Every year, Privacy International publishes a kind of index of privacy. The methodology is qualitative and has a strong element of subjectivity based on PI´s campaigning objectives (for example my colleague, Minas Samatas, finds their assessment of Greece as the best country in Europe in this regard, ludicrous). There are also problems with the equivalence of the all the different categories, both in terms of whether all the surveillance identified is even ethically ´bad´ anyway, and in the adding up of categories to conclude that you can lump together the USA, UK, Russia and China. However, it remains a good focus for discussion and no-one else does anything similar.
Let´s see what they concluded about Brazil. Brazil ends up in the 3rd worst category overall, with a ´systematic failure to uphold safeguards´. In particular, PI condemned:
the role of the courts in weakening constitutional rights of data protection (something I will be coming back to next week);
the lack of a privacy law;
the lack of habeus data provisions;
the lack of a regulatory of personal data and privacy;
an overly simplistic test for the legailty of communications interception;
the new ID law;
recent Youtube censorship;
increasing workplace surveillance, which has only been partially addressed by the courts;
widepsread private interception of intenet and e-mail traffic;
that fact that ISPs are required to keep and hand over traffic data to police;
the extensive road transport surveillance using RFID.
However they also noted:
the protection of the right to privacy of children under a 1990 law; and
the fact that bank records are protected under the constitution, and warrants are required to seize them
I will be going through their country in report in more detail next week and using this as one of the bases for the questions I will ask NGO representatives and parliamentarians in the weeks after wards.
Last week I mentioned the approval of the biometric passports scheme by the European Parliament, and that there were several countries that planned to fingerprint children under the age of 12 despite the legal, ethical and technical problems with this.
However, what I didn´t mention is that – surprise, surprise – Britain is one of the countries that does fingerprint kids, and indeed it has already been fingerprinting foreign children resident in Britain as young as 6. As Privacy International´s Gus Hossein argues on The Guardian´s Comment is Free website, the UK government claims that this is only bcause the EU has forced this upon them when in fact it was the UK government that forced the EU into adopting that position in the first place!
Now, as I mentioned, the European Parliament has pushed the age limit upwards, but will this make any difference to the UK Home Office? Given that the Home Office is still ´carefully considering´ its responce to the kicking it received from the European Court of Human Rights over the taking and retention of the DNA of 857,000 children, I wouldn´t bank on it.
The claim that Brazil is a surveillance society, or at least uses surveillance in the same fundamental organising way as the UK or Japan does, is based on the bureaucracy of identification around entitlement and taxation, rather than policing and security.
My previous post on the subject of whether Brazil was a surveillance society put one side of an argument I am having with myself and colleagues here: that the use surveillance in Brazil is fundamentally based on individual (and indeed commodified and largely class-based) security, rather than surveillance as fundamental social organising principle (as one might legitimately claim is the case in Britain). Now, I deliberately overstated my case and, even as I was posting, my argument was being contradicted by colleagues in the same room!
So here´s the counter-argument – or at least a significant adjustment to the argument. In most nation-states, entering into a relationship with the state involves forms of surveillance by the state of the person. This relationship is more or less voluntary depending on the state and on the subject of the relationship. In most advanced liberal democracies, the nature of surveillance is based on the nature of citizenship, particularly:
the ability of citizens to establish claims to entitlement, the most fundamental to most being a recourse to the law (to protect person and property), secondly the ability to case a vote, and more something that is generally more recent in most states, the right to some kind of support from the state (educational, medical, or financial);
the ability of the state to acquire funds from citizens through direct or indirect taxation, to support the entitlements of citizens, and to maintain order.
I am not going to consider law and order, or indeed electoral systems, here but rather I will concentrate on the way that surveillance operates in an area I had previously begun to consider: the bureaucracy of identification around state-citizen relations particularly in the areas of entitlement and taxation. The claim that Brazil is a surveillance society, or at least uses surveillance in the same fundamental organising way as the UK or Japan does, is based on this rather than policing and security.
There are two broad aspects: on the one side, taxation, and on the other, entitlement. I´ll deal first with the latter (which I know less about at the moment), in particular in the form of Lula´s Programa Bolsa Família (PBF, or Family Grant Program), one of the cornerstones of the socially progressive politics of the current Brazilian government. The PBF provides a very simple, small but direct payment to families with children, for each child, provided that the children go to school and have medical check-ups.
