The New York Times reports that $24M US has been assigned from the Department of Homeland Security to expand the city’s CCTV camera system from downtown to midtown Manhattan (the area between 30th and 60th Streets). This of course is justified by Mayor Bloomberg on the grounds of security, with a large number of iconic buildings in the midtown area. However, it bears repeating that firstly, the 9/11 attacks did not come from the streets, and secondly, London already had a comprehensive CCTV system at the time of the 7/7 attacks and whilst they provided lots of pictures for the news media afterwards, they did not in any way prevent the attacks, and it is difficult to see how such a system could prevent any determined attacker. It may make people feel safer, at least temporarily, however even at that symbolic level, there’s likely to be as many people who feel uneasy about the idea of constant monitoring or the loss of privacy (although from my experience of the UK, the actual monitoring is far from constant or comprehensive, and most people also get used to that too). But, whatever the people of New York do feel – and there will many different reactions – they shouldn’t get the impression that they are getting actual ‘security’ (whatever that is) here. This isn’t a message many people like to hear, it seems, least of all those in government…
Category: USA
Pittsburgh police use sub-lethal weapons against protestors
Mega-events are often the time for some surveillance / control / security innovation and experimentation by states. In what seems to be a rather unwelcome first, the Pittsburgh police have used a military sonic canon to clear protestors off the streets at the G20 summit. These devices are among many so-called ‘sub-lethal weapons’ (see the article by Steve Wright here) that have been gradually migrating from military to civilian use for a number of years – see for example the ongoing debate over the use in the UK of the ultrasonic ‘Mosquito’ device, which is supposed to target young people; its makers rather cynically advertise it as ‘so effective that they tried to ban it’.
The particular weapon used by the Pittsburgh police is the Long Range Accoustic Device (LRAD) made by the American Technology Corporation, which generates a piercing noise that is not only extremely unpleasant, it can damage eardrums and cause heart problems. It was rather eeriely appropriate to see them being used (as you can on The Guardian‘s website) on the same day that TNI / Statewatch released their report on the security-industrial complex and a reminder that this is a global phenomenon.
US border surveillance pours billions into Boeing… and still doesn’t work
Federal Computer Week reports that the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) designed to provide secure and highly surveilled border systems between the USA and Mexico, is in trouble again. There have been major technological failures, cost overruns, and more with the result that the system is way behind schedule. Half the reason seems to be a political economic one. In many ways this system is a giant pork barrel for the Boeing Corporation, which has been sucking up US state subsidies for years and is taking literally billions of US dollars for this project and in unrelated federal recession subsidies. No-one seems to have really checked whether Boeing could really do the job, and like so many large state security and surveillance projects, and most things that have been tried on the Mexico border, it just doesn’t really work.
The article reports the new Director of the SBI, Mark Borkowski as admitting that “the program was first conceived as a quick implementation of existing off-the-shelf technologies […] In retrospect, it would have functioned better if a customized technology solution was developed to meet the requirements […] Some of the things we put into place, in hindsight, were not effective […] What we bet on, which was probably not a good bet, was that this was like buying a new printer for your computer. …We started the wrong way, in my opinion.”
The cost breakdown for the Department of Homeland Security is reported by FCW as:
$1.1Bn to Boeing ($620M for SBInet technology and $440M for border-vehicle barriers and fencing).
$2.4Bn on construction of fencing and vehicle barriers along the southwestern border
$6.5 Bn longer-term to maintain, monitor and repair the fences and structures.
Of course the ridiculous costs are bad enough, but the wider issues here are with the obsession with controlling migration in an economic climate in which the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has progressively stripped Mexico of any economic autonomy and made its (and by extension the whole of Central America’s) working class a reserve of cheap labour for US corporations and its relatively increasingly wealthy, a market for US consumer goods. It’s not surprising that the Mexicans regard it as more than a little unfair that they have been forced into a subservient position, yet are not welcome to come into the USA, and are subject to such harsh security and surveillance to prevent them from doing so. Added to this, as the Mexican President made clear last year, relaxed US laws on gun ownership have resulted in a massively increased flow of weapons into Mexico from the USA, which has exacerbated gang conflicts which thrive in the atmosphere of inequality and exploitation. And of course, the violence just adds to the reasons why people want to leave and find opportunities in the richer, safer USA…
In many ways, what richer nations are doing is not only prioritising their own security, but also simultaneously exporting their insecurity.
