reading this report should serve to disabuse others of any notion that Britain is a good example.

Here’s the detailed analysis. It is long and there are no pictures! But this is serious stuff. I have gone through the whole report and thought about all the recommendations. It is worth remembering first of all what the Committee was asked to do. Here are the questions they started out with:

  • Have increased surveillance and data collection by the state fundamentally altered the way it relates to its citizens?
  • What forms of surveillance and data collection might be considered constitutionally proper or improper? Is there a line that should not be crossed? How could it be identified?
  • What effect do public and private sector surveillance and data collection have on a citizen’s liberty and privacy?
  • How have surveillance and data collection altered the nature of citizenship in the 21st century, especially in terms of citizens’ relationship with the state?
  • Is the Data Protection Act 1998 sufficient to protect citizens? Is there a need for additional constitutional protection for citizens in relation to surveillance and the collection of data?

The answers to the first and last questions are, in short ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Their basic conclusion is that increasing surveillance by the state is the greatest change to the nature of the relationship between state and individual in Britain since the end of the second world war. In opposition to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report from last year, and largely in support of our Report on the Surveillance Society form 2006 and that of the Royal Academy of Engineers from 2007, they show that Britain is a surveillance society, and that this must change. They do not go so far as to recommend an Information Act to bring all legislation in this area together, as I have been arguing, but they do advocate significant new legal / constitutional measures to rebalance the state-individual relationship in favour of the individual.

There are 8 chapters of consideration of all of the evidence given, which is treated in a very careful and even-handed way. The Home Office, the police and the Surveillance Commissioners for example, all come in for a telling-off at various points, but at the same time, some of the current government’s initiatives on openness are quite rightly praised (although of course they don’t go far enough in tackling the culture of secrecy that has plagued British government for far too long).

Who comes out of it well? First of all, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas and his office (the ICO). This is entirely right. None of this debate would have happened without him and he continues to push the agenda forward in an activist manner that many campaigners should look to as an example. Secondly, the media. The Lords seem to be very aware of the role of investigative journalists in holding the government to account. People are too willing these days to make blanket generalisations about the media as if they were all superficial and obsessed with celebrity. In the case of surveillance, the BBC and The Guardian in particular have done a great job. Thirdly academics and campaigners alike come across as far more informed and sensible about this than the state, which leads the Lords to recommend that the government pay us far more attention. On a personal note, it is a bit disconcerting to see myself, Surveillance Studies Network and other people and organizations with whom I work mentioned (approvingly) quite so much in such an important document…

The Committee place the two values of privacy and freedom as the foundations of its recommendations. The Lords argue that privacy and the restraint of state powers are at the heart of liberty, and that they should be taken into account at all times. There is, I am very pleased to see no mention of ‘trade-offs’ between freedom and security and it seems that they accepted my argument (they do quote me on this) that when claims to protect fundamental freedoms by increasing security are actually eroding those freedoms, the tacit agreement that binds people and state is broken. They stress that all organisations involved in surveillance and date handling need to give far more attention to privacy at all stage, indeed that it should be built in.

There are many individual recommendations.The first concern the Information Commissioner. Basically, the Lords argue that he should be given more extensive powers and more resources, specifically:

  • to have a role in assessing the effect on any new surveillance measure on public trust;
  • to be able to monitor the human rights (Article 8, ECHR) effects of government and private surveillance practices on the public;
  • to be consulted by the government at the earliest stages of policy development – they specifically attack the government for not doing thus far; to extend the ICO’s power of inspection to private companies (again something I am quoted on) – they don’t note that the power of inspection over government departments was only granted in a rush by Gordon Brown following the revelations of disastrous losses of data by various state bodies;
  • to speed up the implementation of the ICO’s new power to fine bodies that break the rule on data protection and freedom of information;
  • to be a statutory consultee on all surveillance and data processing laws and for the ICO to report to Parliament on this;
  • for the government and the ICO to undertake a review of the law governing citizens’ consent to use of their personal data – there is quite a lot of interesting discussion in the body of the report on how consent might operate, and I am very pleased that they haven’t, unlike the government, given up on the importance of consent;
  • for the government to work with the ICO on raising public awareness as it should already be doing but has failed to do;
  • and finally, and this is really important – for the Data Protection Act to be amended to mandate a Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) “prior to the adoption of any new surveillance, data collection or processing scheme, including new arrangements for data sharing” with a role for the ICO in overseeing these. The government will probably try to ignore this, but this is the most crucial recommendation for future policy.

