Category: fear

A tale of two communities…

We visited two very different communities today, Santa Marta and Santa Teresa, but despite their differences, in both places we met with an equally impressive community representative.

Morro Santa Marta is a relatively small favela that climbs the steep slope below the peak known as Dona Marta (which is why the favela is often incorrectly called ‘Dona Marta’), above Botafogo, and just on the other side of the hill from the much wealthier neighbourhood of Laranjeiras. Santa Marta is well-known largely because it is perceived as a success story, indeed as we were being taken around he community, journalists from Globo TV were embarking on a month-long series of features and interviews with different members of the community, and representatives were scouting the place as a location for the ‘Red Bull Down’ urban downhill mountain biking series (see this description of a related event in Puerto Rico)… in short, Santa Marta is fashionable.

It is also the target for a number of state interventions; indeed I don’t think I have seen as many different workers from as many different agencies in one place at one time anywhere in Brazil. There were transportation workers on the newly-finished cliff railway, there were workers from the planning department shoring up recently-constructed houses to prevent landslides, there were electric company workers struggling to make sense of the maze of cables, there were refuse workers, and at the base of the favela there was a load of people from the new Motorola-sponsored Digital Santa Marta initiative that is wirelessing the whole neighbourhood. It seemed that various government interests badly want Santa Marta to continue improving, and that a lot is riding on this.

However, as we soon discovered, there is a more complex and fragile reality underlying the business and the superficially sheen of hype. Our guide for the morning was Sonia Oliveira, one of the directors of the community association, and a resident for many years. As we ascended the railway with her, we met her son, and other people, like Luis Gustavo, who she had known since he was a baby… it was clear that Sonia was well-known and well-liked. And who wouldn’t like her? Sonia is a strong woman with a calm, determined presence and an insight matched by the realism of experience.

The key to Santa Marta’s success so far has been the combination of many years of careful community work, combined more recently with a determined effort by a particular battalion of the BOPE (military police special operations) to drive out drug traffickers and secure the community, under Commandate Priscilla, who we will hopefully meet next week. It is not as if the community is any more sympathetic to the police than anyone else in Rio, but the relationship between the people involved here is clearly a special one. And whilst the police still do not understand the community fully – there are still frequent complaints of harassment of young men and the closing down of parties – there is some evidence that they are learning and changing to a small but important extent. One problem now is that the wider context of the ‘choque de ordem’, which is basically a rather more aggressive version of the famous New York ‘zero tolerance’ policy, is threatening to roll back these small improvements in trust and understanding. The police hassle unlicensed stall-holders, which is how most favelados make their living, they stop taxi drivers for checks of insurance and licensing, and of course, they threaten, and indeed carry out the threats, to demolish illegally constructed buildings – which is of course, potentially any piece of the favela. However, for Sonia, the over-assertiveness of ‘choque de ordem’ policing is outweighed by a far greater another fear – which is what happens if the political climate changes, or financial or strategic reviews mean that the BOPE are forced to withdraw from Santa Marta. If they do, she argues, the traffickers will return, and it will be worse than before, as not only will they take control of the community, but they will ‘punish’ it for collaborating with the authorities.

And things must continue here. In many ways they have hardly started. There might be a lot of activity but the favela remains lacking in infrastructure, especially sewage and healthcare. Most of the self-built constructions remain precarious and a severe risk to their inhabitants and those below in the case of heavy rains and consequent landslides. And the understanding of neighbouring communities is far from guaranteed. One might think that neighbours would be grateful that the traffickers are gone and even make efforts to integrate Santa Marta further into the city, but Laranjeiras in particular has been causing all sorts of problems for the favela, in particular over the construction of a school and creche at the top of the neighbourhood. The problem was basically that the school can be seen over the top of the hill, and this led to the fear that Santa Marta would begin to spread over the top and down to the back gates of the expensive apartments and villas of this rather exclusive community inhabited by people like Governor Sergio Cabral. In fact, unlike several other favelas, Santa Marta is not expanding at all. It is becoming a more mature and controlled community, and it is rather ironic that it is at this stage of its development, that it becomes an object of fear and concern for its richer neighbours. The argument has been resolved for now, and the school stays, indeed it is the temporary home of the battalion and the community police, who get a good overview of the neighbourhood from its commanding position. The lack of expansion of Santa Marta has not stopped the State from starting the construction of a wall along its west side. As Sonia says, there is no need to make favelados feel like they are living in a ghetto…

Paulo Oscar Saad was against the building of the school, indeed he is against the expansion of any illegal community into the hills of the area, but in truth this is the only real substantive grounds for disagreement between the leader of the Santa Teresa community association and those in Santa Marta. Santa Teresa is however, an entirely different place. Once a hillside retreat for the rich, its crumbling mansions have for a while now been occupied by an eclectic mixture of artists, academics and other bourgeois but generally progressive people. For many years it served as a kind of cultural centre for the surrounding poorer neighbourhoods, including the many favelas, with favelados mixing with the artists in the bohemian bars and cafes.

