There’s a great piece just out today from Adam Molnar, guesting on Chris Parsons’ blog, about the soon-to-be released British Columbia Services Card, which features a Near-Field Communications (NFC) chip. It’s well worth reading Chris Parsons’ blog on a regular basis anyway, so check it out!
Category: identification
Here comes the US ID-card push
For a while now, I’ve been wondering why the US didn’t attempt to push for a national biometric ID card system in the wake of the 9/11 bombings.
Given reported statements from biometrics industry bosses about 9/11 being ‘what we’ve been waiting for’ and so on, one might have expected there to be a major effort in this direction but officially, as Zureik and Hindle (2004) point out, the International Biometrics Industry Association (IBIA) was relatively cautious in its post-9/11 press work, although it argued that biometrics had a major role to play in the fight against terrorism. Even the 9/11 Commission didn’t recommend a national ID card scheme, instead limiting itself in its final report to In its final report, to recommending a “biometric entry-exit screening system” for travelers in and out of the USA.
Part of this is because of the uneasy relations between the federal government and states governments, and suspicion of the former from the latter, and particularly from the political right has meant national ID cards have always been out of the question, even in an era of identification. So even though ID is frequently required in social situations, especially in dealing with banks, police and government agencies, the US relies on the ubiquitous driver’s licenses, which are issued by states not by the federal government. I remember from my time living in the US (in Virginia) as a non-driver, that in order to have valid form of ID, I had the choice of either carrying my passport or getting a special non-driver’s driver’s license, which always struck me simply as an absurd commentary on the importance of the automobiles in US life because, being young at the time, the nuances of federal-state relationships escaped me. And of course, passports won’t cut it for most, as less than 50% of US citizens have one.
So, if the apparently ubiquitous threat of terrorism was not going to scare states’ rights advocates and the right in general into swallowing the industry lines about security that they might usually have lapped up, what would? Well, the one thing that scares the right more than terrorism – Mexicans! More seriously, the paranoia about undocumented migrants combined with the spiralling cost of oppressive yet clearly ineffective border control (walls, drones, webcams, vigilantes etc. etc.) seems to have no done what the fear of terrorism could not, and inspired a push on both the centre and the right for ID cards – not that there’s much evidence that biometric ID cards will do a better job of excluding undocumented migrants, given that they do nothing to address what’s driving this migration – the demand for cheap, tax-free labour in the USA.
Today, not only the beltway insider’s bible, the Washington Post has an editorial demanding biometric social security cards for all (and a concomitant reduction in spending on hardening the border) following on from a cross-party senate recommendation, but also the Los Angeles Times, a paper which in the past has often been wary of the march to a ‘surveillance society’ – indeed it was the first major US newspaper to use this term, way back in 1970 as well as publishing critics like Gary Marx (see Murakami Wood, 2009) – has an op-ed arguing for a national ID card. The LA Times version, written by Robert Pastor, also claims that this is necessary to deal with voter fraud, a constant concern of the right and which always has a strong undertone of racism, so it’s unsurprising coming after a black Democrat has been elected as President for a second time in a tight election. Ironically, however, the President whose supporters are clearly the target of such attacks, has recently made it clear that he is also a supporter of a ‘tamper-proof’ national ID system.
No-one has yet made the international competition argument that is also so often used in these debates (‘if India and Brazil can do it, then surely the USA can’), but this debate is now ramping up in a way that even 9/11 couldn’t manage. Interesting times ahead…
References:
Murakami Wood, David. “The Surveillance Society’: Questions of History, Place and Culture.” European Journal of Criminology 6.2 (2009).
Zureik, Elia, and Karen Hindle. “Governance, security and technology: the case of biometrics.” Studies in Political Economy 73 (2004).
(thanks to Sarah Soliman and Aaron Martin for the newspaper articles…)
The Iconography of High Velocity DNA tagging
There’s been quite a lot of media coverage in the last few days about the ‘High Velocity DNA Tagging System‘, made by UK company Selectamark, and apparently in line to be purchased by several UK police forces. The system uses a kind of airgun that can fire “a uniquely-coded DNA pellet” for up to 30-40 metres, which “can be used to mark an individual so that they can be apprehended at a less confrontational time for officers.” Claims on the website include one that the microdots of artificial DNA can penetrate through clothing and mark the skin of individuals, and also that the artificial DNA used can result in ‘infinite number’ of unique numerical identifiers.
None of this is entirely new: Selectamark is a company who’s core business is anti-theft marking of equipment, and essentially what they have done is create a gun-based delivery system for an existing technology that was previously used to mark things, thus turning it into a system for identifying individual human beings, in much the same way as has been suggested would occur with RFID implants (but which has not yet really happened in any widespread fashion). Like RFID, the identification is not biometric, i.e. resulting from unique bodily characteristics, but what amounts to a high-tech form of instant temporary tattooing or paint-marking. The company is silent on how temporary this is – and whether the microdots – which are just visible, but show up better under UV light – can be easily removed or washed off by those tagged.
