research – ubisurv

Ambient Government Revisited

A few years ago I was talking around the place about surveillance, security and “ambient government” (or “ambient governance”), but it turned out that so were plenty of other people and no one person really has a claim on this phrase or others like it. It was, somewhat appropriate, in the academic air at the time… and it still should be!

Looking back on it, I don’t think I’ve bettered how I discussed this back then, and I never fully published what I was talking about. So here is the vastly underwatched talk I gave in Victoria back in 2014. If you have 45 minutes to spare, I think it’s worth a watch. Plus, I look so young!

Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop

I am decompressing after our Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop last week: a fabulous few days of discussion at the intersection of space, cities, political economy, history, media and technology. There was no audience, no preconceived outcome, just some of my favourite scholars brought together for a few gorgeous autumn days in Ottawa to talk about ideas. This is what academia should be about but very rarely is.

The concept of the “post-smart city” is a deliberately provocative term, which I and several others have proposed, and which I am exploring in my current research. What I am trying to capture here is the plethora of different things that seems to be emerging out of the concept of the smart city, e.g. Platform Cities, AI Cities, Super Cities, Cognitive Cities, right through to weirdness like the Network State, and the bringing then together with libertarian and national projects for new cities as permanent experiments. I am thinking of “post-” very much in the sense of “post-modern” or “post-structural” in which the “post-” doesn’t indicate that the thing has been superseded but that it includes and builds on it taking it in new directions. However, I am also thinking of Latour’s critique that “we have never been modern.” Maybe we are in a post-smart situation, but have never really been smart… In any case, as a provocation for discussion, it worked really well in this context.

The main sessions were as follows:

“Zones of Interest” – Neoliberal Cities
“My Own Private Idaho” – Libertarian Cities
“From the Internet, Up” – Platform and Media Cities
“Fitter, Happier, More Productive…” – From Smart to AI Cities
“Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” – (Post-)Colonial Cities
“Cleaner, Greener, Meaner…” – (Un)Sustainable Cities
“A New Life Awaits You in the Offworld Colonies” – Extraplanetary Cities

I originally gave a prompt for each and encouraged the leaders of each session to do what they wanted with the subject. In the end, most adopted a fairly conventional presentation and discussion format, and the discussion was great but I am wondering how to do things even more differently next time:

There was a also a public event, on the first evening of the workshop, Rethinking our Futures in an Age of Crisis, featuring Quinn Slobodian, Ayona Datta, Orit Halphen and Nick Couldry in conversation with me. There will be further reflections and eventually a full report published by CIGI Online.

An enormous thank-you to…

My co-organizers: Vincent Mirza and Azadeh Akbari.

Those who accepted our curious invitation: Rowland Atkinson, Ilia Antenucci, Yung Au, Kelly Bronson, Nick Couldry, Raymond Craib, Federico Cugurullo, Ayona Datta, Mehdi Ghassemi, Orit Halpern, Olivier Jutel, Roger Keil, Casey Lynch, Tim Maughan, Kevin McMillan, Carolyn Prouse, Renée Sieber, Isabelle Simpson, Quinn Slobodian, Alina Utrata, Niloufar Vadiati, Catherine Vandermeulen, Dwayne Winseck, Liam Cole Young.

CSS/Lab and CLTS grads and postdocs: Jennie Day, David Eliot, Zimo Meng, Claire Wang, Aiden Bradley and Gabriella di Biaggi.

Those who wanted to be here but were unable to come because of inequitable visa and immigration systems and the climate of fear: Hend Ali and Ahmed M Eleish.

Our funders: SSHRC-CRSH Connection Grants, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and the Research Center for the Future of Cities, and the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS), both at the University of Ottawa.

Climate and the Working Academic

Part of the (re)growing night train network in Europe

I’ve been a environmental activist since I was in my teens. I stood for the Green Party as a student, I was a direct action activist against road-building, illegal logging on Indigenous lands, and much more. I’ve never learned to drive a car, and that was entirely deliberate. We built a Passive House, and are aiming at a net-zero life (you can read more about that here).

But there is one aspect of my life as a working academic that is difficult to reconcile with this, and that is flying. Air travel is one of the worst sources of greenhouse gasses and it’s even worse because the emissions occur higher in the atmosphere. And yet, academics fly a lot. Partly this is about conferences – scholarly associations do love to have their events scattered all over the world – but partly it’s about research – we have to go to places to do observation, interviews etc. etc. – don’t we?