However, this mixture has been undermined by three main developments. The first is the aforementioned illegal building, which threatens the very stability of the hillsides which support Santa Teresa. It isn’t just what one would recognise as ‘favelas’ either; many of the illegal buildings are constructed by relatively or even very wealthy people, and often on land reforested precisely to prevent landslides after two previously disastrous deluges in the 1960s and 1980s. The second is the change in the nature and intensity of crime in Santa Teresa. The neighbourhood had always put up with a certain amount of petty theft and pickpocketing, but the arrival of cocaine (and more recently, crack) and in particular the arming of the drug gangs has led to an increase in both actual serious crime and fear. Finally, the gentrification of Santa Teresa is threatening to destroy the easy-going and bohemian atmosphere of the hillside on which it is based. It is an old story, seemingly destined to be endlessly repeated in similar communities all over the world. The old bars and cafes close, and the new upmarket establishments exclude the poor either overtly by policy or implicitly through price. The fear of crime has also driven many residents into the arms of private security companies, who have gated several dead-end streets and equipped them with guardposts. The signs say they are legal; the Community Association says that they are not. In fact the latter are correct. Paulo, like some other I have talked to here, is sure that the private security companies are intimately linked to the militias and indeed to the criminal gangs, all of which reinforce each other in an ongoing spiral of criminality and securitisation. However it is not as if the police (of any kind) or the politicians can be trusted to deal with the situation. According to the community association leader, the police are entirely corrupt and the politicians are fashion-driven media slaves. The only hope lies in bottom-up community power, yet the community is increasingly divided, and even the remaining assets that make Santa Teresa what it is are being cashed in: the wonderful antique tram system that rattles up the hillside is being privatised and its future is uncertain…

It seems that both community leaders are scared of losing what they have and battling to keep their neighbourhoods alive, inclusive and connected, but both are being hampered by uncertainty and contradictory policies and developments at levels which they cannot seems to influence. The future of Rio depends on people like this being supported not undermined by the state at its various levels (which still do not appear to know what each is doing, let alone look like working together). Oh, and I almost didn’t mention surveillance… that’s because like almost everyone else on the ground here, surveillance is seen as a frippery of the rich and something which has no practical use or meaning for the reality of their lives. There is also a strong sense of freedom too: and things like CCTV are seen as a definite infringement of that liberty. The more I get to know people and places here, the more I am certain that Brazil is nothing like a surveillance society and the changes that it would take to become one would be almost inconceivable in scale and cost.

Note: there are photos of Santa Teresa in the next post and there will be more later this week.

At the Instituto de Segurança Pública

Paola and I had a very productive interview with Colonel Mario Sergio de Brito Duarte, the Director President of the Institute for Public Security (ISP) in Rio de Janeiro. The ISP is a state-level organisation with multiple functions including research on public security and the compilation of crime statistics; professional development for the police services (and also more broadly to encourage greater cooperation and coordination between military and civil police); and community involvement and participation in the development of security policy. The Colonel gave us an hour and a half of his time to explain his view on a wide range of issues around crime, security, the problems of the favelas, and the potential for surveillance, social interventions and policing in solving these problems.

As with many senior police (and military) officers with whom I have talked over the years, the Colonel is an educated, thoughtful man who has strong views based in his experiences as a front-line officer with the Policia Militar in Rio (including some years in BOPE, the special operations section) – as detailed in his book, Incursionanda no Inferno (Incursions into the Inferno). Despite how the title may sound, he was far from being gung-ho or authoritarian in his views, emphasising throughout, as with almost everyone I have talked to, that socio-economic solutions will be the only long-term guarantee of public security in Rio. And he certainly had no sympathy for the illegal actions of militias, despite understanding why they emerged and continued to be supported by some sections of the community.

