borders – Page 3

A juki-net footnote

I had a conversation yesterday (not a formal interview) with Midori Ogasawara, a freelance journalist and writer who used to report on privacy issues for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. This was mainly to set up further interviews with those who are or were involved with campaigns on surveillance and privacy issues in Tokyo. However I also managed to clarify a few of my own questions about juki-net and the opposition which it attracted.

In short, there seem to have been several objections.

First of all was the objection to the idea of a centralised database, which was able to link between other previously separate databases.
Secondly, there was the fact that this was the national state asserting authority over both local government and citizens. Both Local Authorities and citizens groups had argued for ‘opt-in’ systems, whereby firstly, towns could adopt their own policies towards juki-net, and secondly and more fundamentally, individual citizens could decide whether they wanted their details to be shared.
The third objection was to there being a register of addresses at all. Many people saw this simply as an unnecessary intrusion onto their private lives, and in any case, the administration of welfare, education and benefits worked perfectly well before this (from their point of view) so why was such a new uniform system introduced?
Next there were objections based on what was being networked. The jyuminhyo (see my summary from the other day) is not actually a simple list of individuals and where they live, but is a household registry. It might not, like the koseki, place the individual in a family line, but is still a system based on patriarchal assumptions, with a designated ‘head’ of the household, and ‘dependents’ including wives and even adult children.
Finally, there was the question of the construction of an identification infrastructure. Whether or not juki-net is considered as an identification system, and it does have a unique identifying number for each citizen, and has the potential to be built on to create exactly such a comprehensive system of national identification. Lasdec, who we talked to the other day, may not approve of this, or believe it will happen, but they are only technicians, they are not policymakers and don’t have the power or the access to know or decide such matters. And in the end, if they are required by law to run an ID system then they will have to run it.
There were, as I already mentioned, objections to the potential loss or illicit sharing of personal information. I don’t think this is intrinsic to juki-net, or indeed to database systems, but of course both databases and networks make such things easier. People are also quite cynical about promises of secure systems. Lasdec may say that that juki-net is secure, but there have been enough incidences of government data leaks in the past for people not to accept such assertions.
Finally, Juki-net connects to the border, passport and visa system. The reason that foreigners will finally be included on the jyuminhyo (and therefore juki-net) from 2012 is not therefore to respond to long-term foreign residents’ requests for equal treatment but in fact to make it even easier to sort out and find gaikokujin, check their status, and deal with unofficial and illegal migrants. Groups campaigning for the rights of foreign workers (mainly the exploited South-East Asian and Brazilian factory workers) have therefore been very much involved. Of course it also makes it possible to connect the overseas travel of Japanese people to a central address registry.

I’ll be meeting Midori again soon, I hope, along with other researchers and objectors. I am also still hoping to be able to talk to officials from the Homusho (Ministry of Justice) and the Somusho (Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts & Telecommunications), but they are are currently passing around my request to different offices and generally delaying things in the best bureaucratic traditions!

USA, EU and UK all investing in advanced biometrics

News from various sources has revealed that the United State, the European Union and the United Kingdom are all preparing to invest further large sums in advanced biometrics and surveillance research.

According to an anonymous message to Slashdot, in the USA, Department of Justice requisitions for the coming year show “$233.9 million in funding for an ‘Advanced Electronic Surveillance’ project, and $97.6 million to establish the ‘Biometric Technology Center.'” The former is largely to deal with the problems of intercepting Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications – like Skype. The latter is what Slashdot calls a “vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification” for the FBI. In other words, the architecture of the proposed ‘Server in the Sky’ system, which The Guardian revealed last year – for some notes on this and other systems under development, see here.

Meanwhile Owen Bowcott in The Guardian today has a story which puts together various bits and pieces from the EU’s FP7 Security theme research budget and UK security investment. In the UK, there is to be £15 million spent on updating UK biometric security for embassies, and more interestingly other unspecified ‘surveillance’ purposes, and in addition, rolling out of facial recognition systems to more UK airports. As we know, the controlled environments of airports where people are required to look at cameras, are one of the few place where this technology works properly.

