research – Page 4

At the IT Strategic Headquarters

Yesterday we visited the Prime Minister’s IT Senryaku Honbu (IT Strategic Headquarters). (This has actually been the only national-level government agency that has agreed to speak to us, and some of the reasons for refusal have been rather telling, not least that of Houmusho (the Ministry of Justice), which claimed that they had nothing to do with privacy and so on, which betrays a level of ignorance about the effects of their own policies that is probably more the result of bureaucratic sectionalism and literalism than anything else but is nevertheless interesting!). The IT Strategic HQ is responsible for developing the ‘i-Japan’ strategy, the latest incarnation of what has at various times been called ‘Information Society Japan’ and ‘e-Japan’ policy. They are also the agency that wrote the most recent Japanese data protection laws, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

We were treated to a prepared presentation on the latest incarnation of the i-Japan strategy, in which the ‘i’ seems to stand for ‘inclusion’ and ‘innovation’ but not apparently for ‘interactive’, which one might expect from its use elsewhere in computing. However it was the brief interview we had afterwards that was more enlightening.

In short, the government has acknowledged that what they originally wanted out of juki-net has failed due to opposition, despite the supreme court victory that ruled that the current cut-down version was constitutional. However, as Kanshi-no! argued, they are not going to back down that easily. The movement towards the creation of centralised government databases will continue, and there most likely will eventually be a fully configured identification system (and card) and rather alarmingly, the new i-Japan strategy makes it quite clear that laws that currently prevent this from happening will simply be changed or removed. They do not want opposition groups, nor indeed the current global recession, to be able to hold up or change these plans.

However the main thrust of development of centralised databases has shifted away from juki-net and the jyuminhyo (residents’ registration) system, towards national insurance, health and pensions. This is, as the agency than runs juki-net, Lasdec, suggested to us – and I am now beginning to think that this suggestion was rather more of a loaded hint than I had first thought – by far the most data-rich area of government records and therefore in many ways more suitable for being the basis of an architecture of central registration and identification. The database that the government intends to create in this area will also have the possibility for citizens to add in (voluntarily, they say), information from private sources, such as bank account and other financial details. Of course this could be more ‘convenient’ in terms of benefits and taxes, but it also puts an enormous amount of previously private data in the government’s hands and presents a huge temptation to identity fraud and theft from both outside and, more importantly inside the state bureaucracy (and let’s not forget, most identity fraud is an inside job).

It gets more worrying still as despite the advanced stage of these plans, the government has apparently still not decided exactly who will have access to this database, and the police in particular, as well as private insurance companies, are still considered as potential users. It seems that although the IT Strategic HQ might have developed data protection in Japan but they do not appear to understand its principles of necessity, proportionality and consent – indeed I asked them about these principles and they really had no serious reply. Instead they claimed that people in Japan wanted to have these central databases because the current fragmented system had led to poor security and data losses, and in any case, ageing society and the pensions crisis meant this had to be done. I have noticed that in Japan, ‘ageing society’ like ‘terrorism’ in the UK, seems to have become the spectre evoked to silence potential criticism.

There are many other issues too: the government is also trying to introduce a voluntary system of Electronic Health Records (EHR), but this is not as developed as the Connecting for Health centralised database that is still experiencing significant problems in its introduction in the UK; and there are some rather less controversial social inclusion measures included the provision of computers for schools and so on. However my overall impression after leaving the IT Strategic HQ was of a government that was determined to press ahead with centralised collection and control of personal information regardless of the views of citizens or of whether it is really necessary even to achieve the policy aims they have. And this won’t change as the result of a change in government either. If, as seems likely, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP or Jyuminshuto) are voted out, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ or Minshuto) which will succeed them, has already said that it will create a central database.

(Thank-you to the officials of the IT Strategic Headquarters for their time).

