My headline is a slightly more accurate version of the way that news of the new ‘Space Fence’ system has been headlined, for example here in Computerworld. The Space Fence system, whose first stage is a $30 Million US project for Northrop-Grumman, will replace a 1961 VHF radio infrastructure known as the Air Force Space Surveillance System built in 1961.
Although the spin is that the system is all about tracking space debris, this is actually part of the DoD’s satellite tracking operations – which certainly does cover debris, insofar as they are a threat to US satellites, but is also crucially to make sure that an accurate picture of the increasing number of smaller ‘micro-satellites’ from an every-expanding number of countries can be obtained. In that sense, this program is indeed a ‘fence’, a further attempt to enforce the notion that space is effectively US territory.
Following in the footsteps of leading urbanists like Mike Davis and Michael Sorkin, is a project led by Dr Jeremy Nemeth, an assistant professor at University of Colorado. which traces the degradation, securitization and privatization of what we used to optimistically refer to as ‘public space’. This project aims to map and quantify the space in three contemporary cities (New York, Los Angeles and San Fransisco) now restricted in the name of security. The website is online now, and their findings are summarized on the front page:
“Even before [the 9/11] terror attacks, owners and managers of high-profile public and private buildings had begun to militarize space by outfitting surrounding streets and sidewalks with rotating surveillance cameras, metal fences and concrete bollards. In emergency situations, such features may be reasonable impositions, but as threat levels fall these larger security zones fail to incorporate a diversity of uses and users.
Utilizing an innovative method developed by our interdisciplinary team, we find that over 17% of total space within our three study sites is closed entirely or severely limits public access. The ubiquity of these security zones encourages us to consider them a new land use type.”
(thanks to Dr Nemeth for the corrections to my original misattribution of his excellent project)
Tenacious FoI and ‘institutional discovery’ work both in and out of the US courts by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has resulted in the FBI releasing lots of information about its enormous dataveillance program, based around the Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).
the FBI now has a data warehouse with over a billion unique documents or seven times as many as are contained in the Library of Congress;
it is using content management and datamining software to connect, cross-reference and analyse data from over fifty previously separate datasets included in the warehouse. These include, by the way, both the entire US-VISIT database, the No-Fly list and other controversial post-9/11 systems.
The IDW will be used for both link and pattern analysis using technology connected to the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF) prgram, in other words Knowledge Disovery in Databases (KDD) software, which will through connecting people, groups and places, will generate entirely ‘new’ data and project links forward in time as predictions.
EFF conclude that datamining is the future for the IDW. This is true, but I would also say that it was the past and is the present too. Datamining is not new for the US intelligence services, indeed many of the techniques we now call datamining were developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). There would be no point in the FBI just warehousing vast numbers of documents without techniques for analysing and connecting them. KDD may well be more recent for the FBI and this phildickian ‘pre-crime’ is most certainly the future in more ways than one…
There is a lot that interests me here (and indeed, I am currently trying to write a piece about the socio-techncial history of these massive intelligence data analysis systems), but one issue is whether this complex operation will ‘work’ or whether it will throw up so many random and worthless ‘connections’ (the ‘six-degrees of Kevin Bacon’ syndrome) that it will actually slow-down or damage actual investigations into real criminal activities. That all depends on the architecture of the system, and that is something we know little about, although there are a few hints in the EFF report…
The complex landscape of the US judicial system has thrown up a ruling on the police use of GPS tracking devices completely at odds with the recent ruling handed down by the appeals court in Wisconsin. The New York appeals court ruled 4-3 that police GPS tracking should require a warrant. Judge Lipmann’s words on the case, quoted by the New York Times, are particularly interesting as it appears that he wa taking a long view of potential harm in making his decision. He said:
“One need only consider what the police may learn, practically effortlessly, from planting a single device. The whole of a person’s progress through the world, into both public and private spatial spheres, can be charted and recorded over lengthy periods possibly limited only by the need to change the transmitting unit’s batteries. Disclosed in the data retrieved from the transmitting unit, nearly instantaneously with the press of a button on the highly portable receiving unit, will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. What the technology yields and records with breathtaking quality and quantity, is a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations — political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few — and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits. When multiple GPS devices are utilized, even more precisely resolved inferences about our activities are possible. And, with GPS becoming an increasingly routine feature in cars and cell phones, it will be possible to tell from the technology with ever increasing precision who we are and are not with, when we are and are not with them, and what we do and do not carry on our persons — to mention just a few of the highly feasible empirical configurations.”
This long term thinking has to be applauded. Sometimes imagination is necessary in the law, and particularly when the issue is one of socio-technical changes. The technological determinism of ‘if it exists, then it must be used’ is a way of thinking that has to be challenged. The question now for the USA is if either of these case or others will find their way to the federal courts. Until then, US citizens and police do not really know where they stand and the constitutional questions remain open.