On the various other commissions – of which there are too many in my opinion – they merely recommend that the Surveillance and Communications Commissioner work together better and seek the advice of the ICO, especially with regard to the misuse of powers under the Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), and that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal stops hiding from the public. These are weak recommendations. Later they are rather more robust about the problems of having too many ineffectual regulators of RIPA, but despite a brief mention, any recommendations regarding the regulation of the Intelligence Services get quietly dropped along the way (not surprisingly). I would have thought that recommending at the very least that the offices of the Surveillance and Communications Commissioners are brought under the control of the ICO, if not completely absorbed into the ICO, would have been a much better long-term move.

They also have a number of other recommendations on the egregious RIPA, firstly that the (inadequate) administrative procedures are reviewed and secondly that the government should think again about the whole business of allowing Local Authorities police powers, and that in any case, these powers” should only be available for the investigation of serious criminal offences which would attract a custodial sentence of at least two years.” In my opinion, this effectively amounts to saying ‘repeal RIPA’ without saying so directly. The use of intense targeted surveillance powers to deal with minor infractions is what a lot of RIPA is all about whether that was the intention or not. It is an ill-thought out and badly worded law, like so many in this area.

The Lords recognize this deficiency in detail and specificity and argue as a general point, following the Human Rights Committee, that “the Government’s powers should be set out in primary legislation.” Crucially they also note that the government has not seemed very concerned with what happens after legislation is passed or how it works. They recommend the formation of a new Joint Committee in parliament on surveillance and data powers that would have post-legislative scrutiny as one of its key functions.

There are several measures concerning particular technologies. Their coverage of technologies of surveillance and data-collections is not too bad. I gave a seminar to the Committee on the range of surveillance technologies before they started their hearings, and I was beginning to despair at the levels of knowledge – “can they really do that?” was a common cry – and yet here they consider everything from CCTV to ubiquitous computing / ambient intelligence. There are still major deficiencies however. Although they take my point that government needs to get ahead of the technological game in order to regulate effectively, they still have not. They don’t recommend anything specific about the use of scanners in public places, location tracking, about the increasing dependence on RFID, or about the new flexibility, mobility, decrease in size and bodily intrusiveness of surveillance technologies and what this means for regulation. Mind you that is all in our report to the ICO that inspired all this (see Paragraph 4!)

They recommend that:

  • the Government comply fully with the recent ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that DNA profiles of innocent people are no longer kept indefinitely on the National DNA Database (NDNAD) – they also rule out a complete national database on both liberty and cost grounds, and argue that there should be a single, clear law governing the NDNAD and better transparency all-round.
  • On CCTV, they recommend more research on “the effectiveness of CCTV in preventing, detecting and investigating crime”, and more importantly that the government finally put CCTV on a proper statutory basis, with clear regulations, and systems of complaint and redress.
  • The report is at its weakest on the proposed new National Identity Register (NIR) and ID card. No2ID will not be happy, as all that they say is that “the Government’s development of identification systems should give priority to citizen-oriented considerations.” This is practically meaningless.Considering that this is the Constitution Committee report, and that the NIR and ID card are at the heart of how the government sees the information relationship between state and individual, this is also an unacceptable and compromised omission. No doubt it is evidence of a key area of disagreement amongst members, but the Chair should have banged some heads together on this one!
  • Although it is treated as a legislative measure, the Lords recommend mandatory encryption of personal data “in some circumstances.” This should have been stronger – bear in mind that most of the data lost by the state over the last few years was not encrypted
  • They also recommend that the government incorporate ‘design solutions’ in particular Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in all new schemes. This is good as a minimum – we have to make sure that the government doesn’t use PETs as a way of claiming to have dealt with the problem – ooh, look: technology!

In other general measures for the whole of government, the Lords return to their central themes, specifically:

  • that Government should instruct government agencies and private organisations involved in surveillance and data use on compliance with Article 8 ECHR and in particular the legal meanings of necessity and proportionality. They also recommend legal aid should be available for challenges under Article 8.
  • a system of judicial oversight for surveillance carried out by public authorities, with compensation “to those subject to unlawful surveillance by the police, intelligence services, or other public bodies” acting under RIPA. This would be a severe blow the ad-hoc and effectively extra-legal expansion of surveillance powers under the present government. It would be great if it happens, but I am not going to hold my breath until it does…
  • increasing the stature and power of the data protection minister
  • lots of general blah about improving safeguards and restrictions on data handling and implementing standards and training, and education, to improve public confidence. But the thing is, public confidence isn’t really the main issue. Public confidence is low because the government and its private sector contractors have been time and again demonstrated to be incompetent.
  • there are also several paragraphs of recommendations which basically amount to saying ‘listen to the public’ and particularly, pay attention to pressure groups and research in this area because they know what they are talking about. They are right, you know – we do! They also want more research to get better information on public opinion in this area. We can do that too!