At the Tokyo Metropolitan Police HQ

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police HQ in Chiyoda-ku

We had an enlightening interview, which will give me much to analyse later, with three senior officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu (literally, ‘Everyday Life Safety Division’) of the Keisicho (Tokyo Metropolitan Police). Interestingly, this division that was created as a result of the Seikatsu Anzen Jourei (Governor Ishihara’s 2003 Tokyo Metropolitan Government ordinance) and which deals with all the community security and safety initiatives, including CCTV, is separate from the Chiki Bu (the community division) that is responsible for the koban neighbourhood police box system.

Like almost everyone in authority we have met here, the police were convinced that they were not doing surveillance in using the cameras. They also confirmed that almost all of the CCTV systems operated by shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ associations) are not monitored and are simply recorded. They also stressed their deep concern for privacy and the rights of citizens and said that data from the police-operated cameras – of which there are around 150 in Shinjuku (the largest system with 50 cameras in the Kabukicho entertainment district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Roppongi and Ueno – was only kept for 7 days unless there was a specific reason to retain it. This is a legal requirement not just a police guideline. The police cameras are monitored both in local stations and in a central control room, but we were told that it was strictly forbidden for us to visit (unlike every other city in which I have done research) as everyone who enters has to be pre-enrolled in the police iris-scan security database.

We talked a lot about the history of the development of CCTV and of community safety initiatives in Tokyo, and Governor Ishihara’s absolutely central role in backing video surveillance became very clear (it’s a shame he has so far refused an interview with us!). What was also particularly interesting was that the police themselves did not think that apparently obvious ‘trigger events’ were as important as it might seem. For example, they claim that the police only really began considering the use of CCTV cameras not after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground but because of the influence of G8 summit security. One officer specifically mentioned the Gleneagles summit (which was just starting when terrorists attacked the London transport system), but this was in 2005, well after the TMG had already introduced CCTV, and after which the Tokyo police have not introduced a lot more cameras. So I don’t quite understand their point. It may become clearer once I have the complete transcripts… They also claimed that it was the Tokyo police rather than Japan Railways themselves or the Tokyo Metro authority who insisted on installing CCTV in the Tokyo transport network after the Aum attacks.

The officers talked a lot about community involvement. They dismissed the objections to their public space CCTV systems for several reasons, not least as I have already mentioned that they were not doing ‘surveillance’, but more importantly because they claimed to have done extensive consultation with local community groups, businesses etc. The claimed that they could not do anything without this support. This may have been true for Kabukicho, which was undoubtedly afflicted by an influx of Chinese gangs in the 1990s, but we heard from the local government of another ward that is being lined up for one of the new volunteer-based child safety camera systems being introduced from 2010 that they were given no choice by the police, and that local people were not happy about it. The problem is that this local authority don’t want to be interviewed further about this as they are in a rather delicate position over this new system.

(Thank-you very much to the officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu for giving us their time)

Big Mothers not Big Brother? Women changing Rio

The Guardian today has an interesting report on how women are getting to more senior positions in the police in Rio de Janeiro and changing the way policing is done as a result. I reported on my own observation of this back in April, an whilst there are many bright young female officers who want to do things differently, the top echelons of Brazilian policing are still a long way from being feminized and these young guns may not ever get much higher up to where policy is made. There’s also suspicions that such officers are being used largely for their PR value and to defend the police against being just another macho gang.

Of course, there’s more going on than just in the police. A whole generation of men lost to the drugs war has left women in more influential positions within community organisations in the favelas of Rio – we met several during our research. Considering the lack of effective state surveillance and the relative increase in power and local knowledge of these women both in community associations and the police in Brazil, I jokingly referred to them as ‘not so much Big Brother as Big Mothers’…

Community Safety in Arakawa

Far from the skyscrapers and bright lights of Shinjuku, where we had our last interview on community security and safety development (anzen anshin machizukuri), Arakawa-ku is a defiantly shitamachi (‘low-town’ or working class) area to the north-east of Tokyo just north of Ueno and outside the Yamanote-sen JR railway loop line that has for much of the last 40 years defined the boundaries of the richer parts of the city.

