policing – Page 11

Hip Hop Cops

An interesting article entitled ‘Watching Rap’ by Eric Nielson on police surveillance of hip-hop artists in the USA. It’s worth a read and has some nice analysis of the response in rap lyrics, which is a pleasant change from the concentration on mainstream film and fiction that you tend to get in Surveillance Studies. However, it is unfortunately illustrated with a lot of rather irrelevent cliched images of CCTV cameras, Banksy etc. and is rather lacking in a deeper political context. It is not as if rappers are the first group of popular cultural figures, or the first African Americans to be put under surveillance by the US state: he should perhaps have looked back at least to the Black Panthers and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of the 1960s. This isn’t just a cultural connection: Nielson starts off with the rumours around the shooting of Tupac Shakur, whose mother was, of course, deeply involved in the Panthers… but a very worthwhile piece nevertheless.

Britain is a surveillance society and it must change: detailed anaysis of the Lords Constitution Committee report

This is probably the best parliamentary report on surveillance I have ever read, and if only half of the recommendations are given any attention by the government, then Britain will be a much better place.

It’s 3.00am here in Brazil, and I have just spent the last four hours reading, analyzing and writing about the House of Lords Constitution Committee Report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. My expectations of the work of the committee have generally not been disappointed. This is probably the best parliamentary report on surveillance I have ever read, and if only half of the recommendations are given any attention by the government, then Britain will be a much better place. However it is not only relevant to Britain. The UK seems to have come to be regarded as some kind of model for other democracies to follow in terms of surveillance and security – at least by governments. Reading this report should serve to disabuse others of any notion that Britain is a good example.

Here’s the detailed analysis. It is long and there are no pictures! But this is serious stuff. I have gone through the whole report and thought about all the recommendations. It is worth remembering first of all what the Committee was asked to do. Here are the questions they started out with:

Have increased surveillance and data collection by the state fundamentally altered the way it relates to its citizens?
What forms of surveillance and data collection might be considered constitutionally proper or improper? Is there a line that should not be crossed? How could it be identified?
What effect do public and private sector surveillance and data collection have on a citizen’s liberty and privacy?
How have surveillance and data collection altered the nature of citizenship in the 21st century, especially in terms of citizens’ relationship with the state?
Is the Data Protection Act 1998 sufficient to protect citizens? Is there a need for additional constitutional protection for citizens in relation to surveillance and the collection of data?

The answers to the first and last questions are, in short ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Their basic conclusion is that increasing surveillance by the state is the greatest change to the nature of the relationship between state and individual in Britain since the end of the second world war. In opposition to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report from last year, and largely in support of our Report on the Surveillance Society form 2006 and that of the Royal Academy of Engineers from 2007, they show that Britain is a surveillance society, and that this must change. They do not go so far as to recommend an Information Act to bring all legislation in this area together, as I have been arguing, but they do advocate significant new legal / constitutional measures to rebalance the state-individual relationship in favour of the individual.

There are 8 chapters of consideration of all of the evidence given, which is treated in a very careful and even-handed way. The Home Office, the police and the Surveillance Commissioners for example, all come in for a telling-off at various points, but at the same time, some of the current government’s initiatives on openness are quite rightly praised (although of course they don’t go far enough in tackling the culture of secrecy that has plagued British government for far too long).

Who comes out of it well? First of all, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas and his office (the ICO). This is entirely right. None of this debate would have happened without him and he continues to push the agenda forward in an activist manner that many campaigners should look to as an example. Secondly, the media. The Lords seem to be very aware of the role of investigative journalists in holding the government to account. People are too willing these days to make blanket generalisations about the media as if they were all superficial and obsessed with celebrity. In the case of surveillance, the BBC and The Guardian in particular have done a great job. Thirdly academics and campaigners alike come across as far more informed and sensible about this than the state, which leads the Lords to recommend that the government pay us far more attention. On a personal note, it is a bit disconcerting to see myself, Surveillance Studies Network and other people and organizations with whom I work mentioned (approvingly) quite so much in such an important document…

The Committee place the two values of privacy and freedom as the foundations of its recommendations. The Lords argue that privacy and the restraint of state powers are at the heart of liberty, and that they should be taken into account at all times. There is, I am very pleased to see no mention of ‘trade-offs’ between freedom and security and it seems that they accepted my argument (they do quote me on this) that when claims to protect fundamental freedoms by increasing security are actually eroding those freedoms, the tacit agreement that binds people and state is broken. They stress that all organisations involved in surveillance and date handling need to give far more attention to privacy at all stage, indeed that it should be built in.