However, it was also clear to him that current policies like Mayor Eduardo Paes’ ‘choque de ordem’ strategy which involves demolitions of illegally-built houses in the favelas, was absolutely necessary as well. He spent some time outlining his view of the history of how drug gangs infiltrated and gained control of many favelas, an in particular the importance of their obtaining high quality small arms – though he was vague on exactly where these arms came from – I have, of course, heard allegations from other interviewees that corrupt soldiers and policemen were one common source of such weapons.

From the point of view of surveillance studies, it was notable how profoundly indifferent the Colonel appeared to be towards he growth of surveillance, and in particular CCTV cameras. He argued that they might be a useful supplement to real policing, but he certainly did not appear to favour a UK-style ‘surveillance society’ – of which, at least in Rio, there seems little sign as yet. He was similarly indifferent towards other central state social interventions like the Programa Bolsa Familia (PBF), and initiatives like ID cards – of course they might help in some way, but he certainly made no attempt to ague, as the UK government has done, that such technology will make a big difference to fighting crime and terrorism (indeed it was interesting that ‘terrorism’ was not mentioned at all – I guess that, when you have to deal with the constant reality of poverty, drugs and fighting between police and gangs, there is no need to conjure phantasms of terror). Even so, the Colonel recognised that the media in Rio did create fantasies of fear to shock the middle classes, and that this sensationalism did harm real efforts to create safer communities.

There was a lot more… but that will have to wait until I have had the whole interview transcribed and translated. In the meantime, my thanks to Colonel Mario Sergio Duarte and to the very nice and helpful ISP researcher Vanessa Campagnac, one of the authors of the analysis of the Rio de Janeiro Victimisation Survey, who talked to us about more technical issues around crime statistics.

The Shock of Order: Building and Demolition in Rio de Janeiro

I may have been slightly worried about the most recent drugs war that was going on as I arrived, but as usual this appears to have been exaggerated by the press who largely serve the richer, middle-class community, and who appear to want to have their fears stoked on a regular basis. The ‘war’ is a trafficker conflict that involves traffickers based in the large favela of Rocinha, who belong to the Comando Vermelho (CV, Red Command) the oldest and largest of the prison-based umbrella groups of Rio drug traffickers, attacking another favela, Ladeira dos Tabajaras, whose traffickers are backed by the ‘Amigos Dos Amigos’ (ADA, ‘Friends of Friends’). This kind of thing is happening on and off all the time, but what made it a concern of the paranoid middle class in this case, was geography: in order to get to Ladeira dos Tabajaras, the Rocinha gang had to go through the rich high-rise area of Copacabana… to say that it is exaggerated is not to say that it is not dangerous: 8 people have so far been killed, but they are all traffickers and, I believe, all killed following police raids into the favelas.

It is probably no coincidence that this display of force by the Rocinha traffickers is happening just as the city government of Rio has started to implement a policy of the current Mayor, Eduardo Paes, known as ‘choque de ordem’ (the ‘shock of order’), which involves sorties into communities like Rocinha largely to enforce planning regulations by destroying recent illegally built constructions, which are pushing the favelas even further up into the hills. In the last few days, this policy has resulted in the demolition of one particular controversial building, the Minhocão in Rocinha. This was due to start on the 17th, but was halted by a judicial decision, before going ahead in recent days.

There is more than a degree of irony here. The purpose of these demolitions is supposedly to enforce urban planning regulations and ‘protect Rio’. The Secretary for Public Order, Rodrigo Bethlem, is quoted by O Dia as saying (in my translation):

“We cannot permit an entrepreneur to come into Rocinha to build and make easy money by exploiting people. We cannot allow Rio De Janeiro to be destroyed by speculators, who want to make money without following any rules and who aim only at profit.”

Yet, I only have to glance out of my window here to see the towers of the Centro, built by wealthy speculators, which have almost completely destroyed the beautiful Parisian-style boulevards and belle epoque architecture that used to be ‘Rio’. And turning the other way, the coastline it dominate by the secure condominiums long the beaches, which I am pretty sure were not constructed out of the kindheartedness of developers, and whose development no doubt involved corruption at higher levels of urban government. Looking uphill, I can see the often dubiously if not illegally-constructed houses of the rich that cut into the edges of the National Park.

Can we look forward to the demolition of all of these disfigurements of Rio? Of course not… and the reason is obvious. The demolitions in Rocinha are about power projection. Local state policy towards the favelas goes in waves that alternate between socio-economic solutions and violent authoritarianism. For all its negative aspects, many people who are concerned with social justice here recall with some nostalgia the progressive populism of Leonel Brizola who was mayor in the 1980s. His administrations installed infrastructure, built schools and improved houses in the poorest areas.

