The same team that did the influential Report on the Surveillance Society for the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) back in 2006 will be doing a follow-up report on the state of surveillance in the UK for the ICO and the national Parliament this year. Many of the things discussed in that report, which I coordinated, have been accelerating and intensifying, most obviously things like airport body-scanning and the use of drone surveillance cameras, but other things have stalled or slowed, for example the implementation of the ID card regime and more widespread use of RFID tags outside of inventory systems. We’ll be assessing the state of play and making some recommendations as a result. The project this time will be led by Professor Charles Raab in Political Science at Edinburgh University, and one of the world’s leading experts on privacy regulation, and will also include Dr Kirstie Ball of the Open University Business School, Professor Clive Norris of the Centre for Criminological Research at Sheffield, Professor Steve Graham from the Global Urban Research Unit (my old place) at Newcastle University – all in the UK – as well as myself and Professor David Lyon here at the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, in Ontario. It will be great to be back working with the whole team again, and I hope we can contribute to a more focused debate and some real changes to UK policy and practice. We shall see…
Category: academic
Canadians should be concerned about camera surveillance
A new report by the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN) at Queen’s University shows that Canadians believe surveillance cameras promote safety, but their perceptions don’t match the actual evidence. The first of its kind in Canada, A Report on Camera Surveillance in Canada will be used as background to help structure new federal surveillance legislation.
“There is little or no evidence that surveillance deters crime,” says David Lyon, coordinator of the report and director of the school’s new Surveillance Studies Centre. “Media such as TV police shows and crime stoppers promote the perception that cameras are more important than they really are.”
The report looks at the rapid growth of surveillance in Canadian society based on studies about:
- The lack of Canadian legislation addressing public camera surveillance
- Camera surveillance as big business
- An exploration of camera operators
- Research on public opinions about camera surveillance
- Camera surveillance as one of the legacies of hosting the Olympic Games
- Camera surveillance in Ottawa taxicabs
- Camera surveillance in shopping malls
“The public should be concerned,” adds Professor Lyon. “Surveillance technology is constantly changing. Closed-circuit television does not accurately describe it anymore; now surveillance footage is increasingly digitized and free to flow online. What stops are in place to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands? We need to question the social ethics of surveillance footage as well as establish legal limits on how the footage can be used.”
(The Surveillance Camera Awareness Network at the Queen’s Surveillance Centre completed the report with funding from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The report is the topic of a surveillance workshop on January 15 and 16, 2010 at Queen’s University).
Press Release from Queen’s University.
Contact: Jeff Drake
jeff.drake@queensu.ca
613-533-2877
Queen’s University
Voluntary Self-Surveillance
In a nice bit of synchronicity with the ‘Surveillance and Empowerment’ call just issued by Surveillance & Society, there’s a really interesting little piece on the rise of ‘self-tracking’ by Curetogether founder, Alexandra Carmichael, in the latest issue of h+ magazine, an open-access publication from ‘transhumanist’ pioneer, R.U. Sirius.
The piece concentrates on those who have health problems who want to track and share symptoms and other biometric data, but argues that this is a wider interest: “we do it because we love data, or we do it because we have specific things we want to optimize about ourselves.”
There are also some useful links to life-logging and patient data-sharing sites.
(thanks to BoingBoing for the link to h+)
Call for Papers: Surveillance and Empowerment
Special Issue of Surveillance & Society: Issue 8(3)
Guest editors: Torin Monahan, David Murakami Wood, and David J. Phillips
Publication date: end of October 2010
Deadline for submissions: March 31st 2010
This issue of Surveillance & Society is seeking papers and other submissions that examine the social implications of contemporary surveillance with a particular interest in the complexities of empowerment. In the surveillance studies literature, there have been significant contributions unsocial sorting, digital discrimination, privacy invasion, racial profiling, sexual harassment, and other mechanisms of unequal treatment. In contradistinction, this issue seeks to explore the potential of surveillance for individual autonomy and dignity, fairness and due process, community cooperation and empowerment, and social equality. Key to this inquiry will be questioning the extent to which surveillance can be designed, employed, and regulated to contribute to democratic practices and/or the social good.
The very framing of the issue in terms of “surveillance and empowerment” begs the question of empowerment for whom and for what purposes. Thus, we invite critical attention to the ways in which surveillance practices may unfairly embody advantages for some groups over others and to explore alternatives. Possible research areas might include (but are not limited to):
- Surveillance and human security
- Surveillance and well-being / flourishing
- Surveillance for safety
- Ethical surveillance infrastructures and systems, e.g. ubiquitous computing environments that provide care for the vulnerable, dependent and elderly
- Surveillance for sustainability, environmental management and environmental justice Surveillance of energy and resource consumption
- Social networking tools employed by social movements
- Surveillance of corporations, government agencies, or political parties by watchdog groups
- Policies for ensuring privacy, accountability, and transparency with video or other surveillance systems
- Surveillance in post-authoritarian societies – toward restrictions and counters to the unleashed surveillance of former regimes
We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry, artistic, and audio-visual submissions. Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g., “Author, 2009”).