There are many individual recommendations.The first concern the Information Commissioner. Basically, the Lords argue that he should be given more extensive powers and more resources, specifically:

to have a role in assessing the effect on any new surveillance measure on public trust;
to be able to monitor the human rights (Article 8, ECHR) effects of government and private surveillance practices on the public;
to be consulted by the government at the earliest stages of policy development – they specifically attack the government for not doing thus far; to extend the ICO’s power of inspection to private companies (again something I am quoted on) – they don’t note that the power of inspection over government departments was only granted in a rush by Gordon Brown following the revelations of disastrous losses of data by various state bodies;
to speed up the implementation of the ICO’s new power to fine bodies that break the rule on data protection and freedom of information;
to be a statutory consultee on all surveillance and data processing laws and for the ICO to report to Parliament on this;
for the government and the ICO to undertake a review of the law governing citizens’ consent to use of their personal data – there is quite a lot of interesting discussion in the body of the report on how consent might operate, and I am very pleased that they haven’t, unlike the government, given up on the importance of consent;
for the government to work with the ICO on raising public awareness as it should already be doing but has failed to do;
and finally, and this is really important – for the Data Protection Act to be amended to mandate a Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) “prior to the adoption of any new surveillance, data collection or processing scheme, including new arrangements for data sharing” with a role for the ICO in overseeing these. The government will probably try to ignore this, but this is the most crucial recommendation for future policy.

On the various other commissions – of which there are too many in my opinion – they merely recommend that the Surveillance and Communications Commissioner work together better and seek the advice of the ICO, especially with regard to the misuse of powers under the Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), and that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal stops hiding from the public. These are weak recommendations. Later they are rather more robust about the problems of having too many ineffectual regulators of RIPA, but despite a brief mention, any recommendations regarding the regulation of the Intelligence Services get quietly dropped along the way (not surprisingly). I would have thought that recommending at the very least that the offices of the Surveillance and Communications Commissioners are brought under the control of the ICO, if not completely absorbed into the ICO, would have been a much better long-term move.

They also have a number of other recommendations on the egregious RIPA, firstly that the (inadequate) administrative procedures are reviewed and secondly that the government should think again about the whole business of allowing Local Authorities police powers, and that in any case, these powers” should only be available for the investigation of serious criminal offences which would attract a custodial sentence of at least two years.” In my opinion, this effectively amounts to saying ‘repeal RIPA’ without saying so directly. The use of intense targeted surveillance powers to deal with minor infractions is what a lot of RIPA is all about whether that was the intention or not. It is an ill-thought out and badly worded law, like so many in this area.

The Lords recognize this deficiency in detail and specificity and argue as a general point, following the Human Rights Committee, that “the Government’s powers should be set out in primary legislation.” Crucially they also note that the government has not seemed very concerned with what happens after legislation is passed or how it works. They recommend the formation of a new Joint Committee in parliament on surveillance and data powers that would have post-legislative scrutiny as one of its key functions.

There are several measures concerning particular technologies. Their coverage of technologies of surveillance and data-collections is not too bad. I gave a seminar to the Committee on the range of surveillance technologies before they started their hearings, and I was beginning to despair at the levels of knowledge – “can they really do that?” was a common cry – and yet here they consider everything from CCTV to ubiquitous computing / ambient intelligence. There are still major deficiencies however. Although they take my point that government needs to get ahead of the technological game in order to regulate effectively, they still have not. They don’t recommend anything specific about the use of scanners in public places, location tracking, about the increasing dependence on RFID, or about the new flexibility, mobility, decrease in size and bodily intrusiveness of surveillance technologies and what this means for regulation. Mind you that is all in our report to the ICO that inspired all this (see Paragraph 4!)