The current administration of Eduardo Paes is taking a very different and harder line, concentrating on law and order, a stance which was laid out clearly during the Pan-American Games when the police effectively occupied several of the favelas in an Israeli-style security operation. There would be nothing wrong with this if it were backed by some kind of progressive social imagination too – some favelas like Dona Marta, which I will be visiting later this week, have apparently been transformed through a combination of strong control and surveillance with real social improvements.

Instead there are apparently plans to further marginalise favela residents by building a wall along the major highway from the international airport into the city, so that all the city’s elite can feel so much more secure, and of course, visitors will not have to even see the favelas (some or Rio’s most miserable) which line the route… there’s more than a whiff of Israeli tactics about this too. Whether by building or by demolition, urban planning seems to be currently used as a weapon against the favelas and their inhabitants.

Flying into trouble?

Governments will find it harder and harder to stand up to this kind of pressure from the growing security economy – all the companies grown fat on the War on Terror

Two recent stories of the cancellation of airborne surveillance programs should remind us that the route to a surveillance society is not an inevitable technological trajectory.

You don't see that very often! An airborne DEA surveillance plane (Photo by Schweizer Aircraft/MCT).
You don't see that very often! An airborne DEA surveillance plane (Photo by Schweizer Aircraft/MCT).

One is a classic tale of secret budgets disguising incompetence and disorganisation rather than efficient espionage. The US Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) has ended an experimental air surveillance program, following almost total equipment failure. The planes, in short, didn’t fly, or didn’t fly much. Almost $15 million US down the drain, and no accountability because this was an ultra-secret, need-to-know, maximum deniability, ‘black earmark’ project…

The other is a more courageous story of a government finally standing up to the pressure or its larger ‘allies’, and the fear-mongering PR of arms companies. In this case, the Australian government has withdrawn from the BAMS Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) program. It has cost the country $15 Million AUS, but this will save almost $1 Billion AUS. It also puts a small dent in the massive expansion of UAVs, now being used everywhere from the skies of Afghanistan to the streets of Liverpool. This decision did not make the military-industrial complex very happy and the story in The Australian shows clear evidence of corporate PR spin at work – the emotional blackmail of claiming that this decision could cost Australian lives in the event of more bushfires (or in other stories, it would leave Australia open to terrorism).

Global Hawk (USAF)
Global Hawk (USAF)

Even in a recession, governments will find it harder and harder to stand up to this kind of public pressure from the growing security economy – all the companies grown fat on the War on Terror that have the ear of the military and are backed by US-led consortia. It is to their credit that the Australian government has not given in – as for the US DEA, well, that is the opposite lesson – secrecy and the assumption of necessity can lead to massively wasteful state procurement and an absence of real security. The question is whether either lesson will prompt wider leaning…

The beauty and cruelty of Rio de Janeiro

There is no reason why with the same infrastructural, social and economic support as anyone else in society would expect, that the favelas could not become truly beautiful without being cruel…

I am trying to think of something not too banal or cliched to say about Rio de Janeiro. It is rather difficult when I am sitting in my room in this artist’s house in Santa Teresa with its balcony overlooking the whole city centre and the bay and Niteroi on the other side, with bossa nova drifting up from the room below…

Being on a hill though, Santa Teresa is as good a place as any to try to get an initial feel for the geography of the place. Whatever you have read about Rio, however many pictures or films you have seen, it is still impossible not to feel utterly astonished, and in many ways delighted, by the place. Rio is unquestionably the most beautiful city I have ever been in. The shapes of the hills, the curves of the coast, the collision of architectures, the forest which comes right down into the city itself. Flying in, you could see its sprawl (this is a city of over 10 million people), but from the inside it is all small neighbourhoods, and more importantly all edges. One never seems to be entirely in one place in Rio, rather one constantly walks the boundary between city and forest, wealth and poverty, high rise and favela…

Because the poverty and the favelas are also inescapable. Unlike in San Paulo, where the favelas are located more on the periphery and can therefore be ignored by the rich, in Rio the rich and poor neighbourhoods are locked together like the fingers of clasped hands – but are they locked in mutual dependence or a death grip? The richer areas tend to run up the flattest land, whilst the favelas cling to the steeper slopes above and below. The disturbing thing for anyone who would try to form any swift opinion, is how beautiful the favelas are seen from my bird’s eye view. Rio’s beauty is matched by its cruelty, and even its cruelty is beautiful. The houses of the favelas follow the precarious topology of the hills, they pile onto each other, tiny alleys and stairs running in between. Self-constructed, they take the most natural forms that available resources allow, and in many ways are therefore the most human-looking places one can imagine. They most resemble the ancient towns of Greek islands or the Italian coasts, what Donald Ritchie called the ‘crammed mosaic’ of Tokyo neighbourhoods or Cornish fishing villages – the kinds of places that inspire deep feelings of the most intimate community.