Moon protest highlights wider border surveillance issues
The mass mooning of the US balloon camera owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation went ahead, but the irony was that the system had already been disabled by the weather. Apparently a large thunderstorm cause a gash in the fabric of the balloon last week which, if nothing else, should prove rather more effective than the protest in making sure that the US government does not invest in it.
However the wider issue of the US surveillance of the border with Canada remains (not mention that of the Mexican border, already a major concern) and whilst this particular technology and the appropriately ridiculous protest, has attracted most attention in the media, let’s not forget that camera towers have been erected and the USA is flying UAVs along the border. Surely President Obama should realise that the paranoid policies of his predecessor do nothing apart from damage relationships (and trade) with a close neighbour?
Meanwhile, back in the USA…
Just when you though the USA might not be going down the same kind of vehicle tracking route that the UK, Japan and Brazil are following, former Congressman, longtime privacy advocate and erstwhile scourge of ECHELON, Bob Barr, reports in his Atlanta Journal and Constitution blog, that increasing numbers of jurisdications in the States are indeed investing in license plate reading systems. California seems to be leading the way, but there’s plenty of others states following, and no doubt this will be another way of wasting (sorry, investing) Obama’s massive recession-busting boost for security…
Locational Privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a very good little report on locational privacy, “the ability of an individual to move in public space with the expectation that under normal circumstances their location will not be systematically and secretly recorded for later use.”
As usual for EFF, it is written in clear, understandable language and is free-to-access and download.
* I’m going to be away up to the mountains for a couple of days, so there won’t be any more posts here until Sunday at the earliest… next week is a slow one here in Japan as it is O-bon, the Buddhist festival of the dead, and many people go back to their family home and offices are generally closed for some or all of the week. I won’t be doing much in the way of interviewing, but I still have quite a few interviews and visits from the last two weeks to write up.
India invests in surveillance drones
According to The Times of India, the Indian military is investing massively in boom military industry of the moment – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones).
The initial order is apparently for coastal protection and involves the purchase of Heron UAVs from Israel Aerospace Industries, a specialist in such technologies which produces everything from large payload drones to tiny micro-UAVs like the Mosquito, which can be launched by hand and is designed for “providing real-time imagery data in restricted urban areas.” The Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE) have also been developing their own drones in conjunction with IAI, the latest being the Rustom MALE.
Herons are supposedly unarmed but armed versions were used in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon by Israeli armed forces. The ToI article also makes it clear that Indian forces will be buying more overtly aggressive drones such as the US Predator systems that have been used to such devastating effect against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier regions. Far from easing up on the use of these remote-control killing machines, Obama’s administration has accelerated their use. They put fewer US troops in the firing line, and can attack remote areas, from where it is also very difficult to get an accurate independent view on their activities. However they are alleged to have been massively inaccurate, with the Pakistan government claiming that only 10 out of 60 missions between January 2006 and April 2009 had hit their targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders and 687 civilians, an appalling ratio.
With the advent of strategic bombing and then the ICBM, the Twentieth Century saw a massive increase of the role of remote surveillance in warfare, which was intimately linked to the growth in destructive power and the ability to not to understand the consequences in any direct or emotional way. Even with the tank and artillery ground warfare was not so remote, but now in the Twenty-first Century we are seeing surveillance-based, remote-control warfare becoming increasingly normalised. It is not surprising to see both hypocritical states like the USA and Israel intimately involved in the promotion of this form of conflict which looks cleaner and more ‘moral’ from the point of view of the user, but which in fact simply further isolates them from the consequences of their action. Real time surveillance turns everyday life in to a simulation, and drone-based warfare makes war into something like a game. And it’s a deadly and amoral game that increasing numbers of states, like India, are now playing.
Oh, the irony…
CCTV cameras prevent crime, do they? Well, they certainly don’t if it’s the cameras being stolen! This was in Florida, and I seem to remember that back in the mid-90s when video surveillance was first on the rise in the UK, this kind of thing was no uncommon…
Anyway, I know one should never condone crime, but with all the same ill-informed pro-CCTV propaganda being spread in the USA as was used in the UK back then, I am at least enjoying the irony…
Big Brother isn’t listening (at least in Maryland)…
Hot on the heals of my earlier post on the subject, I have just received the news that following the publication of the report in The Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Transit Authority have pulled the proposal to use audio surveillance on their buses.