Bordering the Ara river and split by the Sumida river, it was traditionally a marshy place liable to flooding. It was also a place with a large buraku (outcaste) population and Minowa (in the north of the ward) contains the mournful Jokan-ji (or Nagekomi – ‘thrown-away’) temple, where prostitutes who died in the Yoshiwara pleasure district were cremated. The place has been hit hard by disaster. It was levelled twice in the the Twentieth Century, first by 1923 Kanto daishinsai (Great Kanto Earthquake) and then again by the firebombing in the last years of WW2.

Nevertheless, its rough, industrious, hardworking spirit has continued, and these days, despite the march of secure manshon (high-rise housing) down the post-war avenues, it remains a place full of small industrial units, especially recycling businesses and clothing wholesalers and manufacturers in Nippori, small bars and family restaurants, and lots of ordinary housing, even some of the last remaining dojunkai (early concrete public housing) constructed after the earthquake. It’s also the starting point of the last remaining tramway (streetcar line) in Tokyo, the Toden Arakawa-sen. I like it a lot and it’s where my wife and I have lived in Tokyo in the past, and where we still stay when we return (there will be more pictures in a later post).

It was natural then to turn our attention to the place as a case-study area, mainly because it is so different from Shinjuku and the other areas that have gained so much attention from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s recent initiatives. We met with three officials from the Community Safety section of the local administration: the boss and two guys who had been seconded from the city police and the fire service respectively. The boss was full of enthusiasm for the direction that Arakawa-ku has taken, which although they don’t use the term ‘machizukuri‘ is far more about real community involvement than some places that do.

Arakawa has no comprehensive CCTV strategy, although the police do consult with the developers of large new buildings on its installation. That’s not to say that they don’t have a certain degree of ‘CCTV envy’ of those places with the latest high-tech gadgets that Arakawa can’t afford, but they are not dazed by the glamour of cameras and are realistic about both the limitations of CCTV and the appropriateness of such systems for their city. Instead they concentrate on using and enhancing the natural surveillance capacities of the local communities. They make a great deal of use of volunteers, retired police officers and ordinary local people, who do their own patrols, including the delightful wan-wan (‘woof-woof’) patrol which, judging from the posters, involves mainly older female residents and very small dogs! Participation in the various community initiatives is encouraged through the use of techniques like professional rakugo (traditional comic monologue) performances in schools and community centres. They also run community patrols in miniature versions of police patoka (patrol cars), which not only look more friendly but unlike the US-style police cars can get through much narrower streets.

However these diverse community projects are being stitched together in quite an innovative way, with the use of small anzen anshin sutashion (security and safety stations), which are a bit like community versions of the police koban, the miniature two-person police boxes which dot the city. Indeed the officials referred to them as minkan koban (‘people’s koban’). These small help stations, staffed mainly by ex-police don’t just provide ‘security’ information, they also deal with social security in the broader sense, offering help for older people with benefits, for example. In almost all cases, they have replaced koban that were closed by the police. So one could argue that this is essentially the local authority being forced to pick up the bill for services that used to be provided by the police and at the same time is actually losing real police service. However, the strategy overall is a valiant attempt to make ‘community safety’ less an issue of exclusionary security and more one of inclusivity and community development, more a natural and intimate part of everyday life that does not involve new forms of external control.

Of course, crime isn’t really a massive issue here anyway. Arakawa has consistently had the second or third lowest crime rates of all the 23 Tokyo wards. But even since the introduction of these initiatives, crime has fallen still further from the relative high point it reached a few years ago. And hardly a CCTV camera in sight…

Tokyo Brandscaping and the SuiPo system

Brandscaping is a term used in marketing to describe the metaphorical landscape of brands (either for a particular brand, company or sector), however it is also being used by some researchers, including me, to describe the way in which brands are being infiltrated into urban landscapes, with the ultimate aim of being ‘inhabitable’ perhaps even 24/7 (see for example Disney’s move into urban development with Celebration in Florida).