This provides a rather tenuous link to the headline of the Guardian story which is an EU-funded study into brain-scanning (yet again) called Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis). There are lots of these about, and one of them may work sooner or later, but it is worth pointing out that people have been putting out ‘we will soon have brain scanning’ stories since the 1980s and like, nuclear fusion, it always seems to be 5 or 10 years in the future. Brain-scanning seems to be the technology of the future… always has been, always will be?

SIVAM and Brazilian extremist nationalism

A Brazilian nationalist street stall in Rio

Whilst finishing up my work in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, I came across this interesting bunch of people, mv-brasil, who appear to be a Brazilian nationalist movement, with much in common with organisations like the British National Party or the various right-wing groups in the USA. Their website contains the usual odd mixture of anti-globalisation, evangelical Christian (they campaign against Halloween) and anti-United Nations / New World Order stuff with the added anti-Americanism. There of course is the usual rather uncomfortable fact of the ‘Brazilian Christian’ nationalist being a representative of a colonial power that invaded the country and took it from the indigenous people, but they roll over this one with some nods to Indian rights when it suits their cause, most notably when it comes to the Amazon.

A t-shirt with anti-internationalisation and privatisation of the Amazon slogan

One of the T-shirts for sale makes reference to this, being against ‘internationalisation and privatisation’ of the Amazon by the USA. It is a conspiracy theory I’ve come across before when I was doing some research on the SIVAM program – which provides some actual evidence for contentions that there is a secret American program to control the rainforest. I had someone tell me here in complete good faith that it was a ‘fact’ that several Amazonian tribes already thought that they were part of the USA and flew the US flag! This is combined with the fact the UN and international environmental organisations are very concerned about the destruction of the rainforest and the perceived lack of effort by successive Brazilian administrations to stop it. Put all this together and you have the ingredients for nationalist paranoia.

sivam_logo So what is SIVAM? And why would I be interested in it anyway? The reason is that SIVAM is a surveillance system. Announced at the Earth Summit in 1992, and finally completed in 2002 and fully operationial from 2004, the Sistema de Vigilância da Amazônia (SIVAM) is a multipurpose, multi-agency network of satellite, aerial and ground surveillance and response that aims to monitor the illegal traffic of drugs and forest animals and plants, control national borders and those of indigenous peoples’ lands, and prevent the further destruction of protected areas of forest. A good technical account in English can be found in Aviation Today from 2002, and there is an interesting article on its construction here.

Donald Rumsefld visits the SIVAM control centre, 23 March 2005 (Wikimeda Commons)

The problem is that, although an initiative of various Brazilian government agencies including the environment and Indian affairs ministries, the federal police and the army, SIVAM is supported and funded by the USA – most of the initial $1.39Bn US cost came through a grant from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the consortium that supplies the equipment includes giant US military supplier, Raytheon – amongst many others from Brazil to Sweden. The visit of former President George W. Bush’s right-hand man and then Secretary of State for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to the SIVAM control centre in 2005, was widely reported in Bazil. It was of course interpreted by many as further evidence of Brazil’s ceding of control of the Amazon to the USA, or even presaging a US invasion of the Amazon, as Senator Norm Coleman discovered on a fact-finding mission later that year.

Latin American countries have every right to be suspicious of US motives: the Monroe Doctrine; George Kennan’s Cold War ‘grand area’ vision; the support for dictators like Augosto Pinochet; the invasions of Panama and Grenada; Plan Columbia and the widespread use of military ‘advisors’… the list goes on. And it is certainly the case that US strategic surveillance plans for ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ and the like, have have long included ‘leveraging’ any system in which they are involved from the International Space Station to things like SIVAM. So of course they will have a strategic interest, and no doubt SIVAM data will find its way to US military C4ISR centres, but this does not amount to a plan to invade Brazil or take control of the Amazon.