What’s also really interesting is the imagery deployed in the website. Of course there are the usual images of policemen with large guns (here complete with light source for night-time use). These guns, like tasers, have an interestingly toy-like quality to them with their bright orange plastic finish. Guns that aren’t really guns…
However what’s more interesting are the background images used on the site. The targets of the tagging system are clearly depicted in one background image and will be recognisable to all British readers – ‘hoodies’ – the marginalized urban youth who were implicated in the rioting in London in 2011 (although there is also an inevitable pop culture association, especially with all that light-saber-y UV around, with the evil Sith from the Star Wars franchise).
The youths are depicted encircled in lines of UV-like light whose coils also reflect the image of DNA, which is used here as another background image.
The late Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee described DNA as a ‘cultural icon‘, and indeed, the never-really-explained ‘artificial DNA’ technology which underpins Selectamark’s product seems deliberate discursively confused with exisiting DNA identification technologies, or at least the association is clear: that DNA fingerprinting, which is already understood in media discouse as standing for absolute certainty as to identification, is ‘the same’ as this technology. And clearly this sounds better than associating it, as I did earlier, with tattooing – which has a much less wholesome image when it comes to the state’s usage (Nazi death camps etc.).
And then the lines of light that surround the youth also seem to beam out across and enclose the entire world, which is both a standard marketing trope (“we are a global company”) but also a shift in scale that reflects the way in which security and surveillance has moved, to encompass the globe. The world is also depicted as dark with the suggestion of a coming sunrise (fitting in with the overall ‘crime lurks in the darkness and Selectamark will shine a (UV) light in it” theme) and almost entirely urban:
But then what is the value in this global world, which Selectamark (and the police) are seeking to protect? What is the source of the light? Well, the answer, in the final background image, will surprise no-one. It isn’t those who need justice, the poor, the downtrodden, the huddled masses, it’s big companies:
The corporate sector is depicted as icons streaming information-superhighway style from the light along grid patterns: rational, clean and bright and filling, overcoming, the darkness beyond, in a corporate version of the creation story in the Book of Genesis. We are saved! Thank-you, Selectamark and your High Velocity DNA Tagging!
New UK report on the future of identity
There is yet a another major surveillance-related report out, this one from the UK, on Future Identities – Changing identities in the UK: the next 10 years. It is part of the UK government’s Foresight program, and is available from their website. Their other major current project is on the future of manufacturing. Although the cancellation of the last New Labour administration’s ID card scheme is not explicitly mentioned in the background it seems clear that this report was originally commissioned as a ‘what now?’ exercise – to open up a much wider debate. The Foresight project say this about the final report:
“This Report provides an important opportunity for the Government to consider how identities in the UK are changing and the possible implications for policy-making in the next 10 years. It has involved over 100 academics and stakeholders and is supported by 20 published evidence papers.
It shows that the economic downturn, the effects of globalisation, and increasing international migration have all been influential on notions of identity, while the impact of social media and modern communications technology have created a new digital UK. In particular the report discusses an emerging trend of hyper-connectivity and the ubiquity of the internet enables people to be constantly connected across many different platforms. The detailed findings of the report have implications for a wide range of policy areas and will support the design and evaluation of robust, innovative, open policy-making.”
The Mark of the Beast?
I’ve been following a case in San Antonio, Texas, over the last few months in which a couple with literalist biblical Christian beliefs had challenged their daughter’s school over its introduction of RFID-enabled name tags and here are some random thoughts. The latest news is that the pupil, Andrea Hernandez, has lost in the US District Court – it could still be taken higher. The case has attracted plenty of coverage internationally, all largely emphasizing the fact that the student concerned had been threatened with expulsion for her (or her family’s) stance, and the ‘mark of the beast’ rhetoric deployed by the parents and the organisation that enabled them to bring the case, the evangelical Christian civil rights organisation, The Rutherford Institute.
A standard Surveillance Studies analysis might be that this was another case of security at all costs in a risk society, and surveillance as the silver bullet for a non-existant problem or a at least an actual problem that might have been solved by other methods. But actually things are rather more complicated and perhaps more mundane here, and the answers seem to lie, as Francesca Menichelli has suggested in her recent (and as yet unpublished) PhD on the installation of CCTV camera systems in small towns in Italy, in regional political economy and local government competition.
According to the local newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, when the scheme was introduced, the plan by Northside Independepent School District was essentially not a security or an organisational issue but a matter of gaining access to extra finance. Although the scheme was estimated to cost $525,065 to implement and $136,005 per annum in administration and maintenance, the extra-detailed attendance information resulting from the chip cards could enable them district to access around $1.7 million in state grants.