Contemporary brandscaping makes use of new ambient intelligence, pervasive or ubiquitous computing technologies (‘ubicomp’) and ubiquitous wireless communications to create a landscape in which the consumer is targeted with specific messages directing them to certain consumption patterns. Such communication cans of course be two-way and provide corporations with valuable and very personal data on consumption patterns. As I’ve argued in many presentations over the last few years, ubicomp is necessarily also ubiquitous surveillance (what I call ‘ubisurv’ – hence the name of this blog!) because to work it requires locatability and addressability. Japan, and Tokyo in particular, has been the site for a number of cutting edge experiments in this regard, including the ‘Tokyo Ubiquitous Technology Project’ which embedded 1000 RFID tags which can communicate with RFID-enabled keitai (mobile phones) in upscale Ginza as well as several other pilot schemes around Ueno Park and Shinjuku.

TUTP is not all about marketing surveillance however, part of the scheme has involved ‘Universal Design’ (UD) principles, with one experiment to embed chips in the yellow tactile tiles designed to help guide sight- and mobility-impaired people around the city so that useful access information could be passed through specially-enabled walking sticks. I’m very interested in such experiments as they indicate an alternative direction for ubicomp environments which are about genuinely enabling people who are currently disabled by social and architectural norms, and creating a richer sensory landscape. They show that both surveillance and ‘scary’ technology like RFID chips can be humanised.

Unfortunately in our consumer-capitalist world (and Tokyo is the exemplary city of hyper-consumption), marketing and building brandscapes tends to take priority over enabling the excluded and the disadvantaged. But there are different ways of doing this too, which can be more or less intrusive and consensual. The other day I was talking about the growth in functionality of the Suica smart travel card system. Suica-enabled keitai can now, be used buying all sorts of things and since 2006 there have been a growing number of ‘SuiPo’ (short for ‘Suica Poster’) sites, Suica-enabled advertising hoardings that will, on demand send information to your mobile e-mail address with on particular advertising in which you are interested if you pass your Suica card or phone over a scanner placed next to the poster (see photos below)

The difference between SuiPo and the Ginza RFID scheme however is that it with SuiPo is that it is the consumer who makes the choice whether to activate any particular poster’s additional information system. In this sense it is a development of the i-Mode system in which many keitai can read information from special barcodes embdedded in magazine advertisements. It doesn’t automatically call your phone every time you pass an enabled poster, once you have signed up. Not as high-tech but slightly more consensual. However this will, of course, lead to the accumulation of a lot of data on consumption interests. This potentially generates a massive consumer surveillance tool, because it can be linked up travel patterns (your registered Suica card sends information back on where you go – I was wrong about the absolute differences between London’s Oyster and Tokyo’s Suica systems the other day) and information about consumption.

So will this potential become reality? The page on privacy and data protection on the SuiPo website (as usual the link is hidden away at the bottom of the front page!), is pretty standard stuff except for the legitimate purposes for which the data can be used once you sign up. They are, for those who don’t read Japanese, for:

Sending the specific requested information to you;
Improving services;
Data processing and analysis;
JR East’s promotional marketing; and
JR East customer questionnaires.

Purposes 2 and 3 pretty much allow JR to do anything it likes with the data once you have signed up, and there is no statement as to what can or cannot be done with data once it has been ‘mined’ – analysed and transformed into more useful to the company or other organisations (corporate or state) which might want to buy or access such knowledge. ‘Ubisurv’ indeed…

Place your card here!

SuiPo information

SuiPo reader

A juki-net footnote

I had a conversation yesterday (not a formal interview) with Midori Ogasawara, a freelance journalist and writer who used to report on privacy issues for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. This was mainly to set up further interviews with those who are or were involved with campaigns on surveillance and privacy issues in Tokyo. However I also managed to clarify a few of my own questions about juki-net and the opposition which it attracted.