However, an interesting thing to note in this supplementary report by transport correspondent, Michael Dresser, on the paper’s blog, is that the proposal apparently came about because CCTV cameras these days come with sound-recording built in, and that other transit authorities in Cleveland, Denver and Chicago use it. The MTA administrator responsible for seeking the legal opinion on audio surveillance is quoted as saying “It’s something that’s becoming the standard of the industry.”
So, if I am reading this right here, important policy decisions that have major implications for privacy are being treated simply as technical issues because the technologies that are being purchased have the capabilities. It’s only in this case because the MTA sought a legal opinion that we know at all, let alone that anyone objected. So how many other transit, police or urban authorities or commercial venues in how many places are now regularly using the audio capabilities of cameras without ever having considered that this might be a problem? And what other built-in technical capabilities will simply be used in future simply because they are available? What about the Terahertz Wave scanning that I covered earlier on?
In the USA, Big Brother is listening…
Well, according to the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Transit Authority will be listening if it implements a proposal for recording all conversations between passengers and employees on its buses. This is not the first attempt to introduce audio surveillance of the public. In 2006, in the Netherlands, a microphone system attached to existing CCTV cameras was introduced to supposedly prevent fights by detecting distinctive vocal sounds.
Now, there may well be problems with aggressive or abusive passengers in Maryland (although I’ve also encountered enough abusive drivers in my time!) but that does not mean that any kind of action is justified in the name of preventing or discouraging this. This, as in the Netherlands situation, is a problem of incivility (or ‘respect’ to use Tony Blair’s favourite policy word) but civility develops between people and cannot be imposed by authority or surveillance. What you get by going down this road, if indeed the strategy ‘works’ at all is simply a society of resentful, distrustful, quietude where civility is simply a set of superficial Pavlovian responses not genuinely felt values that people work to create and would want to defend. Problems of incivility are hardly going to he solved by trying to create an even more managed, automated and, fundamentally, desocialised and uncivil society. As the UK’s leading CCTV researcher, Clive Norris, remarked about the UK’s ‘shouting cameras’, introduced as part of the Blair’s ‘Respect Zones’, it is hard to imagine anything much more disrespectful of the public.
What’s particularly interesting in this story too is the way in which one form of surveillance can be used to justify another, producing an internal and self-replicating logic. The thinking is that as buses already have video cameras, then this is just the same thing, right? Stick a notice up saying you’re being recorded and all legal bases are covered. Well, no, I don’t think so. Let’s explore this further. I frequently record conversations that I have. Shocked? Actually, it’s part of my job as a researcher. I interview people and I record the interviews, but I do so with the full consent of the person being interviewed and if they do not want to be recorded, I don’t record them. However, there appears to be no room for consent around mass surveillance at all. It’s becoming clear that the (lack of) regulation of CCTV has set a dangerous precedent here, with consent being regarded as ‘impractical.’ It is really not enough in any accountable system of democracy to assume that the state can assume consent for surveillance measure on the grounds that to seek specific consent would be too hard. And in any case, the ‘acceptance’ of CCTV – even if one believes that the public does indeed ‘accept’ it rather than simply feel a sense of profound disempowerment with regard to video surveillance – does not mean that ‘anything goes’ as far as surveillance is concerned. An already dubious implied consent to one form of monitoring is not the same as consent to all monitoring. And of course, even if you did have some collective majoritarian consent, what does that imply for those in the minority? We already know that surveillance is targeted against minorities, so how can even a standard democratic procedure protect people here? Of course, this is what constitutional protections are for, and in particular in this case, the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution but the MTA appears to think that the precedent of CCTV means that this does not apply. Round and round we go.
This, in the end, is all about organisational risk management and simply treats the public as sources of risk and as potential offenders, not people with rights, and indeed people who either are generally or, given the respect and space they deserve, would be, good. But risk-thinking seems to override even those things we are used to seeing as foundational of our societies.
ubisurv 