Despite this slight degeneration into well-meaning generality at the end, and despite the glaring hole when it comes to the NIR and ID cards, the principles advocated by this report, if implemented, would transform the direction of government in Britain. Many of the individual recommendations are things that I and others have been arguing for, for some time.

So what was the government’s first response? Well, the thoroughly useless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, according to the BBC has “rejected claims of a surveillance society as “not for one moment” true and called for “common sense” guidelines on CCTV and DNA.” When she has read the report she will realize that such guidelines are right in front of her – indeed, she got ‘common sense’ from the European Court on the DNA database some time ago and her department still does not know what to do with it!

As I said, if even half of this reported is acted on, Britain’s ways of dealing with surveillance will be transformed. I am not paying much attention to the Conservatives – in opposition you can say anything and they will beat the government with the liberty stick one day and the security stick the next. The question is, are New Labour brave enough to admit that their approach to surveillance has been almost entirely wrong?

We will soon find out.

My plans

Today there probably won´t be that much new here as I am concentrating on preparing for interviews for the next two weeks in Saõ Paulo and Brasília. I will be talking to various NGOs (mainly concerned with urban violence and security), academics, parliamentarians and representatives for the federal police and government ministers. I am also meeting Danilo Doneda later today, who is the leading Brazilian legal expert on privacy and data protection, and a member of the Habeus Data network, which campaigns for information rights in Latin American.

(My netbook has also decided not to work today, so if I can´t get that fixed there might not be much here at all for the next two weeks! Why do these things always happen just when it is least convenient?)

US No-Fly List is a big fat waste of money

I can’t say I am remotely surprised, but in the journal, Homeland Security Affairs, Marcus Holmes has written a comprehensive demolition of the claim that the US federal government’s No-Fly List is an efficient security policy. He isn’t concerned with civil liberties – ACLU has done that elsewhere – nor with effectiveness – Bruce Schneier nailed that one a while back. He simply demonstrates, using elementary Cost-Benefit Analysis that the policy is a big fat waste of money. The article isn’t complicated to understand, so the best thing I can suggest is that you just go read it… (and thanks to Bruce Schneier and Boingboing.net for posting on this one).

Datawars Conference

There will be a very interesting -looking conference in Amsterdam, 11-12 June, called Datawars: Fighting Terrorism through Data. According to the call for papers, the workshop will be held at the University of Amsterdam in June and will explore the ethical and political implications of the new data-led approach to security, risk and fighting terrorism in Europe. Suggested topics include:

  • Privacy, security and human rights
  • Ethics, responsibility and justice in European data wars
  • Risk, prevention, preemption
  • Data and surveillance
  • Private authorities, states and the European Union
  • Constituting Europe through data

It´s part of a project run by a couple of excellent researchers, Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, of the Universities of Durham and Amsterdam respectively (who probably don´t remember but I worked in an tiny attic office opposite them in the Politics Dept at Newcastle for a few months just after my PhD!). I might go as I have been doing some work on attempts to create global databases, called ´From Echelon to Server in the Sky´, but the timing might be awkward (unfortunately I can´t reveal why yet…).

Major new report on surveillance out next week

House of Lords
House of Lords

I hear on the grapevine that the British House of Lords’ Constitution Committee Report on Surveillance and Data Sharing will be out next Friday 6th February. The inquiry conducted by the committee has been one of the most thorough of any so far conducted, and certainly promises to be more considered than the rather rushed House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report, A Surveillance Society? from last year. Both reports were ordered largely in response to the Report on the Surveillance Society that Surveillance Studies Network wrote for the UK Information Commissioner in late 2006, and which is still getting coverage around the world (see CCTV in Canada for example). Check the Committee’s website for the report itself and, of course, back here for a review, on Friday.

New Issue of Surveillance & Society Out Now!

survsoc
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!

6.1 Relaunch Issue: Revisiting Video Surveillance

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:

  1. Surveillance, Children and Childhood (ed. Val Steeves and Owain Jones) – deadline August 31st 2009;
  2. 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.

Behind the scenes at Surveillance & Society

pkpI’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.opensource_logo

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…

cclogocircleWhat 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.

March Surveillance Workshop

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.