Of course these requirements in themselves involve forms of surveillance, through the monitoring of school attendance by children – for which there is a particular sub-program of the PBF called Projeto Presença (Project Presence) with its own reporting systems – and epidemiology and surveillance of nutrition through the Ministério de Saúde (Ministry of Health). However underlying the entitlement is massive compulsory collection of personal information through the Cadastro Único para Programas Sociais (CadÚnico, or Single Register for Social Programs), set up by Lula´s first administration to unify the previous multiple, often contradictory and difficult to administer number of social programs. This is, of course a database system, which as the CadÚnico website states, ¨funciona como um instrumento de identificação e caracterização socioeconômica das famílias brasileiras¨ (¨functions as an means of identification and socioeconomic caracterization of Brazilian families¨). Like most Brazilian state financial systems, CadÚnico is operated through the federal bank, the Caixa Econômica Federal (CAIXA). The CadÚnico database is founded on ¨um número de identificação social (NIS) de caráter único, pessoal e intransferível¨ (¨a unique, personal and non-transferable Social Identification Number or NIS¨). I am unclear yet how this NIS will relate to the new unique identification system for all citizens.
The PBF Card
Entitlement is demonstrated with (yet another!) card, the patriotic yellow and green Cartão PBF. Like the CPF card, this is a magnetic strip card rather than a smart card, and is required for all transactions involving the PBF. Also like the CPF, but unlike many other forms of Brazilian ID, it has nothing more than the name of the recipient and the CadÚnico number printed on it. In this case the recipient is generally the mother of the children being claimed for, a progressive and practical measure shared with other family entitlement programs in Brazil.
Happy smiling PBF cardholders!
The PBF card in itself may not be enough to claim as you would still need at least the Registro Geral (national ID) card to prove that you are the named holder of the PBF card. The card itself may be simply designed to generate a sense of inclusion, as the pictures of happy smiling PBF cardholders on the government websites show consistently emphasise, although of course, like so many other markers of entitlement to state support, it could also become a stigma.
The information collection to prove entitlement is quite extensive, and here I have translated roughly from the website:
house characteristics (number of rooms; construction type; water, sewerage and garbage systems);
family composition (number of members, dependents like children, the elderly, those with physical handicaps);
identification and civil documents of each family member;
educational qualification of each family member;
professional qualifications and employment situation;
income; and
family outgoing (rent, transport, food and others).
Although PBF is a Federal program, the information is collected at the level of individual municipalities, and there is thus the potential for errors, differences in collection methods, delays and so on to hamper the correct distribution of the money. So each municipality is required to have a committee called the Instância de Controle Social (Social Control Authority) which, whilst it may sound sinister to anglophone ears, actually refers to the control of civil society over the way that the government carries out its social programs. This is also quite a lot of information of the most personal kind and whilst, unlike in many countries there is no central authority of Commissioner for Data Protection in Brazil, there is particularly for PDF, an Observatório de Boas Práticas na Gestão do Programa Bolsa Família (Observatory for Best Practice in the Management of the PBF), which has a whole raft of measures to safeguard and protect the data, correct errors etc (what has been called habeus data principles). Effectively, this is a case of knowing exactly quis custodis ipsos custodes!
Now of course, such a large database of information about the most vulnerable people in society has the potential to be misused by a less progressive or even fascist government. Marxist analysis of early welfare systems has tended to colour our views of such programs as being solely about the management of labour on behalf of capital and the control of the working classes by the state to prevent them from more revolutionary action. For more recent times in Surveillance Studies, John Gilliom´s book, Overseers of the Poor, showed how much Federal assistance programs in the USA could impact negatively upon the lives of claimants, particularly women, in the Appalachian region, and revealed the everyday forms of resistance and adaptation that such women used to make the programs function better for them. I will have to examine more detailed anthropological studies of the PBF to see whether similar things are true of the Brazilian program. I don´t want to get too much into the effectiveness of this program now, although I am trying to examine the correlation of the PBF with apparently declining crime rates in Brazilian cities, but it is worth noting that the World Bank rates it as one of the most successful ways of dealing with extreme poverty in the world. As a general observation, it does seem that only those who object to redistributive policies full stop (or just dislike Lula himself) or those who think it does not go far enough, have any serious complaint about the PBF. But there is far more to consider here…
although there are many forms of surveillance in evidence, Brazil is not fundamentally a ´surveillance society´
What I am doing here is a broad survey of issues around surveillance. I am trying to get to grips with as wide a range of indicators as possible. One impression I have already – which as an impression may be partly or entirely wrong – is that although there are many forms of surveillance in evidence, Brazil is not fundamentally a ´surveillance society´ in the way that the UK is, or in the rather different way that Japan is: Brazil is much more a ´security society´. This is not to say, for example, that there are not many CCTV cameras in the country: Marta Kanashiro´s article in Surveillance & Societylast year indicated that there are well over a million cameras (the total is hard to estimate because of the number of illegal installations).