But these are places of the most miserable poverty, crime and violence. From the bird’s eye view, you can’t smell the shit flowing in the streets, or see the tired, desperate faces of the inhabitants. It is because the architectural form, whilst it evolves from necessity, is not the cause of the socio-economic problems. Form does not, contrary to a still quite prevalent but regressive moral imagination, lead to a necessary moral or social outcome. The old rightist way of dealing with the ‘favela problem’, which was shared with leftist modernism, was the blank slate. Wipe out the favelas, put the people somewhere else, and everything will be okay. They were wrong. There is no reason why with the same infrastructural, social and economic support as anyone else in society would expect, that the favelas could not become truly beautiful without being cruel, why they could not come to be seen equally much as examples of the perfection of human settlement as Santorini or the old town of Lisbon, Mousehole or Mejiro…

The big question is how they get there. Rio’s multiple edges, its ubiquitous boundaries, are in many ways the most secure borders. The favelas are oppressed both by the most intimate micro-authoritarian internal control of the drug trafficking gangs, the uncaring external ‘prison-wardening’ and exploitation of the police and vigilante groups, and the utter fear and disgust of the richer classes who often see the favelados as nothing but criminals. I can’t suggest easy solutions to the fundamental problems, but part of what I am going to do over the next two weeks is to talk to a whole variety of people about the issues of surveillance and control and how some forms of surveillance should be broken or released and some should be made to work for people, not against them.

Metropolitan Police Encouraging Stupidity and Suspicion

Rather than being a legitmate political response to an illiberal, repressive, undemocratic and unaccountable growth in surveillance, ‘interest’ in CCTV is now regarded as suspicious in itself…

Boing Boing has news of the latest London Metropolitan Police campaign which is supposedly encouraging people to report their suspicions on terrorist activity, but is in fact just another step on the illiberal, socially divisive and stupid road towards a McCarthyite Britain where British people are expected to spy on each other in the name of security.

Why not check your neighbours' waste bins?
Why not check your neighbours' waste bins?

Apart from encouraging people to rifle through their neighbours garbage, the most disturbing thing about this new campaign is the way in which it implies that any interest in CCTV cameras is a potentionally terrorist activity.

See that camera? No, you don't. It's not there.
See that camera? No, you don't. It's not there.

From the late 1980s onwards, the British state in its usual bumbling, piecemeal and disorganised way, gradually created an increasingly comprehensive monitoring program of British city centres. There was never any strong evidence for the need for this technology, it was never approved by parliament, there was never a single CCTV Act that enabled it.

Now, just as it has become pretty clear that CCTV has very little effect on crime rates (its original justification, let us not forget), the state has started to close down criticism and even interest in or discussion of these surveillance measures. Effectively, we are being officially instructed to ignore the cameras and pretend we don’t see them. Rather than being a legitimate political response to an illiberal, repressive, undemocratic and unaccountable growth in surveillance, ‘interest’ in CCTV is now regarded as suspicious in itself.

At the same time, the British state is increasingly regulating the means of production of visual images by ordinary citizens. The state (and many private companies) can watch us while we have to pretend we don’ t notice, but for ordinary people to take picture or make video in public places, and in particular making images of state buildings or employees like the police (you know, the people who supposedly work for us), is being gradually and by stealth turned into a criminal act. In the past, I have been very careful not to shout about all acts of state surveillance being totalitarian (because very few of them actually are), but there is no other word for these trends. The police are attempting to make themselves the arbiters of how we see society and public places; they are telling us what can and cannot be legitimately the subject of interest and of visual representation.

They are also spending more time now ‘securing secturity’ – protecting the architecture of surveillance that has been built. You can see the private sector recognising this. At equipment fairs I have been to over the last few years, one of the big developments in camera technology has been methods of armouring and protecting the cameras themselves. There seems to be an effort, deliberate or unconscious, to forget the supposed original purpose of such surveillance in protecting us, and instead to concentrate on protecting the surveillance equipment.