Essentially, surveillance here is simply something that circulates in competition between entities -whether school districts or cities – for resources. Of course the scheme has not been studied in its actual practice yet so we don’t know what actual difference (or lack of difference) it would make to any pupil in the way that we do for Menichelli’s case-study cities, where CCTV is described as being almost entirely useless because it was never really intended to be used as anything other than a way of winning resources. However it would seem that the ‘surveillance’ is almost entirely secondary or perhaps even irrelevent. However I certainly do not dismiss the possibility that nefarious or even unintentionally damaging things could be done with the location data gathered from the chip cards.
It is also the case that the school district attempted to compromise with the pupil by offering to remove the chip from her ID card, essentially limiting the surveillance that could be conducted of her to conventional visual methods. The rejection of this compromise is the reason the District Court threw out Andrea Hernandez’s case. However if the School District is accepting that there is an opt-out possible on grounds of belief then they are potentially undermining the whole scheme – which relies on the generation of accurate attendance and circulation data. Again, one interpretation could be that they aren’t really interested in the data for itself, which reinforces the argument about the instrumental nature of the surveillance scheme in the state funding context, but the other interpretation could be that the school was banking on her exception being the only one, or one of a tiny number, that would not significantly undermine it. The other question here is: is it really the RFID chip that’s the problem, or the surveillant assemblage of which it is but one tiny part? In rejecting the compromise, Hernandez and the Rutherford Institute seem to be suggesting the latter, and here we are a long way from Christian eschatalogy and the ‘mark of the beast’.
(Thanks to Heather Morgan for initially pointing out to me that it was all about the money!)
London Riots and Video Surveillance, Pt.2
My last post was about the lack of any apparent deterrence of rioting from CCTV. However that’s not to say that video surveillance is proving of no use to the authorities. However the way it is being used says a lot about both the limits of CCTV and the general problem of analysis of video images.
As part of ‘Operation Withern’, the investigation into the rioting, the Metropolitan Police have set up a special section of their website, London Disorder Images, as well as on Flickr, which is essentially crowdsourcing the identification of suspects. Despite being the most well-resourced police force in the UK, the Met lacks the resources, time and expertise to analyse and identify everyone it wishes to identify itself, and with widespread popular anger about the riots, they are banking on opening up the process of surveillance and identification as being more efficient and effective – and they may well be right.
Of course, with the problems of lighting, angle, distances, and image quality, the images vary in identifiability – and bear in mind that the few posted so far are probably amongst the best ones – and no doubt there will be many misidentifications. And, in addition, hundreds of people are already being processed through magistrates courts without much need to video evidence. But it is a tactic we are seeing more and more in many places (e.g. Toronto, following the G20 disturbances).
Biometrics in Afghanistan
There’s a very interesting video-report from Sebastian Meyer here on the US military use of biometrics in Afghanistan to try to identify Taliban in what he calls ‘frontline anthropology’. Wired revealed last month that the NATO / US army operation is planned to be expanded into a nationwide biometric ID card scheme by next May. Wired says that there are only two biometric systems operating in Afghanistan but they don’t seem to have noticed that the UNHCR mission in the country is also using biometrics to identify returnees who have already claimed the financial assistance on offer and are making fraudulent claims, in conjunction with the Afghan government. Are these systems all connected? More investigation is needed…
City of Leon to install mass public iris-scanning
The City of Leon in Mexico, if a report in Fast Company are to be believed, is going ahead with a scheme that goes far further than any other urban surveillance project yet in existence. They are already installing scanners that according to their manufacturers, Global Rainmakers Inc., an until recently secretive company with ties to US military operations, can read the irises of up to 50 people per minute.
Now, we have to be careful here. Gizmondo, as usual has gone way over the top with reports of ‘the end of privacy’ (which, if you believed their stories has already happened as many times as the apocalypse for 7th Day Adventists…) and talk of the ‘entire city’ being covered and ‘real-world’ operations (i.e. in uncontrolled settings). In fact, if you read the Fast Company report, and indeed the actual description of the products from the company, they are far more limited even in their claims (which are likely to be exaggerated anyway). There is no indication that the iris scanners proposed will work in uncontrolled settings. When the company talk about the scanners working ‘on the fly’, they mean that they will work when someone is basically looking at the scanner or near enough whilst no more than 2 metres away (in the most advanced and expensive model and significantly less for most of them) and moving at no more than 1.5 metres per second (and, again, slower for the lower range devices). All the examples on the company website show ‘pinch points’ being used (walls, fences, gates etc.) to channel those being identified towards the scanner. In other words, they would not necessarily work in wide public streets or squares anyway and certainly not when people were moving freely.
