Category: USA

No-one helps stabbed man

Cameras 'saw', people 'saw', no-one helped

The BBC is reporting that passers-by in New York failed to help a stabbed man who was bleeding to death on the sidewalk. Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax had reportedly tried to intervene to stop another man from attacking a woman and as knifed. That’s bad enough, but of course what the BBC don’t note is that although they state that this was all captured on CCTV, no-one stopped either the incident or saved Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax as a result of the cameras seeing the whole thing, either. There’s also a strong argument to be made that the presence of cameras may also be a contributory factor in explaining the reasons why passers-by don’t help: surveillance ‘deresponsibilizes’ them – they assume that someone behind the camera will intervene so they don’t have to. Of course, the predominant factor is more likely to be the simple, cruel prejudice that the man was clearly homeless and therefore not even of any interest to them. Contrary to what Bentham believed, being watched constantly clearly doesn’t make better people…

Chicago’s Cameras Continue to Increase

The Associated Press is reporting on Chicago’s ongoing efforts to integrate it’s public and private camera systems together into one seamless visual surveillance system of perhaps  10,000 networked cameras, including those in schools. This is a long way from the very limited ‘closed-circuit’ of the original video surveillance systems. There really isn’t another city that is doing anything close to this. London, for all it’s large numbers of cameras, is a patchwork of disconnected, often archaic, systems bound by multiple domains of regulation. Chicago’s network, in contrast, is being developed, through large Homeland Security and Federal stimulus grants, with connection in mind and regulation in the post-9/11 era is only to the benefit of the state’s efforts. The particularly interesting thing is the way the boundary of acceptability is continually pushed out by this process of connection and integration. For example, the AP story confirms that Chicago Police Superintendent, Jody Weis, has been quoted on several occasions he would like to add secret cameras “as small as matchboxes” to the network. And there are few critical voices.

Federal judge rules against NSA

A US Federal Court judge has ruled that the National Security Agency’s secret domestic wiretapping program of internal terrorist suspects, was illegal according to the New York Times. The activity violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which was put into place after the various inquiries into the activities of the FBI and NSA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As I’ve said before, that’s hardly a surprise and don’t think this has got a whole lot to do with George W. Bush in particular. Intelligence services might claim to operate under laws but in reality their priorities are not bound by them.But there’s a kind of cycle of collective amnesia that goes on with these inquiries and rulings. This time, the NSA was basically doing almost exactly the same thing as in the earlier period. Some minor superficial changes will occur. People will forget about it. The NSA will carry on. Then in 20 years time, there will be something else that will reveal again the same kinds of activities. Cue collective shock again. And so on. It would take a lot more continual public oversight and openness for them to be held properly to account, and if they were, they’d be very different entities. But that’s not to say that they shouldn’t be held to account: the fact that most democratic nations have what amounts to a secret state within the state that may have very different priorities than the official government or the people should be profoundly worrying. Yet it seems to be such an enormous breach of the democratic ideal that it goes largely unnoticed.

Google does the right thing, but…

Google is, as I type this, closing down its Chinese site as the first stage of its withdrawal of service from mainland China, in response to numerous attacks on the company’s computers from hackers allegedly connected to the Chinese state and ongoing demands to provide a censored service with which they felt they could not comply. The company claims that Chinese users will still be able to use Google, only through the special Hong Kong website, http://www.google.com.hk, which for historical reasons falls outside the Chinese state’s Internet control regime. Whether this will mean that the site will actually be accessible to Chinese Net users is debateable. Some say they cannot access it already. There are also numerous ‘fake Google’ sites that have sprung up to try to make some fast cash out of the situation.

But there’s more to this of course. Google has been widely reported to have opened its doors to the US National Security Agency (NSA) in order, they say, to solve the hacking issue, but the NSA only get involved in matters of US national security – if Google is essentially saying it is effectively beholden to US intelligence policy and interests, I am not sure that this is a whole lot better than bowing to China. You can be sure as well, that once invited in, the NSA will insinuate themselves into the company. Having a proper official backdoor into Google would make things a lot easier for the NSA, especially in populating its shiny new data warehouse in Utah…

Support Peter Watts

I’ve been snowed under teaching recently and haven’t been posting much. One thing has really got my goat though and I think it needs wider attention. Those of you who read boingboing will already know, but the SF author, Peter Watts (who wrote the excellent novel of really alien contact, Blindsight) has been convicted of obstructing US border guards and could spend up to two years in prison. This is despite the fact that the border guards lied about the whole incident (they claimed he had tried to choke an officer, when in fact they were assaulting him, a fact admitted in court). He basically got convicted for challenged the guards and getting out of his car to ask what was going on. As Cory Doctorow comments on BoingBoing, this is not about security, this is not about safety, and it is not even about crime as we would recognise it, it is about authority and the massive increase in humourless abuse that has increased so much in recent years, particularly on the US border*. Peter Watts was convicted essentially of not responding fast enough and questioning commands. He’s now posted more on his own blog, including some comments from some of the jury, who couldn’t quite believe the outcome…

Anyone who thinks ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ or truly believes that it couldn’t happen to you, read this a be concerned. Show your support for Peter too. Write to your congressmen if you are in the USA, or Members of Parliament in Canada, write to Ministers and Secretaries of State. Make a fuss. Write to Peter too and tell him you support him.