They recommend that:

the Government comply fully with the recent ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that DNA profiles of innocent people are no longer kept indefinitely on the National DNA Database (NDNAD) – they also rule out a complete national database on both liberty and cost grounds, and argue that there should be a single, clear law governing the NDNAD and better transparency all-round.
On CCTV, they recommend more research on “the effectiveness of CCTV in preventing, detecting and investigating crime”, and more importantly that the government finally put CCTV on a proper statutory basis, with clear regulations, and systems of complaint and redress.
The report is at its weakest on the proposed new National Identity Register (NIR) and ID card. No2ID will not be happy, as all that they say is that “the Government’s development of identification systems should give priority to citizen-oriented considerations.” This is practically meaningless.Considering that this is the Constitution Committee report, and that the NIR and ID card are at the heart of how the government sees the information relationship between state and individual, this is also an unacceptable and compromised omission. No doubt it is evidence of a key area of disagreement amongst members, but the Chair should have banged some heads together on this one!
Although it is treated as a legislative measure, the Lords recommend mandatory encryption of personal data “in some circumstances.” This should have been stronger – bear in mind that most of the data lost by the state over the last few years was not encrypted
They also recommend that the government incorporate ‘design solutions’ in particular Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in all new schemes. This is good as a minimum – we have to make sure that the government doesn’t use PETs as a way of claiming to have dealt with the problem – ooh, look: technology!

In other general measures for the whole of government, the Lords return to their central themes, specifically:

that Government should instruct government agencies and private organisations involved in surveillance and data use on compliance with Article 8 ECHR and in particular the legal meanings of necessity and proportionality. They also recommend legal aid should be available for challenges under Article 8.
a system of judicial oversight for surveillance carried out by public authorities, with compensation “to those subject to unlawful surveillance by the police, intelligence services, or other public bodies” acting under RIPA. This would be a severe blow the ad-hoc and effectively extra-legal expansion of surveillance powers under the present government. It would be great if it happens, but I am not going to hold my breath until it does…
increasing the stature and power of the data protection minister
lots of general blah about improving safeguards and restrictions on data handling and implementing standards and training, and education, to improve public confidence. But the thing is, public confidence isn’t really the main issue. Public confidence is low because the government and its private sector contractors have been time and again demonstrated to be incompetent.
there are also several paragraphs of recommendations which basically amount to saying ‘listen to the public’ and particularly, pay attention to pressure groups and research in this area because they know what they are talking about. They are right, you know – we do! They also want more research to get better information on public opinion in this area. We can do that too!

Despite this slight degeneration into well-meaning generality at the end, and despite the glaring hole when it comes to the NIR and ID cards, the principles advocated by this report, if implemented, would transform the direction of government in Britain. Many of the individual recommendations are things that I and others have been arguing for, for some time.

So what was the government’s first response? Well, the thoroughly useless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, according to the BBC has “rejected claims of a surveillance society as “not for one moment” true and called for “common sense” guidelines on CCTV and DNA.” When she has read the report she will realize that such guidelines are right in front of her – indeed, she got ‘common sense’ from the European Court on the DNA database some time ago and her department still does not know what to do with it!

As I said, if even half of this reported is acted on, Britain’s ways of dealing with surveillance will be transformed. I am not paying much attention to the Conservatives – in opposition you can say anything and they will beat the government with the liberty stick one day and the security stick the next. The question is, are New Labour brave enough to admit that their approach to surveillance has been almost entirely wrong?

We will soon find out.

The case of the serial killer and a South Korean surveillance surge

the case of the serial killer, Kang Ho-Soon, looks like it will be the signal for a surveillance surge in South Korea

Martin Innes described how certain ´signal crimes´ can trigger major cultural shifts, changes in policy or in many cases what, a few years ago, I called a ´surveillance surge´. In the UK, the case of James Bulger was one such incident that continues to resonate in all sorts of ways, but in particular has been held to be a major factor in the nationwide expansion of CCTV. 9/11 can be seen as another for the expansion of surveillance in the USA. Now the case of the serial killer, Kang Ho-Soon, looks like it will be the signal for a surveillance surge in South Korea.

Kang, described as a classic psychopath, killed seven women in Gyeonggi province between late 2006 and 2008. He met the women through personal ads and by offering them lifts home as they were waiting at bus stops at night, and then raped and killed them before disposing of the bodies in remote locations. His capture was at least partly down to CCTV images of his car near the sites of the murders.

According to Kim Rahn´s story in the Korean Times, South Korea seems to in the grip of frenzy of fear of strangers, with massive increases in applications to companies offering mobile phone location and tracking services, all schools in Seoul installing CCTV apparently to prevent violence and kidnappings, and in Gyeonggi province, 1,724 surveillance cameras, many with high resolution night vision will be installed. The murders have also sparked new debates about the use of the death penalty in the country.