CNET’s ‘Technically Incorrect’ blog leads me to a rather disturbing story in the Chicago Tribune last week about a ruling from a court in Wisconsin, USA. The judges in the appeal court decided that police use of covert GPS tracking devices is equivalent to the naked eye and therefore is not covered by US constitutional prohibitions (in the 4th amendment) on search and seizure. Whilst the local representative claimed that “GPS tracking is an effective means of protecting public safety”, ACLU argued that in fact this is an unwarranted extension of surveillance powers: “the idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else’s property without any court supervision, that’s wrong.”
Now the case itself involved a man suspected of stalking, itself a form of surveillance and not something anyone would want to encourage or defend, however, once again, ends do not justify the means, particularly when the implications of the use of such means are so profound. The ruling illustrates the widespread inability of judges (and lawmakers more broadly) to deal effectively the way in which new technologies change the game or perhaps the inability of constitutional protections to protect effectively in an age of vastly improved technologies of visibility.
In fact the judges in this case themselves expressed some disquiet about their ruling. I can sympathise with them – it is far from obvious how to interpret new surveillance technologies with the constition and laws available. One would think, after the wiretapping cases of the 60s and 70s in the USA, that this lesson might have been learned, but it seems courts will continue to take terms like ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ literally – as perhaps they must. But surely if a device is attached to the ‘outside’ of a car or a house, or indeed is not attached at all and is remote, it does not automatically follow that the information that the device collects is not intimate and personal, and indeed not the same as what could only have been obtained in previous decades by direct human intrusion? For example, a device that can effectively ‘see through walls’ is not the same as the naked eye – it is the equivalent of a police officer being inside the house. Whether this applies to a GPS tracker on a car (whether it is really any more or less than an officer sitting outside the house, or following the vehicle) is a moot point – there will be more and more of these cases, as police test the technological limits of the law, and it seems that most countries, not just the USA, still lack the professional (as opposed to the academic) legal thinking to deal with them.
News from various sources has revealed that the United State, the European Union and the United Kingdom are all preparing to invest further large sums in advanced biometrics and surveillance research.
According to an anonymous message to Slashdot, in the USA, Department of Justice requisitions for the coming year show “$233.9 million in funding for an ‘Advanced Electronic Surveillance’ project, and $97.6 million to establish the ‘Biometric Technology Center.'” The former is largely to deal with the problems of intercepting Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications – like Skype. The latter is what Slashdot calls a “vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification” for the FBI. In other words, the architecture of the proposed ‘Server in the Sky’ system, which The Guardian revealed last year – for some notes on this and other systems under development, see here.
Meanwhile Owen Bowcott in The Guardian today has a story which puts together various bits and pieces from the EU’s FP7 Security theme research budget and UK security investment. In the UK, there is to be £15 million spent on updating UK biometric security for embassies, and more interestingly other unspecified ‘surveillance’ purposes, and in addition, rolling out of facial recognition systems to more UK airports. As we know, the controlled environments of airports where people are required to look at cameras, are one of the few place where this technology works properly.
This provides a rather tenuous link to the headline of the Guardian story which is an EU-funded study into brain-scanning (yet again) called Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis). There are lots of these about, and one of them may work sooner or later, but it is worth pointing out that people have been putting out ‘we will soon have brain scanning’ stories since the 1980s and like, nuclear fusion, it always seems to be 5 or 10 years in the future. Brain-scanning seems to be the technology of the future… always has been, always will be?
While the vast majority of those monitoring CCTV screens are probably decent people who stick within the legal and ethical guidelines (such as they are), it is worth remembering that pervasive surveillance offers unprecedented opportunities to perverts, stalkers and sex offenders. This is not just secret cameras set up by weirdo voyeurs, it is the people who work with CCTV. This was noted by Clive Norris and collaborators back in the 1990s in Britain in their work on control rooms when they reported on operators making private tapes of women they saw in the street. Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph reported on a case in the US, where two FBI agents spied on girls changing for a charity fashion show for the underprivileged. They have been charged with criminal violation of privacy, which I am glad to see is a crime in the US. But, don’t forget that behind the cameras, if there is anyone these days, is a human being and that human being has as many flaws and secret desires as anyone else.
There is an excellent new report on facial recognition now available for free download. The report is written by my one-time co-author on the subject, Lucas Introna of Lancaster University, and new Surveillance & Society advisory board member, Helen Nissenbaum of New York University.
The report is aimed primarily at people who developing policy on, or thinking of commissioning or even using facial recognition and therefore concentrates on the practical questions (does it work? what are its limitations?) however it does not neglect the moral and political issues of both overt and covert use. What is quite interesting for me is how little the technical problems with the systems have changed since Lucas and I wrote our piece back in 2004; the ability of facial recognition to work in real-world situations as opposed to controlled environments still appears limited by environmental and systemic variables like lighting, the size of the gallery of faces and so on.
The report is probably the best non-technical summary available and is perfect for non-specialists who want to understand what is the state-of-the-art in facial recognition and the range of issues associated with the technology. Very much recommended.