However, surveillance here is very much tied into security. It´s not a ´security state´ – although it still retains reminders of its more authoritarian past – the concentration on security is largely private. Industry reports I have found, for example, this one from the Massachussets South America Office, indicate that the security industry is growing at rates of betwen 10 and 15% regardless of wider economic trends. Foreign companies are poised like vultures over the thousands of SME security companies that make up the huge private security sector, and positively salivate over the high crime figures.
If one talks in abstracts and absolutes, investment in security at a national level seems to make a difference to these figures. The Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (or Fórum Segurança, the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety), an independent network of local groups, experts and members of state and private secuirty organisations, has started to publish an annual report. The second report, available late last year, indicates a strong correlation between increased spending ($35 Billion US in 2007) and the decline in homicides. For example, in Rio there was an increase in spending of 4.4% and a decline in homicides of 4.7%. A summary in English is available here.
The big thing is not so much public space surveillance (although the industry report mentioned above estimates a $1Bn US market for electronic surveillance technology mainly for the private sector), but both fortification (especially the upsurge in the building of secure condominiums) and the increasing numbers of human security operatives. These may be private security, the new Municipal Guards – basically private security now employed by more than 750 local mayors – or even more worryingly, the urban militias, particularly in Rio. Despite the massive investment in public safety highlighted by Fórum Segurança, official police and other state agents of security and safety are still poorly paid, demotivated and not trusted. To remedy their perceived weakness, in particular in dealing with drug trafficking gangs, so-called Autodefesas Comunitárias (ADC, or Community Self-Defence) groups have emerged. These are paramilitaries made up of current and former police, soldiers, firemen and private security, who basically invade favelas to drive out traffickers in the name of safety, but which soon come to dominate the area and create a new kind of violent order. Now a report by the Parliamentary Hearing Commission into the Militias of Rio de Janeiro, has named names (including several local representatives), and various measures are promised.
…the Brazilian driving licence is a goldmine of personal information…
I spent a little while over the last couple of days examining the actual material identity documents currently required in Brazil. Here are some pictures with a little explanation. There will be a lot more in the final article!
The first is the simplest but in many ways the most important to life-chances. This is the Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas (CPF) (Register of Physical (or Natural) Persons) card (or Taxpayer’s Card).
‘Pessoas Físicas’ is a a piece of legalese that is draws a distinction between humans and other ‘legal persons’, like corporations or governments. The CPF number is issued to all those who pay tax and is essential if one wants any formal work. The actual document is a blue plastic card like old-style credit cards, which also has a machine readable magnetic strip on the back.
The number is also required for many other government transactions, and it is, apparently a major disaster if you lose the card, or if for some reason, your CPF number is rescinded (which can happen if you don’t pay tax in Brazil for more than a year, for example if you are abroad, without explanation). Many people who live in the favelas, and who are involved in the shadow economy do not have a CPF, which is a severe obstacle to social inclusion.
The second document is the Registro Geral (General Registry) (ID) card, a double-sided piece of thick paper, just larger than a credit card. It is oriented vertically at the front and horizontally at the back.
As I noted in the first post I made on this subject, the RG card cross-references the CPF and also birth certification (it lists the full names of both mother and father and city and state of origin). This card is the one that is being replaced by the new RIC smartcard ID system.
Finally, we have the Carteira Nacional de Habilitação, the driving licence which, despite its name, is issued at state rather than national-level. The colour and format differs from state-to-state, however they all have pretty much the same level of information (a lot!) and cross-identification with other forms of ID. This one is from Paraná, which is a paper usually folded in half horizontally. It is specifically forbidden to laminate it.
The Brazilian driving licence is a goldmine of personal information. Partly this is because the licence had been intended to be a unifying piece of identification (a practice typical of ‘autocentric’ cultures!), containing all the information on both the CPF card and the RG card, and more. This will now not be the case following the issuing of the new RIC cards, so it will be interesting to see if the quantity of information on these licences will be reduced or, if not, what the justification will be for having this much visible personal information on one paper document.