In short, there seem to have been several objections.

First of all was the objection to the idea of a centralised database, which was able to link between other previously separate databases.
Secondly, there was the fact that this was the national state asserting authority over both local government and citizens. Both Local Authorities and citizens groups had argued for ‘opt-in’ systems, whereby firstly, towns could adopt their own policies towards juki-net, and secondly and more fundamentally, individual citizens could decide whether they wanted their details to be shared.
The third objection was to there being a register of addresses at all. Many people saw this simply as an unnecessary intrusion onto their private lives, and in any case, the administration of welfare, education and benefits worked perfectly well before this (from their point of view) so why was such a new uniform system introduced?
Next there were objections based on what was being networked. The jyuminhyo (see my summary from the other day) is not actually a simple list of individuals and where they live, but is a household registry. It might not, like the koseki, place the individual in a family line, but is still a system based on patriarchal assumptions, with a designated ‘head’ of the household, and ‘dependents’ including wives and even adult children.
Finally, there was the question of the construction of an identification infrastructure. Whether or not juki-net is considered as an identification system, and it does have a unique identifying number for each citizen, and has the potential to be built on to create exactly such a comprehensive system of national identification. Lasdec, who we talked to the other day, may not approve of this, or believe it will happen, but they are only technicians, they are not policymakers and don’t have the power or the access to know or decide such matters. And in the end, if they are required by law to run an ID system then they will have to run it.
There were, as I already mentioned, objections to the potential loss or illicit sharing of personal information. I don’t think this is intrinsic to juki-net, or indeed to database systems, but of course both databases and networks make such things easier. People are also quite cynical about promises of secure systems. Lasdec may say that that juki-net is secure, but there have been enough incidences of government data leaks in the past for people not to accept such assertions.
Finally, Juki-net connects to the border, passport and visa system. The reason that foreigners will finally be included on the jyuminhyo (and therefore juki-net) from 2012 is not therefore to respond to long-term foreign residents’ requests for equal treatment but in fact to make it even easier to sort out and find gaikokujin, check their status, and deal with unofficial and illegal migrants. Groups campaigning for the rights of foreign workers (mainly the exploited South-East Asian and Brazilian factory workers) have therefore been very much involved. Of course it also makes it possible to connect the overseas travel of Japanese people to a central address registry.

I’ll be meeting Midori again soon, I hope, along with other researchers and objectors. I am also still hoping to be able to talk to officials from the Homusho (Ministry of Justice) and the Somusho (Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts & Telecommunications), but they are are currently passing around my request to different offices and generally delaying things in the best bureaucratic traditions!

Identification in Japan (Part 2): Juki-net

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the big developments in state information systems in Japan in recent years has been the development of the jyuminkihondaichou network system (Residents’ Registry Network System, or juki-net). Very basically juki-net is a way of connecting together the 1700 (recently restructured from 3300) local authorities’ residents’ registries (jyuminhyo). These are a record of who lives in the area and where, that are held on a multiplicity of different local computer (and even still, paper) databases. Japanese government services are always struggling to catch up with massive and swift social changes, particularly the increased mobility of people, that made first the Meiji-era koseki (family registers) and then the disconnected local jyuminhyo (which were both themselves introduced to deal with earlier waves of increased social and spatial mobility) inadequate.

