Americas – ubisurv

The mundane costs of independent drones

It’s been an aim of developers for quite a while to develop more independently functioning surveillance drones that can fly around and recharge themselves in some way – whether it’s solar gliders in the stratosphere or, at street level, biomimetic bird-like micro-UAVs that can ‘perch’ and draw power from electricity cables. This was one of the original aims of the DARPA call that led to the creation of that beautiful marvel of engineering / dystopian nightmare surveillance tool, the Nano Hummingbird. If you are an engineer, this is certainly convenient and probably looks a lot like a ‘free lunch’ – there is certainly no mention of any possible costs or downsides in this piece on engineering.com. But as we all should know, there is no such thing as free lunch.

Firstly and most importantly, there’s the question of whether societies want either identifiable or camouflaged surveillance devices flying around us at all times. A mobile surveillance device essentially becomes even more independent and less limited by its construction if it can ‘feed’ itself. And while the US Federal Aviation Authority in particular has just recently put a bar on commercial drone delivery services (PDF), it certainly hasn’t prohibited other kinds of drone use, and many other national regulatory bodies are yet to decide on what to do, while drone manufacturers are pushing hard for less ‘bureaucratic’ licensing and fewer controls.

The second objection is less fundamental but perhaps more effective at igniting opposition to such devices. It might be that any single device would draw minute amounts of power from cables, but what happens if (or when) there are thousands, even millions, of these devices – flying, crawling, creeping, rolling, slithering – and all hungry for electricity? I would suggest that, just like the cumulative effect of millions of computers and mobile phones, this would be substantial and unlike the claims made for smartphones, this would be additional rather than replacing less efficient devices. And this is not including the energy use of the huge server farms that provide the big data infrastructure for all of these things. So, who pays for this? Essentially we do: increased energy demand means higher bills and especially when the power is being drawn in an unaccountable way as with a biomimetic bird on a wire. And unlike the more voluntary decision to use a phone because of its benefits to us, paying for our own surveillance in this way would seem to be less obviously ‘for our own good’ and certainly has the potential to incite the ire of ‘ordinary middle-class homeowners’ (that holy grail of political marketing) and not just the usual small-government libertarian right or pro-privacy and anti-surveillance left.

High tech class control

Watch this video from The Guardian on Camden, NJ. It’s ostensibly about police surveillance, and I was expecting to be outraged (once again…) at the use of over-the-top high technology – visual and audio surveillance – to deal with everyday crime.

But instead, what struck me was not so much the ostensible subject but the backdrop: the place itself. The areas patrolled by the officers in this film look almost post-apocalyptic. I’ve seen favelas in Rio de Janeiro that are in better shape, and many certainly seem to have more hope than this. Poverty and inequality in the USA, grounded in a history and present of racial and class exploitation, have become extreme. There’s no other way to put it.

And yet, outside of these places, which are everywhere across the USA, and ironically given the investment in technologies of visibility, the reality is invisible. The use of surveillance here is just a recognition of the lack of anything that amounts to a conception of a decent and fair society in practise, while people are still blinded by the noble goals of the USA as expressed in its constitution. This constitution means little to millions of Americans forced to live in these conditions, while being treated all the time as not even ‘potential criminals’ but simply ‘future criminals’, who will commit a crime at some point, and are destined for nothing more than to be churned through a carceral system that is in itself now a profitable and perhaps even essential component of American capitalism. However, this seems to have escaped the notice and concern of those who actually vote in elections and make decisions, whether they class themselves as liberals or conservatives, most of whom are so far removed from these conditions, physically and emotionally that they could not possibly understand.

This makes it even more bitterly ironic that The Guardian choses to title this report as ‘Minority Report meets The Wire‘, as if the only way to understand this is through fiction – that, somehow, it can’t be real. Yet here it is.

Harper’s nominee for Privacy Commissioner must be challenged

The current Canadian government has been in a lot of trouble recently over nominations to various federal offices. It’s been accused of cronyism, overly partisan, inappropriate and even illegal nominations to senior positions. Many have been rejected. It comes as no surprise then to find that Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has nominated someone who seems almost entirely inappropriate to be the next federal Privacy Commissioner.

The nominee, Daniel Therrien, has spent almost all his career as a government insider. If Therrien was a privacy expert, this wouldn’t necessary be an obstacle even to someone taking a job which is supposedly an arm’s length position, as much a watchdog on government as a government office.

If he was a privacy expert.

But he’s not.

Therrien’s experience comes mainly in corrections (prisons and parole offices) and latterly with immigration and border issues. He’s currently the Assistant Deputy Attorney General, Public Safety, Defence and Immigration Portfolio, at the Department of Justice. It is in this position that he has had some involvement with privacy issues, and in some ways, this involvement makes his nomination even more troubling.

Therrien was one of the leaders of the Canadian negotiating team that dealt with the privacy principles of the Beyond the Border Accord, the agreement that essentially allows the USA to extend its ‘perimeter’ around Canada (the original proposed version of the agreement was refered to as the North American Perimeter agreement).