So is this what is being proposed? Well, there are two phases of the partnership with Leon that the company has announced – and we have as yet no word from Leon itself on this. Phase I will cover the settings in which one might expect levels of access control to be high: prisons, police stations etc. Phase II will supposedly cover “mass transit, medical centers and banks, among other [unnammed] public and private locations”. It is also worth noting that the scheme’s enrolment is limited to convicted criminals, with all other enrolment on an entirely voluntary basis.
I am not saying that this is not highly concerning – it is. But we need to be careful of all kinds of things here. First of all, the Fast Company report is pure corporate PR, and the dreams of the CEO of Rainmakers, Jeff Carter (basically, world domination and ‘the end of fraud’ – ha ha ha, as if…) are the same kind of macho bulltoffee that one would expect from any thrusting executive in a newish company in a highly competitive marketplace. Secondly, there’s a whole lot of space here for both technological failure and resistance. The current government Leon may well find that the adverse publicity from this will lose rather than gain them votes and that in itself could see the end of the scheme, or its being limited to Phase I. In addition, without this being part of wider national networks, there may in the end be little real incentive for anyone to enrol voluntarily in this. Why would banks in Leon require this form of identification but not those in Mexico City or Toluca for example? Will the city authorities force everyone who use public transport to undergo an iris scan (which would make the ‘voluntary’ enrolment a sham)? This could all end being as insignificant as the Mexican companies offering RFID implants as a supposed antidote to kidnapping, it could be the start of a seismic shift in the nature of urban space, or it could be a messy mixture.
I hope my colleagues in Mexico are paying attention though – and I will try to keep updated on what’s really going on beyond the corporate PR.
Further details on the new UK government’s Civil Liberties agenda
The UK full coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrat parties has just been published. It includes a section on civil liberties which is much more than we could have hoped for and which makes no mention of rolling back the Human Rights Act or the more ludicrous fringe Conservative demands… In full it is as follows:
“The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion.
This will include:
• A freedom or great repeal bill;
• The scrapping of the ID card scheme, the national identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point database;
• Outlawing the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission;
• The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency;
• Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database;
• The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury;
• The restoration of rights to non-violent protest;
• The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech;
• Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation;
• Further regulation of CCTV;
• Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason;
• A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.”
All of these points are excellent. They lack detail of course, and the devil is always in the detail, and I would have liked to have seen a little more on what would be included in the ‘great repeal’ given that later it only talks about ‘safeguards’ against the abuse of anti-terrorism laws, but really this is as good as anyone could have hoped for, even, though they may not admit it, many of the more socially-liberal Labour Party supporters. The reform of libel laws and commitment to transparency is equally as welcome as the rolling back or regulation of surveillance, and this seems to extend into other parts of the agreement for the reform of government and elections. I hope the eventual full programme will also include some rationalisation of the crazy landscape of multiple ‘commissions’ to regulate different aspects of state-citizen information relations, in favour of an expanded and more powerful Information Commissioner’s Office, but we will see. However, this is a great start (and I never, ever, thought I would be saying that about a Conservative government…).
UK ID Card Program scrapped after election (and more)
As both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats in the UK had the scrapping of the National Identity Card card scheme as part of their manifesto, the unpopular program has been suspended immediately by the new coalition government, pending further announcements.
The full statement reads as follows:
“Both Parties that now form the new Government stated in their manifestos that they will cancel Identity Cards and the National Identity Register. We will announce in due course how this will be achieved. Applications can continue to be made for ID cards but we would advise anyone thinking of applying to wait for further announcements.
Until Parliament agrees otherwise, identity cards remain valid and as such can still be used as an identity document and for travel within Europe. We will update you with further information as soon as we have it.”
But although the cards will almost certainly go, despite the statement it is unclear yet what will be the fate of the National Identity Register (NIR), the new central database at the heart of the scheme. Neither party, and the Tories especially, said anything specific in their manifestos about scrapping the database, so we will see what happens here – although the statement issued seems categorical about this too. Although the end of the card scheme reduces opportunities for the ‘papers, please’ style abuse of minorities, it is the database that is of biggest concern to those interested in surveillance and social sorting. I have long favoured a secure central government Information Clearinghouse, which whilst transferring necessary information as needed and consented to between different parts of government, would not in itself hold any data. I suspect however, that some fudge will emerge!
In the meantime, the price of the coalition also was reported to include new legislation regulating video surveillance (CCTV) cameras (only about 20 years too late, but that’s the speed of British politics for you), and the review of many of the new powers in the (Anti-)Terrorism and Civil Contingencies Acts (and perhaps the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act too – though it hasn’t yet been mentioned specifically). It is very rare that legislation is repealed or rolled back but we may yet see an increase in civil liberties under the new coalition. The one big worry in this are though is the Conservative opposition to the Human Rights Act – however with their Liberal Democrat partners being committed to the HRA, I can’t see any moves to repeal the act in this Parliament.
I am cautiously optimistic…
ubisurv 