USA – Page 3 – ubisurv

Occupy the Internet!

I’ve been writing for several years now about the creeping attempts by nominally democratic governments to control or even close the Internet (see here for example). This week the biggest such step for some time occurs as the world’s most powerful democracy, the USA, begins a new process of introducing such controls. There are two bills before the House of Representatives (the Stop Online Piracy Bill, SOPA) and the Senate (the Protect IP act), which essentially do the same thing (although the House bill goes further): assert a wide-ranging heavy-handed jurisdiction on the Internet even beyond US borders.

Of course, the US bills do not do this as China does, in the name of political and social order, but in the name of commerce. The bills are supposedly about protecting American intellectual property, however their effect is likely to be severely chilling to free expression and the dissemination of ideas and to innovation, social and economic. The bills, amongst many other provisions, will allow corporation to sue website owners and ISPs for even unknowingly hosting or communicating copyrighted materials illicitly.

As Michael Geist has shown, SOPA in particular also asserts US jurisdiction over vast swathes of the Internet on the grounds that any site whose name is registered with a US registrar is considered a ‘US site’ regardless of the location of its server and given that name-registration of top-level (.com, .org, .net etc) names is entirely controlled from within the USA, the provisions mean that every top-level domain is considered to be ‘US’. Further it claims that IP addresses (the numerical address of site) within the whole North American region (ARIN) which includes Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, are also ‘domestic’ for the purposes of this law. Basically, the USA is asserting a kind of Munro-doctrine for the Internet.

I wrote, half-jokingly, some time ago that the US state invented the Internet, but they don’t like how it’s being used and now they want it back: this is the demand in writing. The big problem in opposing this is of course the fact that US citizens have already been thoroughly bombarded with propaganda that has told them that they are ‘under threat’ from pirates and hackers and even cyberwar – and that openness makes them insecure. They’ve been told that the Wikileaks model of accountability through openness and transparency is an attack on the USA. In an age of economic insecurity, no doubt the protection of American jobs will also be wheeled out as an excuse.

But this is quite simply another manifestation of immoral corporate greed. Intellectual Property is in itself a kind of information-age enclosure, a concept that, while it may have some use in limited forms, has become so far-reaching that it is ludicrous, and through which financial and legal strength can simply steamroller traditional or alternative visions of fairness, sharing and openness – even though these things have been shown to be vital in real innovation. If this is an infowar, I know which side I am on, and which side you should be on, and it is not the side of Protect IP and SOPA and the negative politics of closure, it is with Anonymous and the Pirate Party, with open flows, open source and open access. We have to tell them that they can’t have the Internet back, it’s ours now. We have to occupy the Internet, to build around these attempts to stifle innovation and sharing and we have to do it now.

In the meantime, you can express your displeasure here: http://americancensorship.org/

See also: The Internet Must Be Defended! Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

GPS tracking goes mainstream

There is increasing evidence that US police forces are now using GPS tracking devices regularly and with impunity. Following court rulings at different levels which have left the legal situation unclear with only the Supreme Court left (this coming week), police forces across the country have been slapping GPS trackers on thousands of private vehicles, without warrants, and until recently, without the knowledge of those being tracked.

However, Wired‘s Threat Level blog has been reporting on the growing numbers of cases of Americans who have discovered GPS trackers on their cars, and in one particularly bizarre case, a device that was replaced by undercover officers while the Wired reporters were in the vicinity, having just removed and photographed the original device!

There are many pictures and manufacturers’ detail on Threat Level. Here are a couple…

GPS tracker in place:

GPS tracker disassembled showing souped-up longlife battery, including manufacturer’s details:

One of the more perplexing things about the use of these devices is what recourse the US citizen has when they discover them. If they are placed ‘legally’, do you have the right to remove or indeed to disassemble them? What would be done if they are removed? The experience of Wired would suggest that the device would be replaced, but how many times could this go on? At what point would the state take some kind of legal action to attempt to prevent the removal of a device? In the case of location tracking devices that are known about but unable to be legally removed, surely you have a situation that becomes equivalent not to simple (if it is even simple) unwarranted surveillance, but to electronic tagging.