Operational from 2002, juki-net is restricted by law to only transmitting four pieces of personal data (name, sex, date-of-birth and address), plus a randomly-generated 11-digit unique number. Nevertheless, the system was strongly opposed and has sparked multiple legal challenges from residents’ groups who did not want to be on the system at all, and who considered the risk of data leakage or privacy violation to be too great for the system to be lawful. These challenges were combined together into one class-action suit, which finally failed at the highest level, the Supreme Court, in March 2008. The court ruled that juki-net was constitutional and there was no serious security risk in the system itself but according to some analysts did not address the possibility of mistakes being made by operatives. But this would seem to me to be a problem of data protection in general in Japan, rather than an issues that is specific to juki-net. Like Brazil, but unlike Canada and the UK for example, Japan has no independent watchdog agency or commissioner for safeguarding privacy or kojin deta (personal data), and other than internal procedures, the courts are the citizen’s only recourse. In any case, as Britain’s comparatively frequent incidence of data loss by public authorities shows, even having such a system does not necessarily make for better practice. There is in Japan, as in Britain, training and advice in data protection provided by a specialist government information systems agency.

We interviewed officials at that government agency, Lasdec (the Local Authorities Systems Development Centre) today. Lasdec also developed and runs juki-net and is responsible for the new jyuminhyo / juki-net card that enables easy access to local (and some national) services via the web or ATM-like machines at local government offices. Unsurprisingly they were quite bemused by the opposition to juki-net, which they say was based on a lack of understanding amongst citizens about what it was, and a general fear of computers and databases. They argued that many people (including one or two local authorities) had the impression juki-net was, or was planned to be, an extensive database of all personal information held by different parts of the government, or even was the basis for a new system of national identification or indeed was a new system of national identification – indeed that was the impression one got from reading both Japanese and foreign civil and cyber-liberties groups’ reports in 2002/2003 with plenty of stories of the new Japanese ‘Big Brother’ system (see the archived collection here for example).

However Lasdec argued that both ideas were incorrect. The officials recognised both that the 11-digit unique number was adapted from a previous failed identification scheme, and that juki-net could in theory become the basis for any proposed future national ID scheme, but this was prevented by the enabling law. In any case juki-net was not even the best existing system on which to base an ID system: passport, driving licence and healthcare databases all had more information and certainly information with higher levels of personal identifiability – and no-one seems to be objecting the amount of information contained on the driving licence system, for example. Juki-net has no photos or other biometric data and no historical information. Likewise the residents’ card can have a photo if the resident wishes, but this is not shared through juki-net, and in fact the card itself is entirely voluntary. In addition, only in one city has take-up of the card exceeded more than 50% of the adult population (Lasdec has detailed information on take-up but only published a ‘league table’ without percentages). You also do not lose anything by chosing not to have or use the card.

The officials at Lasdec were, as with many technical and systems engineers in both public and private sectors whom I have interviewed, far more aware of privacy, data protection and surveillance issues than most politicians and mainstream (non-technical) government officials. They did not shy away from the terms kanshi (surveillance) or kanshi shakai (surveillance society) and indeed were as critical of the unregulated spread of things like CCTV in public space as many activists. They saw themselves in fact as controllers of information flow as much as facilitators. They were committed to the minimalist model of information-sharing set out by the law governing juki-net and wanted to find always the ways that information that was necessary to be shared could be shared without the creation of central databases or the exchange of additional unnecessary information. In addition, new laws came into force (in 2006), which make the residential information more private than it was before. In fact, such local registers used to be entirely public (anyone could access them), and now they are far more restricted – this only seems to have been noticed by direct marketing firms, who of course were not 100% happy with this change.

This puts me into a strange position. I have colleagues here who have been utterly opposed to juki-net, and I have always assumed that it was in some way similar or equivalent to the UK National Identity Register / ID card scheme. However in fact, it seems very similar to the ‘information clearing house’ idea which I and others have proposed for the UK, in opposition to the enormous NIR which would seem to suck in every kind of state-held information on the citizen! In addition juki-net does not require any more information from the Japanese citizen than is already held by the state, again unlike the NIR in the UK, for which multiple new forms of information are being requested by the state and indeed there are fines, and ultimately prison sentences, proposed by law for refusal to give up or update such information. In contrast, juki-net is more like the electoral register in the UK, to which hardly anyone objects.