Whilst finishing up my work in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, I came across this interesting bunch of people, mv-brasil, who appear to be a Brazilian nationalist movement, with much in common with organisations like the British National Party or the various right-wing groups in the USA. Their website contains the usual odd mixture of anti-globalisation, evangelical Christian (they campaign against Halloween) and anti-United Nations / New World Order stuff with the added anti-Americanism. There of course is the usual rather uncomfortable fact of the ‘Brazilian Christian’ nationalist being a representative of a colonial power that invaded the country and took it from the indigenous people, but they roll over this one with some nods to Indian rights when it suits their cause, most notably when it comes to the Amazon.
A t-shirt with anti-internationalisation and privatisation of the Amazon slogan
One of the T-shirts for sale makes reference to this, being against ‘internationalisation and privatisation’ of the Amazon by the USA. It is a conspiracy theory I’ve come across before when I was doing some research on the SIVAM program – which provides some actual evidence for contentions that there is a secret American program to control the rainforest. I had someone tell me here in complete good faith that it was a ‘fact’ that several Amazonian tribes already thought that they were part of the USA and flew the US flag! This is combined with the fact the UN and international environmental organisations are very concerned about the destruction of the rainforest and the perceived lack of effort by successive Brazilian administrations to stop it. Put all this together and you have the ingredients for nationalist paranoia.
So what is SIVAM? And why would I be interested in it anyway? The reason is that SIVAM is a surveillance system. Announced at the Earth Summit in 1992, and finally completed in 2002 and fully operationial from 2004, the Sistema de Vigilância da Amazônia (SIVAM) is a multipurpose, multi-agency network of satellite, aerial and ground surveillance and response that aims to monitor the illegal traffic of drugs and forest animals and plants, control national borders and those of indigenous peoples’ lands, and prevent the further destruction of protected areas of forest. A good technical account in English can be found in Aviation Today from 2002, and there is an interesting article on its construction here.
Donald Rumsefld visits the SIVAM control centre, 23 March 2005 (Wikimeda Commons)
The problem is that, although an initiative of various Brazilian government agencies including the environment and Indian affairs ministries, the federal police and the army, SIVAM is supported and funded by the USA – most of the initial $1.39Bn US cost came through a grant from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the consortium that supplies the equipment includes giant US military supplier, Raytheon – amongst many others from Brazil to Sweden. The visit of former President George W. Bush’s right-hand man and then Secretary of State for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to the SIVAM control centre in 2005, was widely reported in Bazil. It was of course interpreted by many as further evidence of Brazil’s ceding of control of the Amazon to the USA, or even presaging a US invasion of the Amazon, as Senator Norm Coleman discovered on a fact-finding mission later that year.
Latin American countries have every right to be suspicious of US motives: the Monroe Doctrine; George Kennan’s Cold War ‘grand area’ vision; the support for dictators like Augosto Pinochet; the invasions of Panama and Grenada; Plan Columbia and the widespread use of military ‘advisors’… the list goes on. And it is certainly the case that US strategic surveillance plans for ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ and the like, have have long included ‘leveraging’ any system in which they are involved from the International Space Station to things like SIVAM. So of course they will have a strategic interest, and no doubt SIVAM data will find its way to US military C4ISR centres, but this does not amount to a plan to invade Brazil or take control of the Amazon.
There has been a lot of interest in the US border with Mexico in recent years, and rightly so. However, what not so many people have noticed is that the closing of the closing of the USA is taking place along the world’s largest land border between two countries, the border between the USA and Canada.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) already patrol the airspace (and at a low enough level that private flights have had to be restricted, thereby doing two security jobs with one technology). However, the most recent announcement concerned the installation of video surveillance towers to monitor waterways. This is all on the basis of very little information about whether this is either cost-effective or necessary; according to the AP article, the Border Patrol themselves admit this: “What we don’t know is how often that vulnerability is exploited […] if, in fact, there’s a lot more going on than we thought, then this technology will help us identify it and it will help us respond and apprehend those people in ways that we haven’t before.” So essentially, this is surveillance to see whether surveillance is necessary – it seems we are now in a surveillance double-bind, so you no longer need a strong reason to install cameras; they are their own justification and may be justified in retrospect whatever does or does not happen. If nothing is seen, they will be said to be a deterrent, if something is detected then they will be proclaimed as showing the need for surveillance!
The technology employed against those tricky Canucks will be provided by the same supplier, Boeing, that has been so criticised for its failures on the Mexican border (and there have been plenty of failures down there). It seems that even when it comes to the trump card of security, which normally wins hands-down, the congressional pork-barrel remains the joker in the pack. Now, the Canadians and local firms along the US border have already been complaining about the post-9/11 restrictions that have begun to stifle cross-border trade on which many of those communities depend. In a recession, such considerations might be thought to count for something, but it seems that the mighty Boeing’s profits matter more…
So what is SIVAM? And why would I be interested in it anyway? The reason is that SIVAM is a surveillance system. Announced at the Earth Summit in 1992, and finally completed in 2002 and fully operationial from 2004, the 
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