But, and there is always a ´but´, one interesting fact in the story is that the bus stops where Kang met his victims were unlit. Street lighting is now apparently also to be added. Now it is one of the truisms of studies of CCTV that improved street lighting is a far better deterrent of opportunist crime than cameras – not that you are ever going to deter a true psychopath. Neither street lighting nor all the CCTV cameras in the world will do that.

More broadly however, I wonder whether South Korea is going through a similar breakdown of the feeling of social assurance that Japan is experiencing. At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush, I know Japan is not South Korea and South Korea is not Japan, but both societies traditionally had highly structured, ordered cultures which have been rapidly transformed in the face of industrialisation and globalisation. From my own research in Japan, it seems that the move towards increasing surveillance is strongly connected to this transformation. However at the same time, increasing surveillance is also encouraging the further decline of trust and a move toward a society of strangers. This can be seen as part of what David Lyon is starting to call the ´surveillance spiral´, a self-reinforcing movement in which more surveillance is always the answer to the problems that can at least partly be traced to living in a surveillance society.

Private Security in Brazil: the global versus the specific

One of the purposes of my project here is to differentiate what is the product of globalising forces (or indeed generator of such forces), and what is more specific and particular to each of the countries and cities that I am examining. If you skim Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk´s 2007 collection, Evil Paradises, you can certainly come away with the overall impression that everything bad in the world is down to neoliberal capitalism. But actually, many of the contributors to that book, particularly Tim Mitchell on the reasons why the state and private capital are so entangled in Egypt and Mike Davis himself on Dubai, are quite careful about describing the particular historical roots and contemporary developments that have led to the situations they observe. I am trying to do the same.

As I wrote last week, the private security industry here in Brazil is obvious and ubiquitous. It is easy to see this simply as part of a trend towards privatisation, and the growth of personal, community and class-based responses to risk and fear that is pretty much the same, or is at least in evidence, all over the world. However, there are several factors here that point internally and backwards in time. The first was made clear to me reading James Holston´s superb 2008 book Insurgent Citizenship, which is both an excellent ethnographic study of contemporary conflicts over housing and land in Saõ Paulo and an illuminating historical account of the roots of such conflicts in the development of citizenship, property rights and order in Brazil from its foundation.

Brazilian National Guard troops in the C19th

Holston makes a comparison between the foundation of Brazil and the other, and in many ways superficially similar, federal state in the Americas, the USA. He argues that whilst the USA consolidated itself within a smaller territory before expanding west, Brazil arrived as a massive fully-formed state. In consequence, the USA developed a form of governance that expanded with the territory, and this included centrally-determined land surveying and an emphasis on small townships to control territory and organise development. Brazil on the other hand, being basically divided between highly administered colonial towns and practically no administration at all elsewhere, had ´an incapacity to consolidate itself´ (65). The state therefore depended on large landowners, and in particular after the creation of the National Guard (1831), which was delegated to these property owners, these landowners also acquired a military-police power. Effectively, this conflation of private interest and the law, or coronelismo, was built into the governing structure and culture of Brazil.

One of the thousands of private security firms...

It is a masterly analysis but Holston´s one slight error, I think, is to call this ´a nationwide privatisation of the public´ (66). It is hard to argue this when the public had never really yet existed in anything like the idealised sense in which it is used by political scientists – in other words the nature of the ´public´ in Brazil was always pre-defined by the private, and by the power of the private, rather than the other way around. In other words, what has happened since, off and on, has been a struggle by the more democratic and progressive interests in Brazil to bring the private into the public. You can see this right up to the present day with the struggles by the state to prohibit and eradicate the so-called Autodefesas Comunitárias, the authoritarian paramilitary groups that have emerged in Rio and other cities in recent years. The struggle is essentially one of creating the ´public´.

Member of the elite Brazilian National Public Security Force in training, 2007 (EPA/Antônio Lacerda) — Members of the elite Brazilian National Public Security Force in training, 2007 (EPA/Antônio Lacerda)

The ADC issue highlights another historical reason for the dependence on and trust in, private security in Brazil. The reason is simply that the law is not trusted. Judges and courts have long been perceived as essentially tools of privilege and the official police in their various forms are not trusted by many people of all social classes. The former, as with coronelismo, goes way back into the post-colonial period, but the latter is also a particular legacy of the dictatorships (which can also be seen as the ultimate private control of the public), the last of which only ended in 1985. This leaves Lula´s government, the first that can really claim to be at all progressive, with several major problems: making an untrusted police more trustworthy whilst at the same time increasing their effectiveness and equipment; regulating the thousands of private security firms and, if possible, reducing the dependence of property-owning Brazilians upon them; and finally, and most importantly, dealing with the massive underlying inequalities, that are also a product of what Holston calls the the inclusive but inegalitarian nature of Brazil´s constitution and subsequent socio-economic development. The latter subject is outside the scope of my project, but I will be continuing to delve into the differentiations and intersections between segurança pública and segurança privada whilst I am here.