This all makes me wonder exactly what it is that provoked such vociferous opposition to juki-net. If it is a actually or potentially repressive surveillance system, somewhat like Barthes’ famous description of Tokyo, it is one with an empty centre; there is no ‘Big Brother’ only a rather well-meaning set of bespectacled technicians who are just trying, as they see it, to make things work better so that people don’t have to keep proving who they are every time they move to a new area. Perhaps there are particular cultural and political factors (that is after all the working hypothesis of this entire project – and perhaps in making assumptions about both systems and oppositions across borders we obscure the specifics). Perhaps it is the association of the 11-digit number with previous proposed ID schemes. Perhaps, as in Germany, in new government information systems, there are resonances with older systems of identification and control that hark back to more repressive, fascist, times. Or perhaps there is a general cynicism of successive government ‘information society’ / ‘e-Japan’ / ‘i-Japan’ strategies and initiatives, each of which promise empowerment and in practice deliver more bureaucracy. These are some questions I need to explore further with other officials academics and activists.

Identification in Japan (Part 1)

Just as I did in Brazil, I am going to be looking a little at the way in which systems of government information and identification work in Japan.

One of the immediately obvious things is that Japan has no national system of ID cards. Instead, as in the UK, the Driving Licence is used as a de-facto ID. The Japanese Driving License until recently was rather like that in Brazil, in that it connected to individual strongly to the family though carrying the honseki, the address where the koseki (family registration) was registered. However, this section can now be left blank and may be removed altogether in the future. The current driving license has a photo but no other biometric data, and whilst being a plastic card with a credit card form factor, is not any kind of smart card. There’s a really nice photo-essay on the process of obtaining a Japanese driving license on super-otaku, Danny Choo’s site.

The koseki is a very traditional way of registering people based on their family’s place of origin or residency and can often stretch back many generations with details of parents, grandparents etc. The individual is no more than one name on this register. The koseki is simply a computer record these days, although paper print-outs are used in more formal identification procedures, but very few people carry a copy of their koseki around with them.

In addition to the koseki, there is a jyuminhyou (Residents’ Register), a current address register, which every local authority keeps. As with the koseki, there was an associated old paper certificate for many years. In 1999, the old Resident Registration Law was updated and came into effect in 2002 and this included a provision to introduce a voluntary Resident Registration Card. This is a smart card, and is supposed to make access to local services easier, though some see it as a precursor to a full national ID-card scheme, especially as from 2004 the card could also be used to do other things online, like tax-returns. The suspicions are also because of the way in which the card as introduced along with a new system for connecting up all the local authority residents’ registry systems in Japan, juki-net. I’ll write more about this tomorrow as we are going to talk to the official responsible for the implementation of the card and juki-net at Lasdec, the Local Authorities Systems Development Center.* On Friday afternoon, I will also be meeting up with Ogasawara Midori, a freelance journalist who specialized in covering the juki-net controversy and is also a former student of my future boss, Professor David Lyon.

There is of course an exception to the lack of national ID. Foreign residents often get very upset that they are forced to carry the gaikokujin touroku shoumeisho (Certificate of Alien Registration). This is seen as discriminatory and it is particularly so in the case of families who are identified by the state as ‘Korean’ or ‘Chinese’, whose increasingly distant ancestors came from those countries. The gaikokujin touroku shoumeisho was also particularly controversial as it included fingerprinting requirements for Koreans and Chinese that were seen as a product of the colonial period, but which were only removed in 1999. But then, following on from reactions to 9/11, and G8 plans for standardized biometric passports and visas, they were reintroduced in 2007 along with fingerprinting and facial photographs of all foreigners at the border. In one small progressive step however, permanent Korean and Chinese residents would not have the ‘colonial stigma’ reintroduced.

Foreigners are also not included on the jyuminhyou except at the discretion of local officials, although indications are that they will be included from 2012 when the system in further rationalised, although it is probably down to the campaigns for change from naturalised and long-term foreign residents like Ardudou Debito.