Well, perhaps not. Or perhaps we are not being imaginative enough. The pandemic has shown that many smaller seminars and workshops can happens perfectly well via the internet, and with VR, that’s only going to improve. I don’t think our Surveillance Studies Centre seminars, which have been entirely virtual this year, have been worse, indeed we’ve been able to invite people from further afield than we would normally do. I’d also argue that a lot of more distant research visits could be replaced by a combination of internet connection and on-the-ground work carried out via partnerships with local researchers.

I don’t think we can replace the magic of face-to-face interaction and chance meeting and discussion entirely. But we can minimise the environmental damage we do. A lot of this is strcutural and therefore it is a matter for funding agencies, scholarly associations and universities. We should be seeing research funding taking into account excessive travel proposals when evaluating grant applications etc.

But I think it is also necessary that we take personal action, especially those of us who in the most priviledged academic positions. My personal climate pledge is this: I will take no more than one long-haul return flight a year from now on –– forever. I’m not going to be doing lots of short-haul flights either –generally speaking, I will take none– but I do leave open the possibility that I would take one very occasionally.

This is ‘inconvenient’ but it just means I have to take decisions about what I do, when, and where I go. For example, I know the Surveillance & Society / Surveillance Studies Network Conference is every two years, in Europe. This means I can plan for a month-long conference / research and friends and family visit trip in 2022: I’ll be doing 4 conferences (ICA – Paris, SSN – Rotterdam, EuroS&P – Genoa, Beyond Smart Cities – Malmo), a mountain marathon in Leichenstein, and visiting family & friends in the UK, all by train (mainly night trains) and ferry. 2023 will have to be a family trip to Japan, but could also involve a significant research visit.

If I’m invited anywhere else overseas outside of this, I will either insist on virtual presentation or if that is not possible, I will just turn it down. I’ve been working out how to get to places I might need to go in Canada and the USA. It’s possible to get to most major cities by train. You just have to accept it’s going to to take longer, but since you can work on trains, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the worst part of it is generally the Canadian elements: Canada desperately needs to invest in its railways and espcially in frequency and speed. It’s ridiculous that you can’t get to Montreal or Ottawa from Kingston much before midday. Anyway, we’ll find out how well this is going to work when I go to New York by train via Montreal, in April next year.

Now, who’s going to join me?

Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada

The New Transparency project is coming to an end, and we are launching our major final report, Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada / Vivre à nu: La surveillance au Canada, in Ottawa on Thursday 8th May (which is also my birthday!). The report is being published as a book by Athabasca University Press, so it is available in all formats including a free-t0-download PDF. We want as many people in Canada (and elsewhere) to read it as possible.

The launch will be covered by the Canadian press and was already blogged in the Ottawa Citizen a few days ago .

A website with resources and summaries will be here very soon, and there is also a promotional video / trailer here in Youtube.

Science Fiction post-9/11 (Part 2)

This combined social science / literary analysis lark is harder than it looks! Frequently asked questions of scholars who look at books or films at conferences always include one or more of the following: ‘why these books?’, ‘how did you sample?’, ‘what makes these films significant?’ and so on – indeed I had a bit of a go at an unfortunate PhD researcher at a conference last year on exactly this basis (sorry, Michael Krause, your paper was actually really interesting). So I have been trying to be systematic. So the first thing I did was to compile a longlist of English-language SF since 9/11. Basically, I went through all the major US and British SF award shortlists for novels from 2002 onwards. The awards I covered were: the Hugo, the Nebula, the John W. Campbell Memorial award, Locus, the Philip K. Dick, the Arthur C. Clarke, the British Science Fiction Association award and the James Tiptree Jr.

The reason for using awards was to address the ‘importance question’. I could also have used ‘best of year’ lists from a number of online publications and bloggers but where would you stop? In any case, many of these awards are already crowdsourced and fan-based, at least in their nomination procedures. Inevitably, some smart alec will say ‘but you didn’t include ‘award X’. Again, there’s a limit. So although the PKD (which only covers new paperback fiction) and the Tiptree (focused on gender) are relatively minor, they are well-regarded and expand the ground to include a lot more edgy and innovative work, whereas the Lambda award (LGBT sf) is pretty small. Likewise I did not include Canadian and Australian association awards because they tend to have a very restricted pool to draw on and the best authors from those countries are published internationally anyway and, in the case of Canada at least, are very influential in the international associations.