Corrupting automated surveillance

OK, so automated surveillance systems are always right, aren’t they? I mean, they wouldn’t allow systems to be put into place that didn’t work, would they?

That was probably the attitude of many Italians who were supposedly caught jumping red lights by a new T-redspeed looped-camera system manufactured by KRIA. However, the BBC is reporting today that the system had been rigged by shortening the traffic light sequence, and that hundreds of officials were involved in the scam that earned them a great deal of money.

Now, the advocates of automated surveillance will say that there was nothing wrong with the technology itself, and that may be true in this case, but technologies exist within social systems and, unless you try to remove people altogether or by developing heuristic systems – both of which have their own ethical and practical problems – then these kind of things are always going to happen. It’s something those involved in assessing technologies for public use should think about, but in this case it seems they had thought about it, and their only thought was how much cash they could make…

Keep quiet or get labelled a terrorist…

BoingBoing brings this piece from the Daily Kos to my attention. It’s a disturbing story of what has happened on a number of occasions to people who annoy flight attendants and end up being labeled as terrorists. These ridiculous rulings have been severely debilitating – in the most extreme case, one woman lost access to her children, and in a Kafkaesque twist was unable to argue the case because she could not reach the custody hearing (in Hawai’i) because she was banned from flying!

These rulings have all occurred through extreme interpretations of the provisions of the US PATRIOT Act. However both this tendency for laws to extend their reach is not unique to the USA, indeed Britain may be far more culpable in this regard but in its mundane, bureaucratic way. Examples include the way that the Harassment Act, designed to protect people from stalkers, has become a tool of corporations against protestors, and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which has enabled local authorities to employ intensive surveillance of individuals for such heinous acts as recycling wrongly.

The other issue here is once again, one of responsibilization, the enabling of ordinary people in minor positions of responsibility, or none, to use powers that would previously have been reserved to law enforcement officials or the court system. In the USA, it is flight attendants, whose role has increased markedly as post-9/11 provisions have ratcheted up expectations of passenger behaviour, but in Britain, the New Labour administration has enabled hundreds of bureaucrats to issue fines without any court process through the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanction Act, passed last year.

Basically, there are more and more people who, on a whim and with little or no evidence, can make life extremely difficult if you don’t conform to increasingly tight behavioural norms based on pre-established categories – ‘acting like a terrorist‘ being just one. Some of these norms we may even agree with – no-one likes rudeness – but what is happening is a process of desocialization and the replacement of what used to be matters of civility by narrow protocols.

Violent Crime in Brazil

Murder rates in Brazil and Sao Paulo (The Economist) — Murder rates in Brazil and São Paulo (The Economist, 2008)

Most people tend to think of Brazilian cities as divided and violent, with especially high rates of gang-related gun deaths in and around the favelas. Certainly that was the impression I was starting to get. However, there was an excellent piece last year in The Economist on falling murder rates in Brazilian cities. Yes, that´s right, I said falling murder rates. And not just falling, plummeting.

However, as the article points out, the decline is largely due to a halving of the murder rate in Brazil´s second city, São Paulo. The Economist put this down to a combination of: tighter gun control; better policing (including community policing initiatives and a large new Murder Squad, which ¨uses computer profiling to spot patterns and to act preventively¨); and, a relative decline in the youth demographic as the baby-boom cohort of children born after the mass immigration from the 1970s ages – the gangsters are getting older and getting out of crime, and there are slightly fewer young recruits to replace them. But one note of caution is that this may all be the temporary result of one particular gang gaining a dominant and unchallengable position. My view (not The Economist´s) is that if this latter development is a genuinely long-term trend, it could either result in a move to more legal community development activities by the gang (as has happened in some US cities) or a more stable but persistant pattern of criminality such as that in exhibited by the endemic gang-cultures of Southern Italy or in Japan…

Of course, I should also note that these figures are official ones from the Ministry of Health and I have no idea yet how reliable are the collection or categorisation methods for crime statistics used by the Brazilian authorities.

(thanks to Rodrigo Firmino for this one)