This is particularly problematic for researchers like me. We’ll see what happens when I am back in London in May and June when I will be taking a lot of pictures of CCTV as part of my project, which is of course, ironically, sponsored by an official British state research council…

The rise of personal surveillance

Personal surveillance is only going to get harder to regulate as things like ‘smart dust’ and micro-UAVs come down in price and are more easily available…

CBS News in the USA is reporting on the rise of stalking and in particular the use of more powerful, smaller and cheaper surveillance devices: embedded hidden cameras, GPS trackers and so on. They discuss in particular the case of Michael Strahan, a sportsman who seems to be obsessed with keeping watch on family and friends. But the bigger pictures is that stalking is something that apparently affects around 3.4 million US citizens. That’s more than one in a hundred, an astonishing figure if it’s anywhere near ‘right’.

Stalking and personal surveillance are an integral part of the culture of any state in which order in ensured through surveillance. We are creating unhealthy societies in which personal relationships between people are increasingly characterised by the same fear and distrust as states have of their people.

Smart Dust chips (Dust Networks)
Smart Dust chips (Dust Networks)

ravenThis is only going to get harder to regulate as things like ‘smart dust’ and micro-UAVs come down in price and are more easily available. And already surveillance equipment like head-mounted cameras for cyclists, is marketed as ‘toys’… regulation is only half the answer. The other half has to be in working out how to shift away from this mistrustful, fearful, risk-obsessed culture. Part of this has to be down to government: the more that surveillance is part of every solution they come up with to any problem, the worse the social malaise will become.

Incompetence and Surveillance

There is an opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph (UK) today by Alasdair Palmer, which argues that it is the incompetence and human fallibility of the UK government rather than any lack of desire which prevents an Orwellian surveillance state from emerging in the UK. It is hardly new but it’s an attractive argument, one which I have used before and which we used to a certain extent in our Report on the Surveillance Society, and one which draws on the deep well of cynicism about government which has long characterised British politics.

However there are a number of problems with the argument. The first is whether it is really true. A totalitarian society does not have to be competent in the sense of having correct information, in fact one of the central messages of Nineteen Eight-Four is that ‘truth’ is a product of state control in such societies. This was obvious in the case of Stalin’s purges. The accusations made against individuals did not rely on the accuracy of the accusation but on the very fact of accusation, something brought out very strongly in Orlando Figges’ recent book, The Whisperers. In the UK in recent years we have seen some elements of this. It doesn’t matter for example, whether someone really is a terrorist, the word ‘terrorist’ is just redefined in law and practice to encompass that person. New terms are invented to describe quasi-crimes (like anti-social behaviour) which come to have the force of ‘crime’ and become the focus of state surveillance activity. And I have shown how the recent arguments over photography in public places show a genuine totalitarianism in the attempt to define the limits of the collection and interpretation of visual images. It doesn’t matter how competent the state is at carrying out its desires here. The very fact that it defines what is acceptability in this way can create a new ‘normality’ and a ‘chilling effect’ on protest and resistance – which makes such activity even more essential.

The second problem is the idea that incompetence protects us. It didn’t in Soviet Russia and it doesn’t today. The government’s uselessness in handling data harms people. The loss and leakage of private personal information can lead to real effects on people’s lives: information theft, fraud and so on. The loss of trust in those who control information also has knock-on effects on those organisations that genuinely rely on personal information to provide essential services and care: education, health services, social work etc. A loss of trust caused by failed repression leads to a generalised loss of trust in government and in other people: it damages social trust. It is perhaps because British people have such a low level of social trust anyway that we expect things to fail.

The third problem relies on the first two and is the idea that state incompetence is enough to protect us. Of course it isn’t. Cynicism is no basis for thinking of, and creating, a better society. Do we want to live in a society where our only protection is the fact that state is structurally or contingently unable to create a totalitarian situation even though it continues to try? I certainly don’t. The emergence of surveillance societies, competent or otherwise, requires the imagination of alternatives – including greater democracy, accountability, transparency, and regulation and control of both state and corporate organisations in our favour – and political action to demand and create those alternatives.

A faith in failure is simply a form of nihilism.

At the Camara dos Deputados

I had a great meeting at the architecturally stunning Camara dos Deputados (the Brazilian equivalent of the British House of Commons or the House of Representatives in the USA), which almost made up for the fact that it was the only one of the three scheduled interviews that I had arranged that actually went ahead… it really does look like I will have to come back.