All the shortlisted novels for all the awards added up to about 350 novels: too many to do any kind of useful analysis of any more than the most superficial kind with the time I have – although I may come back to this longer longlist later. So I tightened my criteria to novels that had either won any of the major award or been shortlisted for at least two. This leaves me with 117 novels, about half of which I have already read. I am now in a dilemma. This is still too many to deal with. I did produce a shortlist of just award-winners, 68 novels (there were a few ties in some years for some awards), but can you consider a novel that won the only award for which it was shortlisted to be more ‘significant’ than a novel that was shortlisted for 2, 3, 4 or 5 awards but didn’t win any? And here I also got into questions of personal preference: with this selection, and this is even more the case if I reduce the list further to only novels that won an award and were also shortlisted for at least one other (38), a lot of the novels that I find most interesting and which I would like to discuss because 1. they are good; and 2. they actually make some interesting post-9/11 points, for example, Lavie Tidhar‘s Osama (nominated for the BSFA 2011 and the JWCM 2012 but not a winner) and Kathleen Ann Goonan‘s In War Times (the 2008 JWCM winner, but not shortlisted for any of the other major awards) drop off. So, somehow I am going to have to do make some broad considerations of the 117, and select within these on the basis of either representativeness with regard to some particular themes I identify from the broad survey, or just because I think they are worth discussing in more depth.

Canada and Mali

I’m privileged to be supervising some great students at all levels, but Jeff Monaghan is something else*. Not surprisingly for someone who previously worked with the awesomely prolific and engaged, Kevin Walby (now over in Victoria – who may be the young researcher I most admire in surveillance studies), he mainly uses Access to Information and Privacy requests (ATIPs – under Canada’s freedom of information legislation) as a basic method, and as far as I can see he is constantly firing these things off and sorting through them for revealing nuggets. Right now, Jeff is working in the way in which Canadian development aid, like that of many wealthy nations, is becoming increasingly entwined with a security agenda, what he calls ‘security aid’. Anyway, he’s in the news today because one of his ATIPs has revealed that Canada was engaged in planning for military intervention in Mali, of some sort, over a year ago, belying their apparent public reluctance to get involved right now.

Research News

This is just a quick personal update to say that my long-time collaborator, Kiyoshi Abe of Kwansei Gakuin University, and I, have been successful in winning a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship, for my project, Public Safety and Surveillance in the Global City: The Case of Tokyo. I’ll be heading to Japan for ten months from mid-June this year, where I will be based in Tokyo, and working with Kiyoshi (who is down in Kobe) and hopefully also with some great people from Meiji University. That’s when this blog will return to being much more of a research diary for my fieldwork again – it’s been a while!

Negotiating (In)visibilities

There’s an interesting new research network called ‘Negotiating (In)visibilies‘, one of those fascinating interdisciplinary collaborations (or collisions) that spans architcture, urban studies, cultural studies, arts and information (and probably). I’ve been asked to be an advisor and will also be giving one of the keynotes at what looks to be a really great opening confererence in Copenhagen, February 1-2 2012. Should be fun!

London Riots and Video Surveillance, pt.1

A really interesting map on the website of the US monthly, The Atlantic, illustrating the relationship between density of video surveillance cameras (CCTV) and recent incidence of rioting in London. There are many things one can get even from a simple map like this. It’s worth noting in particular that Wandsworth and Harringey are the residential boroughs with the highest concentration of CCTV, and have been hit by rioting. There are also places with both greater and less than average density of CCTV which have not had rioting.

Whilst you have to be careful not to mistake correlation for causality, and bearing in mind that this is not a statistically tested verdict, the main tentative conclusion one can draw is that there seems to be no relationship between the presence and density of CCTV and the occurence of rioting. This might seem like a fairly weak statement, but it is yet more evidence that CCTV has little deterrent effect on crime of this sort (and of course, the rioting is not only explicable as ‘crime’ anyway).