All papers must be submitted through the online submission system no later than March 31st 2010, for publication at the end of October 2010. Please use submit the papers in a MSWord-compatible format. For further submission guidelines, please see:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact: torin.monahan@vanderbilt.edu
For other current calls (including Issue 8(2) Surveillance, Consumers and Consumption) and announcements, please see:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/announcement
New Issue of Surveillance & Society
NEW ISSUE: Volume 7 Number 1 (Open Issue)
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/issue/current
- Keith Guzik – Discrimination by Design: Data Mining in the United States’s ‘War on Terrorism’
- Shelly Ikebuchi Ketchell – Carceral Ambivalence: Japanese Canadian ‘Internment’ and the Sugar Beet Programme during World War II
- Nicholas Holm – Watching the Paranoid: Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance
- Christopher Gad & Peter Lauritsen – Situated Surveillance: an ethnographic study of fisheries inspection in Denmark
- Patrick O’Byrne & Dave Holmes – Public Health STI/HIV Surveillance: Exploring the Society of Control
plus…
- A video piece by Jan J Knoetze, Brent Meistre – Interrogating Surveillance: The 50 Minute Hour
- Responses to previous articles by Sean P. Hier & Josh Greenberg and David Murakami Wood
- and Book Reviews by Rodrigo Jose Firmino & Fabio Duarte, Ariane Ellerbrok, Patrick Feng, Jason Pridmore and Tarangini Sriraman
School Surveillance
No-one could have failed to notice the gradual infiltration of security and surveillance technologies and practices into schools throughout the industrialised word. Of course, schools have always been sorting mechanisms (as Foucault pointed out), but the use of high-tech scanning systems at entrances, cameras in classrooms, RFID for library books and even meals, point to not just a justifiable concern with the safety of kids (and staff) but a combination of commercial pressure and paranoia.
My friend and colleague, Torin Monahan from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has a new edited collection out on this very topic with Rodolfo Torres. Schools under Surveillance has a range of contributors, most of whom it is good to see are not the usual Surveillance Studies suspects. His local paper, The Tennessean did a story on the book, which notes Torin, has generated “a lot of crazy blowback” from bloggers in particular School surveillance is a sensitive topic which needs careful consideration, and it’s a shame some people can’t discuss these issues without such stupidity.
New LiSS website
The ESF-COST Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS) network in Europe has a smart new website with news and contacts for experts from across the continent. I’m very pleased to see how successful and active LiSS is under the guidance of my co-instigator, Will Webster (who put most of the work in, anyway)… when I upped and moved to Canada, I felt a bit like an irresponsible father who left his child when it was only a baby.
US wiretapping information release
From Chris Parsons:
“Christopher Soghoian, a PhD Candidate at Indiana University, has released the information on US wiretap/pen register information along with documents received through FOIA that are inquiring into the costs that telecommunications carriers demand for the two aforementioned services. He also has full recordings of sessions from (the closed door) ISS World: Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering. An executive summary of his draft thoughts are below, followed by a link to the full piece he’s written. He has made available his recordings and the responses to his FOIA requests to the public at large, all accessible at the link below.
Executive Summary
Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at awiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.
It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.”
UK DNA Database Criticised by Report
The UK’s DNA database, already under fire by the European Court of Human Right for retaining samples and data from innocent people, has now been lambasted in a report by the government’s own genetics watchdog. The Human Genetics Commission.
The report, called Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? contains a numbers of serious criticisms, most notably the finding that police forces around Britain are routinely arresting people simply in order to obtain their DNA. Almost a million innocent people, including many children, are now on the database, and the ECHR ruling has finally prompted the government to make some minor concessions, such as keeping the DNA of innocent people for 6 years as opposed to 12, but there appears to have been no fundamental change in police practice, nor any change in the instructions given to local forces on best practice.
It’s main recommendations are:
- that there should be a parliamentary debate about the recording of what it calls ‘unconvicted’ people;
- that because the purpose of the database has shifted over time, there should be constraints set out in new primary legislation;
- that “robust evidence of the ‘forensic utility’ of the database should be produced to justify the resource cost and interference with individual privacy it represents”; and,
- that there should be an independent oversight board and appeals board to consider removal of profiles; and transparency over data and other issues.
These are all laudable, but I really start to question their judgement in using the term ‘unconvicted people’. British law has always worked on the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. People are therefore ‘innocent’ until they have a conviction. The term ‘unconvicted’ seems to imply that innocence is no longer an assumption, and that the working hypothesis is that everyone is either guilty or not yet (therefore, potentially) guilty. This is what results from the normalisation of surveillance in everyday life, and it’s one thing we warned most strongly against in our own Report on the Surveillance Society back in 2006. When even critical reports start using language that reflects the worldview of the people they are criticising, you have to be concerned.
Calling people ‘unconvicted’ and not ‘innocent’ matters.
Olympic surveillance legacies
David Loukidelis, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, speaking today at The Surveillance Games workshop, has made it quite clear that his office does not want the Winter Games to leave a legacy of securitization in the city or indeed, fear (as the Assistant Federal Privacy Commissioner, Chantal Bernier, put it), in the consciousness of its residents. In particular he argued that the 600 (yes, 600) cameras that are being installed at the Olympic venues and beyond should not be allowed to remain after the games. I hope that his office is able to deliver on this view, but I doubt that it will. As Kevin Haggerty and Phil Boyle have noted, security architecture is now an actual deliverable of the Olympics, and as many other researchers have shown, such architecture, including in particular CCTV but also adjusted local or national laws on the thematic and spatial limits of protest and freedom of expression (which, as Michael Vonn of the BCCLA and Chris Shaw, a leading anti-games activist, are describing at this very moment in the conference, are themselves often illegal and unconstitutional) tends not only to persist but to act as a kind of Trojan Horse for an expanded surveillance. And as Vonn’s group has also shown – the city is building a permanent CCTV control centre as part of the security architecture for the Games, and you don’t do that for cameras that are going to be removed.
ubisurv 