The new Brazilian ID-card (from Renato Siqueira's Conversa Digital)
There are more details of the new Brazilian ID card and system on Renato Siqueira’s Conversa Digital blog, including some informative images and photos. It seems that far from eliminating the various different numbers currently used, this new system will merely create a kind of overlay. And, not only that, but the CPF, RG and electoral number will be printed on the back. Unless every single transaction will actually require the taking of fingerprints or the verification of photos, this card will be even more of a convenient source of personal information to thieves and fraudsters than ever before. Plus the chip technology is the same standard format that has proved to easy to clone and access illicitly elsewhere…
Our paper is based around a case of identity theft, which is endemic in Brazil, which we use to open up the laws, practices and technologies of identification here. One thing that is already clear is that Brazil is a highly bureaucratic state – for example, the forms you need to fill in just to get a mobile phone are incredible in their detail – yet the forms of identification which one needs for every transaction with the state and many private organisations too, are highly insecure.
One example is that every personal cheque has printed on it not only the usual information (bank name and address, bank sort code, account holder name and account number), but also has the 11-digit Cadastro de Pessoas Fisicas (CPF) (a taxpayer’s card) number and the 9-digit Registro Geral (RG) (the national ID card) number. This must be a utter joy to fraudsters and identity thieves!
What’s more, all these are not just numbers in a database somewhere but physical documents in their own right, and on each there is a lot of this cross-identification: the CPF card also has the name and date of birth, the CPF number is ubiquitous, appearing also on the RG card and the driving licence. The latter has its own 11-digit registration number, but also has the RG number, name, and place and date of birth. What is even more interesting is that the RG card not only contains a photo and a thumbprint (the state database contains prints of all 10 fingers and thumbs), but also the names of both parents. This means it can be related more easily to the birth certificate. It reminds me a little of the Japanese system which still prioritises the family above the individual in some ways, but there is no actual equivalent of the koseki, the Japanese family register.
Now, in the name of security and “para integrar os bancos de dados de diversos órgãos dos sistemas de identificação do Brasil” (to inegrate the databases of the diverse organisations of identification systems in Brazil), the Ministry of Justice is proposing to merge some of these – the RG, CPF, Driving Licence and Electoria Regisirtation, into a new, smart, Registro de Identidade Civil (RIC) card based on a unique number. Whilst this will have many of the same problems as new smart ID systems everywhere else, at the very least it might stop Brazilian citizens carrying around multiple documents that list almost everything thieves and fraudsters need and can access without any sophisticated equipment. The process is due to start now, and run until 2017, so we will be taking a look at this as it proceeds.
I’ll put some pictures up with explanations later today…
Here´s a tangled web… at first glance the story being reported in Australian outlets of the state of Victoria´s secret police losing highly confidential data on criminal associates looks like another of those stories so familiar from the UK about an incompetant state unable to safeguard personal data.
But it turns out to be rather more complicated.
It seems that this data loss involves corrupt officers connected to a drugs-smuggling ring. Now, research on identity theft by Jennifer Whitson and Kevin Haggerty in Canada has shown that a high percentage of incidents of frauds are related to the selling or use of data by employees or other organisational insiders. In the UK, we assume incompetance by our state and its numerous private sector associates, but perhaps in this assumption we are too quick to dismiss the possibility of corruption, crime and conspriacies…
The European Union’s plan to introduce biometric passports (with fingerprint images) will go ahead from the end of June after the European Parliament finally agreed to the proposal. This means that all states of the EU will now have to construct new databases of fingerprints for the entire population (including the UK and Ireland who, although outside the Schengen agreement on internal borders, voluntarily follow the same passport standards).
The Parliament did manage to introduce one major ammendment which rejected the European Commission’s plan to have children under 12 years-old fingerprinted as well – although some countries already do this. However, this vote was a rubber-stamping exercise by a ineffectual body.
The unreliability of fingerprint identification, which is mentioned in this report by PC Worldremains a major issue. Having talked to European Commission people at many different events, my general opinion of them is that, whilst well-meaning, they are seriously lacking technological expertise and knowledge of the research in the area, and generally fail to listen to those who know except where they will confirm their existing opinions. Like most governments.
Last week I mentioned the approval of the biometric passports scheme by the European Parliament, and that there were several countries that planned to fingerprint children under the age of 12 despite the legal, ethical and technical problems with this.
ubisurv 