So what do the principles say? Essentially they are a vague set of reaffirmations of well-understood data protection principles combined with the recognition of domestic laws. They don’t do anything specific or new. They certainly will not guarantee that sensitive personal information is not shared across borders or provide for genuine protection when they are. And it seems clear that while necessity and proportionality and data quality are all referenced, necessity seems to trump everything else. As the final principle on ‘Retention’ states:

“The United States and Canada are to retain personal information only so long as necessary for the specific purpose for which the information was provided or further used.”

But as we know from almost everything that has happened since 9/11, necessity is the mother of expansion.

In addition, most of the principles also use the phrase “in accordance with their respective domestic laws”, or similar. A paragraph on ‘Effective Oversight’ states

“A system of effective data protection supervision is to exist in the form of a public supervisory authority or authorities with effective powers of intervention and enforcement. These powers may be carried out by a specialized public information protection authority or by more than one supervisory public authority to meet the particular circumstances of different legal systems.”

Translated, this means “business as usual.” Canada can carry on having its system of Commissioners and the USA can carry on having its in-house Privacy Officers. This does nothing to resolve the issue of what happens when privacy laws and systems of oversight are in conflict or incompatible – as they frequently are.

The Prime Minister is quoted in the press release as saying: “I am pleased that Daniel Therrien has agreed to be nominated for the position of Privacy Commissioner. He is a well-qualified candidate who would bring significant experience in law and privacy issues to the position.”

I guess it all depends what one considers to be ‘significant experience’. He has some experience. But he is neither a privacy lawyer not a privacy expert by training nor has be become such by virtue of his career. And his limited experience is almost entirely in the context of the furthering of neoliberal trade and security agreements with the USA, it is not in domestic privacy protection.

Daniel Therrien may well have had an impeccable professional record. He may well be an excellent Assistant Deputy Attorney General. He may well be a good person. But none of those things are the issue here: Therrien is not “a well qualified candidate” to be the federal Privacy Commissioner. He could, like the current interim Commissioner, Chantal Bernier, legitimately be appointed as Deputy Commissioner in order to build up his qualification in the area. But as the Commissioner? No.

Luckily, this nomination is not a foregone conclusion. It must be approved by both the Senate and House of Commons, and Liberals, NDP and Greens have all voiced concerns already. I am adding my own voice to this in saying that this nomination must be challenged in the most robust terms. Personally, I also think it’s a great shame that the capable and directly experienced Bernier was not given the opportunity to retain the seat that she has only been keeping warm for the next Commissioner…

The Right to Watch?

I’ve always defended the right to photograph in public places. However, a number of cases in the last few weeks are highlighting an important new development in this area, a new front in the increasingly confusing information wars. Gary Marx always like to say that surveillance is neither good nor bad but that intent, circumstances, and effects make it so, but a growing number of people and organizations seem to be treating surveillance – or at least watching, and certainly not all watching is surveillance – as a right which supersedes rights to privacy. We’ve seen this in the case of Google Glass – even before it was launched commercially – and more recently with the arguments over the ‘right to be forgotten’ in Europe, with personal privacy being counterposed to freedom of information and actions to protect privacy being compared to censorship. It’s all somewhat reminiscent of Dave Eggers’ novel, The Circle, in which a Facebook-Google-Apple-a-like company completely turns around social values until, as one of the corporate slogans has it, “PRIVACY IS THEFT!”

The latest case is that of the use of drones / micro-UAVs / MAVs in the USA. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), the government body that controls US airspace, is trying to regulate the use of drones and has attempted to fine commercial drone operators who fly surveillance drones without their permission. The case revolves around one Robert Pirker, who used an unlicensed drone to film a promotional video back in 2011. At the moment the FAA is appealing against the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), who rule that it could not fine Pirker as it did have jurisdiction over small drones. Now the media has weighted in on Pirker’s side, arguing that the FAA’s stance infringes the first amendment and creates a ‘chilling effect’ on journalism.

I’m really not sure about either argument. On the FAA side, this is partly about a bureaucracy trying to keep control of its regulatory territory as much it is about the object of the regulation – the FAA does not want to be seen to be losing control just as the number of small drones is increasing massively.

On the other side, is this really about the rights of journalists? Pirker was making a commercial film not covering a story, and the effect of the FAA’s ruling being overturned is more likely to open the door to a corporate free-for-all, an absurd PKDickian world of drones as far as the eye can see, with all the attendant crashes and legal battles, could result. Think not? Well, back in the 1900s, people thought there would never be that many cars on the roads either… so it is certainly it is partly about their mandate, i.e. air safety.

The big question here, as with Google Glass and with Search, is whether technological change makes a difference. Is a flying camera just the same as a hand-held camera? Does the greater potential for intrusion, or on the other hand the inability to know that one is being filmed, matter? Does that possibility that ‘the truth’ will be revealed justify any technological method used to obtain it? If not, which ones are acceptable, whereis the line drawn, and who decides and how? In the UK, the ‘public interest’ would be a good basis for deciding, as has been frequently alluded to in the Leveson Inquiry into telephone tapping conducted by Murdoch-owned newspapers, however ‘public interest’ is a much vaguer term in the USA… what is certain is that conflicts around the ‘right to watch’ versus the ‘right to privacy’ and other human rights and social priorities are only going to intensify.

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.