The profits of fear

According to new market research by ABI, summarised by Business Wire, video surveillance remains a growth industry despite the recession, posting 10% growth figures recently. The report also claims that the overall size of the video surveillance industry (which of course it just a portion of the overall security and surveillance sector) will increase to $41 Billion US by 2014 (assuming there is the predicted global economic recovery, of course).

As I have written before, there are two somewhat contradictory trends for this sector in the current recession . The first is the insecurity that results from economic crisis, which coupled with actual rises in crime that also tend to follow, leads to increased investment in security and surveillance. This would tend to suggest a growing market in hard times. However, the other is the increasing mismatch between high security and trade flows. Increased security and surveillance imposes costs on those trying to move and sell goods and services, and this is particularly true of cross-border trade in a time of paranoia about controlling flows of risky people. This could result in a free trade versus security stand-off that might lead to a declining security market. Of course, breaking down the differences further, high tech surveillance is often used in place of physical security and is frequently seen as a substitute for it, so a reaction against higher security might actually lead to more surveillance… either way, the surveillance technology suppliers win.

US borders with Canada strengthened

There has been a lot of interest in the US border with Mexico in recent years, and rightly so. However, what not so many people have noticed is that the closing of the closing of the USA is taking place along the world’s largest land border between two countries, the border between the USA and Canada.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) already patrol the airspace (and at a low enough level that private flights have had to be restricted, thereby doing two security jobs with one technology). However, the most recent announcement concerned the installation of video surveillance towers to monitor waterways. This is all on the basis of very little information about whether this is either cost-effective or necessary; according to the AP article, the Border Patrol themselves admit this: “What we don’t know is how often that vulnerability is exploited […] if, in fact, there’s a lot more going on than we thought, then this technology will help us identify it and it will help us respond and apprehend those people in ways that we haven’t before.” So essentially, this is surveillance to see whether surveillance is necessary – it seems we are now in a surveillance double-bind, so you no longer need a strong reason to install cameras; they are their own justification and may be justified in retrospect whatever does or does not happen. If nothing is seen, they will be said to be a deterrent, if something is detected then they will be proclaimed as showing the need for surveillance!

The technology employed against those tricky Canucks will be provided by the same supplier, Boeing, that has been so criticised for its failures on the Mexican border (and there have been plenty of failures down there). It seems that even when it comes to the trump card of security, which normally wins hands-down, the congressional pork-barrel remains the joker in the pack. Now, the Canadians and local firms along the US border have already been complaining about the post-9/11 restrictions that have begun to stifle cross-border trade on which many of those communities depend. In a recession, such considerations might be thought to count for something, but it seems that the mighty Boeing’s profits matter more…

Which is worse: no surveillance or incompetent surveillance?

Ok, so I know it is a provocative and incomplete question, but it’s one I am forced to ask this morning as a case in Australia, where a badly implemented video surveillance system in Sydney airport is being blamed for the failure of a court case over a brawl in which a man was killed.

According to reports, the police are quoted as saying that they were “hindered in their search for images of the alleged offenders by an outdated and fragmented surveillance system”. They claim that the four or five different uncoordinated systems in and around the airport, all with different recording locations and formats, make it difficult for them to gather evidence. When you look closer however, it does seem to be the that the only real problem relates to one of the systems which was very old and could not record from more than one of its camera simultaneously.

Although it notes that there are other ‘community concerns’ than just having complete surveillance (of course…), the newspaper seems to be accepting the objectivity of claims that this is a problem of a lack of centralisation. Fear of terrorism is as usual the motivation for this, although the unlikely occurrence of terrorist events and the fact that the incident in question is a biker brawl (i.e. a domestic gang issue) means that this link is tenuous. It also should lead one to question why such a violent disturbance was allowed to progress to the point where someone was killed in an airport. That has very little to do with poor CCTV and much more to do with a failure of more basic security and a lack of care for passengers on the ground more generally. Perhaps the real issue should whether we are becoming so reliant on technological systems of monitoring that we are forgetting the protective purpose of security and the rather more human ways in which this could be improved.