Security systems and trust

Sometimes, little local stories give us the best insight into what living in a surveillance society is really like. This one is from a school in Virginia, USA. According to the local newspaper (via BoingBoing) a middle school student was suspended from school for opening the main door for a women who they knew who was unable to press the entry button because they had their hands full. The reason given by the school auhtorities is that the school has a secure entry system, in which people are supposed to press the entry button, look into a camera, and request entry. The student was suspended on the grounds that they were all supposed to know the rules, and that these rules were potentially of vital importance.

However this security-bureaucratic reasoning misses the key point that the child knew the adult concerned. Whilst security and surveillance systems are at least in part designed to respond to a supposed decline in social trust and an inceased ‘threat’ (which is very poorly supported by evidence anyway), there is good reason to suppose that placing what were previously matters of social negotiation into the hands of such ‘systems’, ‘rules’ and ‘technology’ further damages social trust.

Many questions then arise: what is this school, through this action and these systems, teaching kids about society? That security comes above all else? That no-one can be trusted? And that individual decision-making or social interaction is better replaced by impersonal systems? Surely, if education is the basis of the future of society, then what should be taught are the opposite lessons. This kind of subordination to systems is a form of training, of disciplinary control, not learning and education.

Corporate Privacy Redux

The Supreme Court of the USA has unanimously decided (pdf) that “corporations do not have “personal privacy” for the purposes of exemption 7(C) [of The Freedom of Information Act].”

This is a welcome decision which should set back further efforts by corporate bodies to claim ‘human rights’ as a justification for avoiding their responsibilities under laws mandating transparency and accountability.

Marc Rotenberg points us to a welcome for this decision from Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Good news all round for once.

‘Turning Off’ the Internet

Boing Boing contributors have been doing a fascinating job of documenting the place of the Internet and social media in the ongoing turmoil spreading across Arabic countries. Until recently the focus had been on the use of social media tools by activists, but in the last few days, the empire has struck back. In particular the Egyptian state has effectively ‘turned off’ the Internet, cutting Net access and communications between Egypt and the rest of the world.

What’s particularly interesting is that the rulers of western ‘democracies’ seem to want similar powers. I’ve been writing about the growing movement amongst states to develop powers to split or close the Internet entirely for some time (see here, here and here, for example). Most recently, I reported on French efforts to develop Internet censorship power in wide-ranging circumstances, and as Sean Bonner on BB points out, a bill was introduced into Congress last year by, it’s that man again, Joe Liebermann, to give the USA government even greater powers to cut off civilian access to the Net entirely in the event of a ‘cyber-emergency’.

This is not a drill, people, this is happening…

US border project cancelled… or is it just mutating?

Neoconopticon is reporting that the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) project is to be shelved and replaced with off-the shelf surveillance equipment (UAVs etc.).

The project which was based on contracts with Boeing and Raytheon, had been in trouble for some time. I reported back in 2009 how Boeing had basically wasted most of the money on the Mexican border projects on systems that didn’t work. Neoconopticon gives the figure of $3.7Bn for the project, but in fact estimated costs for the longer-term maintenance just of the Mexican fence component had spiralled to over $10Bn.

The original source for this news, Defence Industry Daily, has a good timeline.

I am left wondering however about whether this cancellation might have anything to do with the discussions that were recently revealed on the North American Perimeter project, which I blogged back in December last year. A complete North American perimeter might reduce the pressure to add further security to the US-Canadian border at least, and Canadian government funds and people could be leveraged by the US, as they were during the Cold War with the DEW Line and BMEWS. A summit on the issue between US President, Barack Obama, and Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, had been scheduled for January and was recently pushed back into February, which has given time for the decision on the cancellation of the SBI.

This could all be coincidence, but it is certainly interesting timing…

Corporate Privacy?

I’ve been arguing a lot recently that individual privacy, state secrecy and corporate confidentiality should be regarded as clearly separate things. Keeping this separation is important precisely because it stops organisations which we should expect to be open to inspection and accountable to us, from using ‘privacy’ as an excuse for avoiding such inspection. Philosophically, the distinction should be clear, but legally it may not be so obvious. One problem however lies in the nature of the whole notion of ‘incorporation’, which in its very language already assigns certain individual human attributes to organisations. And corporations are very much aware of this.