The parliamentary buildings in Brasilia, originally laid out by Lucio Costa. The Camara dos Depuados, by Oscar Niemeyer, is to the left.
The parliamentary buildings in Brasilia, originally laid out by Lucio Costa. The Camara dos Deputados, by Oscar Niemeyer, is to the right.

This meeting took place in the Comissao de Direitos Humanos e Minorias (the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities) and was with Federal Deputy and committee member, Pompeo de Mattos, the secretary of the Commission, Marcio Marques de Araujo, and Hebe Guimareas-Dalgaard, who works in the International Relations office and who served as translator.

The meeting covered all sorts of background issues around security in Brazil, and concentrated on Deputado de Mattos’s specialities in this area, which are in justice and drug-trafficking issues. Again, I won’t do more than summarize a few immediately important things here. There was a lot of talk of police corruption and some hair-raising stories of the ways in which military police officers in particular has become involved in selling equipment and ammunition, and of course the autodefesas communitarias that I have mentioned before. Interestingly though, it was the deputy’s opinion that the military police, despite having a ‘culture of violence’ inherited from their role as enforcers of the military dictatorship, were less corrupt (in an everyday way) than the civil police. The latter are even lower down the police food-chain and correspondingly more poorly paid and equipped.

The inadequacies of the civil police has led many Mayors of larger towns and cities to introduce so-called ‘Municipal Guards’ – basically private security given some official status. They have few powers but are basically there to increase the visibility of security, a kind of prophylactic community policing. The problem is however that the official police and the massive private security sector are thoroughly intermixed already. Many officers moonlight as private security guards, which leads to all kinds of conflicts of interest.

Deputado de Mattos was certainly not obsessed with the inadequacies of the police however. Serious and organized crime associated with drug-trafficking paralyzes the everyday life of poorer areas of large cities in Brazil. Despite the fears of the rich over crime, it is the poorest that suffer most. He described the drug gangs as being the major obstacle to any positive change in Brazilian cities. However he didn’t see any militaristic solution – fighting a war against the drug gangs would only lead to more violence. The only solution to the problems of both crime and the poverty from which it emerges is social inclusion. The favelados must be provided with the same opportunities and infrastructure as everyone else. The need schools, hospitals, transport, and so on. Programs like Bolsa Familia, however well-intentioned, make no fundamental difference, he argued – contradicting, as most people with whom I have talked have done, the assessment of external organisations like the World Bank.

However providing such opportunities is not easy, and not just because of the costs. The drug-gangs actively resist any attempt by the state to introduce services, to the extent of intimidating or even killing construction workers. And this shouldn’t be in any way romanticized as some kind of popular resistance of the poor to the imposition of unwanted state interference – this is an attempt to maintain the rule of fear and violence. Somehow, one can never get away from the security issue in Brazil.

Leaving the Camara dos Deputados, looking past the parliamentary buildings up towards the Esplanada dos Ministerios, with all the government Ministries lined up in identical blocks.
Leaving the Camara dos Deputados, looking past the parliamentary buildings up towards the Esplanada dos Ministerios, with all the government Ministries lined up in identical blocks.

(Thanks to Deputado Pompeo de Mattos, who as you will see if you check out his website is quite a character. He is fiercely proud of his southern ‘gaucho’ roots, and writes poetry to that effect. He is also – and I don’t say this very often of politicians – a genuinely nice guy. Thanks also to Marcio Marques de Araujo and to Hebe Guimares-Dalgaard without whom the meeting would have been impossible).

Surveillance and the ‘Open-source Insurgency’

Hierarchical, national and corporate bodies are profoundly afraid of the openness, apparent lack of interest in conventional goals and absence of obvious leadership or deference that is represented by the new collaborative networks like Open-source. They are not ‘under control’. The answer for the military-industrial complex is a consistent one, and as usual it combines strategic military and economic goals. This answer is surveillance.

The US military-industrial complex is always trying to identify new threats to bolster its budgets. There was a minor outcry a few years ago when US military powerpoint slides on strategy seemed to indicate that it regarded international civil society organisations, including the Red Cross, as a potential source of such threat. Then came 9/11 and the war on terror and for a while it didn’t need these phantom menaces as there were real global enemies, and fortunately for the military-industrial complex, it seemed that those enemies might be infinitely expandable and malleable into what was briefly termed the ‘long war’.