What’s Wrong with Video Surveillance?

Occasionally, you need to simplify and clarify. Someone asked me the other day, “so, what’s wrong with CCTV anyway?” Here was my quick answer.*

1. Does CCTV prevent crime?

The prevention of crime was the main rationale for CCTV in Britain back in the early days in the 1990s, and this rationale is still the main one currently in the USA…

But meta-evaluation of valid studies of CCTV by Welsh and Farrington, recently published as Making Places Safer by OUP, shows the following: that studies can only show a positive correlation between reduction in rates of crime and the installation and operation of CCTV in limited situations, namely in car parks and the like. This is because car theft is a more rational form of crime (the perpetrators are often professional criminals and they do not want to get caught). Most crime, especially street crime and violence is not so rational. People do not generally look up in their violent drunken haze and think ‘ooh, there’s a camera, better not kick this guy’s head in’.

According to Martin Gill and co.’s work evaluating 14 schemes across the UK, only 1 resulted in a clear reduction in crime over the longer term. CCTV can have temporary effects in reducing crime (and police studies always seem to be done in these early months and hence are very misleading), but over the years after installation, unless other things are done, the crime will return to similar levels. It’s those other things that are done – more community volunteers, neighbourhood watch schemes, better street lighting, economic regeneration – that make the difference to crime rates. People who think they ‘know’ it’s down to CCTV are just looking at A and B and thinking changes to A must be a result of B, without considering C, D and E…

What can be useful in this regard, knowing that temporary reductions can be made, is to use CCTV in targeted, temporary and flexible manner – i.e. if you are going to have video surveillance at all, make it moveable and used to target specific areas where there have been sudden increases in crime.

So, so much for prevention…

2. What about solving crime? Surely CCTV gives us lots of evidence?

Well, not as much as you might think. The biggest study of street robbery and CCTV in London (the city with the highest density of cameras in Europe), commissioned by the Metropolitan Police, showed that only 3% of such crimes were solved using CCTV . And, figures released in 2007 through Freedom of Information Act requests, showed that 80% of crime in London still goes unsolved even with this infrastructure.

3. But at least someone’s looking out for us – right?

Studies of control rooms show that the professionalism and seriousness of operators is increasing but there is still evidence that more time is spent on anti-social behaviour and dealing with ‘unwanted’ people than the potential for serious crime, particularly in shopping districts. Who is watched and why is also complicated by family and social connections, especially in smaller towns. CCTV systems are also increasingly difficult to watch as the numbers of cameras and screens increase; there aren’t enough staff, however well-trained they are, to do a really efficient job in most cases and computer analytics are not good enough (yet).

In addition, there is the growing issue of cost. There were originally subsidies for installing CCTV in Britain in the 1990s, but running costs, maintenance and replacement have to be covered by the operators (usually Local Authorities) and there is an ongoing row going on behind the scenes between LAs and police in the UK about who pays for it.

Now costs are starting to bite, exacerbated by recession and new Tory efficiency savings, some local authorities have even started to either combine their monitoring with others – meaning even more distant and less efficient watching and in some cases have stopped watching the cameras live at all (in many countries this dead recording is normal anyway).

4. What about the Courts?

The only undoubtedly positive effect seems to be that it encourages criminals who are caught to confess and plead guilty, which saves court costs and time – although of course, guilty pleas mean that the criminals are punished less and out of prison quicker (if they go in at all), which might be felt not to be an advantage by some!

Summary

Video Surveillance, particularly fixed CCTV, is expensive, inefficient and has all kinds of negative social side-effects. Public money would be better spent on improved street lighting, schemes for community involvement and economic regeneration. CCTV certainly isn’t a ‘Panopticon’ because actually it doesn’t actually ‘see’ very well at all nor does it actually seem to alter behaviour as much as states would like in itself, but it does appear to contribute to the decline of social trust and decreasing personal responsibility, which are partly at least to blame for the problems CCTV is supposed to solve, and all of which would be more likely to increase with other solutions.

*In most ways, this answer is not really ‘mine’ – it’s the distillation of many other people’s work, some of whom are mentioned here, some of whom like Clive Norris, Mike McCahill, Will Webster, Pete Fussey and Gavin Smith, are not… anyway, they know who they are! Thank-you all…