Marc Rotenberg points me to a very interesting legal test case in which the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in the USA is currently involved. This case originally started when in 2008 the Federal Communications Commission ruled that corporations could not use ‘privacy’ as a reason to reject Freedom of Information requests. In 2009, a court overruled this decision. And now the FCC, ironically aided by EPIC, an organisation which frequently finds itself challenging rather than supporting the state on such issues, is seeking to have this ruling overturned in the Supreme Court.

This strikes me as a vital case, not just for the USA, for other jurisdictions where corporations will be observing the outcome and seeking to bring similar challenges if they can. If privacy, and indeed any other fundamental human right, is to mean anything it can neither be granted to companies who find it simply a convenient cover for a desire for confidentiality, nor to states who seek to maintain secrecy. Clearly there is information possessed by corporations and by states that might have elements that could be damaging to personal privacy. Private individuals acting in a corporate or state capacity may perhaps in some clearly delineated circumstances have the right not to be personally identified, even more so for individuals from outside the organisation concerned, but the ‘what’ of the information should still not, by association with an individual expressing a desire for privacy or anonymity, acquire the protection of privacy.

The New North American Perimeter

Canadians have been angered to discover recently that a deal to create a new US-Canada perimeter security initiative has been going on behind their backs. This plan has been some time in the making, as we uncovered during our current research on border security. In particular, alliances of major corporations and US and Canadian government organisations have been planning together in the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) – who back in 2007 produced a document, Building a Secure and Competitive North Anerica (pdf), that seems to prefigure exactly what this ‘new’ soon to be announced plan will contain.

And already the state public relations machines have rumbled into place to prevent dissent. The government clearly has nothing but contempt for the Canadian Charter rights that this deal will damage (most notably those around information and privacy). And there seems to be no doubt that this deal will further embed US security priorities in Canadian-US relations, and effectively add an inner core of security to the economic layer of NAFTA (excluding Mexico, of course… no doubt the perimeter will continue exclude them, even while we exploit their cheap labour and resources). Indeed the ‘success’ of NAFTA (read: the success of NAFTA for business elites) is one of the reasons given for supporting this so-far unseen plan by five former Canadian ambassadors to Washington in an Opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today.

This first volley from the big guns seems to have come straight from the Ottawa PR stategy. There are references to ‘common sense’ and the ‘reassertion of sovereignty’ and attacks on ‘bellyaching’ and ‘knee-jerk anti-Americanism’. Indeed it is worth quoting the final paragraph in full because it is a masterpiece of old-fashioned continentalist propaganda combined with post-9/11 fear-stoking:

“Knee-jerk anti-Americanism is an indulgence without purpose in today’s interconnected, interdependent world. Our future economic prosperity relies on an efficient border, and we should welcome any agreement that smoothes the way for jobs and growth while toughening up our borders to security threats against both our countries.”

In this worldview, asserting sovereignty means giving it up, ‘interconnected and interdependent’ means allied with the USA rather than all the other multiplicity of friendships Canada had carefully crafted around the world prior to the Harper era, and security threats to the USA are seen as one and the same as those to Canada. In other words, we should hitch our wagon more firmly to Washington and prevent any return to that ‘indulgent’ Canadian emphasis on global security, peace-building, human development and human rights – you know, the values that once gained Canada respect around the world.

It’s quite eye-opening in a way to see former representatives of the Canadian state to the USA openly acting as US assets in Canada, clearly trying to educate the Canadian public in how to think and how to behave towards their rulers (sorry, slip of the tongue, of course I meant ‘neighbours’), and trying to preempt and predefine reaction to a plan that we haven’t even seen yet not least because people like this seem to think that Canadians don’t deserve to have a say in something that amounts to nothing less than the future sovereignty of their country.

(thanks to Harrison Smith for the NACC document and David Lyon for pointing out the Opinion piece)

Robot Warfare

28robot-span-articleLarge — MAARS ground robot (NYT)

The New York Times recently had a good article on the development of robot warfare, covering surveillance drones, and actual warfighting machines, inspired, it seems, by a visit to the annual ‘Robotics Rodeo‘ held by the US military at Fort Benning in Georgia every October. These things are only going to get more common and more sophisticated… never mind that they kill plenty of civilians, they keep ‘our boys’ out of harm’s way, eh?