But the war on terror isn’t what it was. So there seems to be some effort to resurrect previous threats. One of these is ‘the war on drugs’ now rebranded as ‘narco-terrorism’ or ‘narco-insurgency’. And the particular focus of the concern is closer to the United States: Mexico. Writing in the self-proclaimed ‘capitalist tool’, Forbes magazine, Reihan Salaam argued that Mexico’s ongoing struggle with drug-related violence was a major threat which could ‘blind-side’ the USA. Now, Republicans like Salaam are struggling to find anything important to say when its obvious what the major global problems are, and the US electorate has decided that the Republicans aren’t the people to solve them. He is of course correct that there is a serious situation in Mexico – and indeed elsewhere in Latin-America: the drug-trafficking gangs are also the major problem for the Brazilian government in any attempt to include their excluded favela communities. However, he makes no mention of the other underlying cause of destabilization in the USA’s southern neighbour – the way in which NAFTA has transformed Mexico into a subordinate economic role to the USA as source of cheap production facilities and cheap labour, all the while being told that its people are not wanted in the USA. The EU has its critics, but at least its building of free-trade has been accompanied by a far greater degree of free movement of people and reciprocal political rights. Nor is there any reference to the consumption of cocaine and crack in the USA that is driving the trade (as the first comment on the article notes).

Instead Salaam tries to analyze the Mexican situation using a recent strategic theory, and one which is profoundly worrying in its implications. In an essay in the New York Times in October 2005, John Robb argued that the Iraq war had turned into what he termed an ‘open-source’ insurgency, “a resilient network made up of small, autonomous groups”. He argued that those resisting the US occupation and other armed groups were like open-source software developers in that “the insurgents have subordinated their individual goals to the common goal of the movement”. (Never mind once again, that there is an obvious underlying common goal – that of getting rid of an occupying foreign power!).

Now of course, in many ways this was just a restatement of the whole post-Cold War, network-centric warfare hypothesis. There are also echoes back to the kind of language which has been used to describe ‘eastern’ or ‘foreign’ peoples for centuries – the British in India being unable to tell ‘them’ apart, the faceless and numberless ‘yellow peril’, the ‘godless communists’ who subordinated their individual will to the collective, and the ‘clash of civilizations’. It’s the hive-mind, the fear of humans who don’t appear to act ‘like us’. Without the overt racism of course: this is Orientalism 2.0, the politically-correct version!

However the addition of the label ‘open-source’ is no accident. Hierarchical, national and corporate bodies are profoundly afraid of the openness, apparent lack of interest in conventional goals (profit, advancement, etc.), and absence of obvious leadership or deference that is represented by the new collaborative networks like Open-source. They are not ‘under control’.

So how to bring them ‘under control’? John Robb’s first (and rather refreshing) answer was that in many ways you probably can’t and that in Iraq, the US should have probably ‘let them win’. But this is an unpopular response for the uneconstructed military-industrial complex. For them the first answer is a consistent one, and as usual it combines strategic military and economic goals. This answer is surveillance. For the Internet, we have seen, and continue to see, attempts in multiple countries to attack the basis of what makes the Internet creative and free, in the name of all kinds of ‘risks’ (mainly terrorism, identity crime, pirating and paedophilia). Of course these risks are no greater on the Internet than in the material world, but the Internet is still for many people, and many politicians in particular, a vast, unknown terrain which they do not understand: ‘here be dragons’ as the old maps used to have it of any such ‘terra incognita’.

For countries afflicted by the new ‘open-source insurgency’, the answer is the same. The Defense Industry Daily today starts off its story on Mexico with the apparently uncontentious statement that “Mexico needs surveillance.” It then lists with the usual kind of techno-pornographic relish of these publications, all the mainly Israeli UAVs and surveillance craft that the Mexican state is buying. We are supposed to cheer. We are supposed to think that this is evidence of Mexico’s growing maturity. Soon Mexico will be monitored and ‘under control’. No evidence of whether surveillance ‘works’ (even in military terms) troubles these kinds of stories. That is taken as self-evident. And certainly there is no question of whether this could in any way be the wrong approach, or even a counterproductive strategy. As the Brazilian parliamentarian to whom I was talking yesterday said, about the favelas, the only answer to both crime (because, let’s not forget that’s what ‘narco-terrorism’ really is) and the poverty on which it feeds, is in the long-term (and that means starting now not later): sanitation, schools, hospitals, transport, jobs – in other words providing the poor with access to the same society that the wealthier enjoy. Extending intensive high-tech military surveillance across the global south is not only a complete failure to address these underlying issues, it also diverts much-needed money away from social priorities. It is the wrong answer to the wrong question… except for the defense industry.