*Although as I am also going ‘out on the town’ with an important figure in Shinjuku urban planning (and regular in the Golden Gai stand-up bar neighbourhood), I might not get round to writing this sequel up until Friday morning.

Resident Registration Card

Mega-events, Security and Surveillance

The connection between what are often called ‘mega-events’ (international summits, major sporting competitions etc.), securitization, and he intensification of surveillance is becoming a very interesting area and one which we wrote about in our recent book on urban resilience. I am writing some further stuff on this with Kiyoshi Abe on how mega-events have been managed in Japan.

It seems that in general, such events are either used as ‘test-beds’ for new technologies and procedures which are then either continued afterwards (as with The Olympic Games and CCTV in Greece in 2004 and The FIFA World Cup and video surveillance in Japan/Korea in 2002), or become ‘islands’ of temporary exemption where normal legal human rights protections are reduced or removed and whole areas of public space are often literally, fenced off (as in Rio de Janeiro for the Pan-American Games of 2007, whose model will apparently be extended to include walling off the poor favelas in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup). There’s going to be a very interesting conference on The Surveillance Games later this year to tie in with the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Now The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the London Olympics 2012 may make use of a proposal originally designed to stop the proliferation of unofficial commercial advertising near games venues in order to prevent protest. The legislation even allows police to enter private houses to seize material.

Of course the government say that they have no plans to use it in this way, but it’s interesting to see the way in which the ‘standards’ being imposed by such travelling cicuses of globalization tend to end up looking more like the authoritarian regime in Beijing (host of the highly securitized 2008 Olympics) than the supposedly liberal west, whilst at the same time promoting a very controlled but highly commercialized environment. Even the original purposes of the 2006 law (necessary for London to host the Games) are an interesting reflection of the massive corporate interests involved in the Olympics, for which they apparently need a captive and docile audience.

How Many CCTV Cameras are there in Britain? (Part 6)

BBC’s Newsnight current affairs programme has used the Freedom of Information Act to ask almost 100 Local Authorities in the UK how many video surveillance cameras they operate. There are some really nice graphics here, which demonstrate what a ridiculous number of cameras we have, and particularly the way in which CCTV is becoming seen as ‘normal’ in all areas, not just big cities.

This brings up the discussion we were having earlier in the year with David Aaronovitch of The Times and Paul Lewis of The Guardian (see here, here, here, here and here!), who claimed that members of Surveillance Studies Network had knowingly fabricated figures. In fact these were scenarios and broad guesstimates and never presented as anything more than that. Newsnight in common with most media doesn’t get this either and thinks that its survey means that “there are almost one million fewer CCTV cameras in the UK than previously thought.”

However there survey was only of Local Authorities. It did not cover private systems in public open space or quasi-public space like transport systems (railways, buses and the underground) and shopping malls, let along cameras in private space. The guesstimates made by Clive Norris and Mike McCahill way back in 2001 included all cameras in public space. Norris and Gary Armstrong’s little scenario of being spotted by up to 300 cameras a day most certainly included purely private ones too – as did a real life version of the same kind of scenario conducted by The Times earlier this year – in fact, private cameras covering public space were almost twice as numerous as state ones. So in fact there are probably many more CCTV cameras than “previously thought.” The important thing is that there is almost no control over their proliferation whether nominally ‘public’ or ‘private’ and, as I wrote the other day, almost nothing apart from conscience that seems to be stopping operators from using ‘augmented’ CCTV because extra functionality like audio comes as standard on camera units these days.

For me, of course, the really interesting figures are the international comparative ones: that there are more cameras operated by the average London borough than by the whole metropolis of Tokyo. Yet in other ways, the figures are probably closer – Tokyo is as comprehensively covered as London in terms of public transport. Nothing is quite as clear-cut as it seems if you restrict the research to one type of camera system. Still, thank-you very much to the Newsnight researchers for performing a useful public service!