*And sure, there’s a context, but it seems to me that the post-9/11 situation is used as an excuse by rather too many guards to exercise a petty brutality on anyone who does not conform to their perception of normality. That critical point where liberty comes up against security is just as much about interpersonal encounters like this as it is about grand policy.

Mapping drone strikes

Via Boingboing, an analysis and map of US UAV drone strikes on the tribal regions of Pakistan from 2004. Some good stuff from NewAmerica. What is particularly interested, if not unpredictable, is the way that weaponized UAVs have in the course of just a few years become a ‘normal’ part of the US war machine, with deaths from drone strikes possibly doubling from 2008-9. We can’t be sure of the exact numbers.

Closing the Internet

A lot of my current thinking is based around the dynamic of opening / closing. I’ve been considering the way in which elements of state power, and in particular the military and intelligence agencies, regard openness per se as a threat. Now, Wired’s Threat Level blog (just about my favourite reading right now), has an excellent take on the response to what has been termed (in a deliberately mixed-up phrase) the ‘open-source insurgency’. This  is the way in which the ex-head of US intelligence, now working for ‘contractor’*, Booz Allen Hamilton, Michael McConnell. is promoting the re-engineering of the Internet. This is necessary, it is argued, because the current openness of the Net means that terrorists and criminals can flourish. This re-engineering would “make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable”. In other words to close the Internet. remove everything that is innovative and democratic about it, and make it easier for agencies like the NSA to monitor it.

Along with a whole raft of measures like extending ‘lawful access’ regimes, introducing corporate-biased copyright and anti-peer-2-peer legislation, censorship and Net filtering, this is an attack on what the Internet has become and to turn it into something simply for consumption – something, in other words, more like television. But there is another layer here too – the US military, I suspect, still has a nostalgic longing for when the Internet was its private domain. It’s a long way from its origins, and now perhaps the military want it back. But it isn’t theirs anymore, it’s ours and we need to fight for it.

* or, more accurately, arm’s length consulting agency of the US state.

US school spies on kids at school… and at home

There’s a really disturbing story on Boingboing concerning a US school in a wealthy suburb that issued laptops to students whose webcams could be covertly switched on by school administrators, wherever the kids were. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the school saw nothing wrong in using these cameras to spy on kids at home, and even issuing a disciplinary notice to one child who was apparently deemed to be guilty of ‘improper behaviour.’ Not surprisingly the school is now subject to a class action lawsuit.

School surveillance is a particularly under-studied issue, although recently, there has been the excellent new book edited by Torin Monahan and there will be a double issue of Surveillance & Society on surveillance and children coming out in March / April. It seems that because children either do not have adult rights (or their rights are not seen as important in the same way), states, school authorities and individual Heads and Administrators have all taken the opportunity to experiment with ever more  intrusive surveillance measures. Many of these were once justified with reference to concerns over truancy and attendance, or security and violence (the metal detectors in many urban US high schools, for example), and then there was health (used to justify the automated monitoring of what kids ate at meal times). But increasingly more petty and market-based issues have emerged: corporate data-collection and compliance with minor rules and regulations. All seemingly without any regard for the developing sense of autonomy, privacy or sociality of children.

Of course, the increasing use of surveillance in schools also serves an educative function in a surveillance society: essentially it indoctrinates children as to what is the ‘new normal’, what should be their expectations of privacy (and other rights) in a world increasingly organised on the principles of surveillance. However it’s good to see the lawsuit in this case and that some things still have the power to raise people from their apathy. But this is a school in a wealthy area with educated parents who understand and have access to the law – what would be the outcome in a school in a marginalized area?

European Parliament blocks EU-US data-sharing agreement

In a rare burst of sanity and concern for the rights of EU citizens, the European Parliament has exercised one of its very limited range of powers and blocked an agreement to continue the ability of the US government to access the Swift international bank transfer system. The parliament argued that the agreement, the descendent of a secret arrangement discovered in 2006, which came about in the aftermath of 9/11, paid insufficient attention to privacy. They are right. It doesn’t pay any attention to the safeguarding of citizens’ information rights, it merely confirms the terms of the undemocratic original agreement, one of a surge of such arrangements that were rushed through in the wake of the attacks when no-one was likely to pay much attention to things like human rights. Now, however, in an slightly less charged atmosphere, the Parliament has been able to demand that such rights should be respected in any transparent and accountable agreement. No-one is arguing that data should not be shared where there is a case for it to be shared, but this should not be at the expense of the rights and freedoms of which we are supposedly exemplars.

Pentagon seeks bids for 3D-surveillance system

DARPA are seeking bids for a high resolution three-dimensional battlefield surveillance system. The so-called Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS) program is looking to develop “a fundamentally new optical ISR capability that can provide ultra high-resolution 3D images for rapid, in-field identification of a diverse set of targets… for use in an active battlefield or hostile environments with designs tailored to allow for soldier portable applications as well as UAV integration.”

As Wired maagazine points out, the Pentagon are already deep into a virtual 3D surveillance scheme, the evily-named Gorgon Stare, that involves 12 cameras attached to Reaper drones, and DARPA already have another development programme called Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance – Imaging System (ARGUS-IS), which involves “a 1.8 Gigapixels video sensor”. There’s more details here.

Artist's Impression of the ARGUS system (Wired)

There’s no getting away from it: semi-autonomous robots and unmanned aerial vehicles are the new silver bullet for both military and civil uses, both in surveillance and warfighting itself. It’s about time more researchers and activitists paid this some greater attention…