The police apparently also have eye-witnesses, so you have to wonder what the agenda is here. Is it simply a case of police frustration? Would it really help if the systems were all joined up and run centrally? Or is this just a problem with one system? Is this case being used deliberately to try to create a wave of public outrage upon which more intensive joined-up video surveillance can be implemented? I don’t know the answers, but someone in Australia should be asking rather more searching questions than just ‘why don’t the cameras work better?’

(Thanks to Roger Clarke – who does indeed ask difficult questions – for pointing out this story)

UK travel database

Lots of media outlets today and yesterday reporting on the UK government’s e-Borders initiative. I’m not quite sure why particularly now: we’ve known about the e-Borders program – which is based around the new RFID-chipped passports – for some time. Of course the system involves collecting vast amounts of data, including rather more personal information than seems in any way necessary, like for example, travel companions – as if terrorists and criminals will obediently identify themselves by booking and traveling together!

For that is the justification for all this. On the Politics.co.uk website, Phil Woolas, the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration – another barrel-scraping appointment by a government that doesn’t really have many options for ministers now – said that this is is just about allowing ‘us to count all passengers in and out of the UK.’ But this isn’t just counting. What was a system derived in a combination of bowing to US demands after 9/11 and embarrassment over the government’s total inability to counter opposition criticism over immigration with any real facts has expanded its functionality (as with all of these systems) into something rather more comprehensive.

Woolas goes on to say that it ‘targets those who aren’t willing to play by our rules’ – tough talk, but it with the ever increasing numbers of trivial, silly and sometimes plain bad rules introduced by the current government, it’s hard to know what playing by the rules means anymore. This is a major problem for those who just accept all of this with a shrug and argue ‘nothing to hide nothing to fear’. I also wonder how long it will be before this database is hacked or details get left on a train or the whole thing is ‘lost’. Maybe I will start paying attention to Phil Woolas’s idea of the rules when his government starts paying attention to the European Convention on Human Rights, introduces some proper accountability and oversight for all these new surveillance initiatives as the House or Lords recommended, and stops losing our data and pandering to fear. Accountability, competence, ethics and rationality: it’s not much to ask from a government is it?

Virtual surveillance fail

this Open-Circuit TV (OCTV) is also about ´responsibilizing´citizens, trying to turn ordinary people into civic spies. Luckily, whilst people love to watch, they generally refuse to behave as agents of surveillance

The US-Mexican border has been a pretty good barometer of the levels of paranoia, waste and stupidity around immigration and surveillance for quite some time now. Now the El Paso Times of Texas reports on the stupendous failure of one massive initiative that was supposed to spread the burden of watching the border by installing webcams (and associated infrastructure) for US citizens to watch online and report anything suspicious.

Around $2 Million US was sunk into the program, yet it had few tangible outcomes. The figures, released under the Texas Public Information Act show that despite 1,894,288 hits on the website, there have been just 3 arrests out of a projected 1200, and only 8 incidents reported in total out of a projected 50,000.

What made me laugh was the comment from the office of Governor Rick Perry, who initiated the scheme, that the only problem was the way in which the scheme´s success had been assessed – there is a quote from a spokesperson that is a classic of government evasion: apparently, ¨the progress reports need to be adjusted to come in line with the strategy¨!

The only sensible comment on the whole debacle comes from Scott Stewart, a surveillance and security expert from Stratfor, who notes as all surveillance experts already know, that cameras are not that effective at deterring or stopping crime, and blames our naive faith in technological solutions that ¨can provide us with a false sense of security¨.

This isn´t just about whether cameras work though.

Of course there are wider issues about the fairness of US relations with Mexico which, under NAFTA, effectively mean that the US uses Mexico as a source of cheap labour and land for manufacturing and the free flow of goods, but does not permit the free flow of people. However for studies of surveillance, it is also about whether encouraging virtual voyeurism is either socially desirable or effective in reducing crime. In terms of effectiveness, of course Bruce Schneier has been arguing for quite a while that most security schemes are inefficient and counterproductive and there was an excellent paper by John Mueller of Ohio State University exploding the statistical myths around security measures in the War on Terror.

But this Open-Circuit Television (OCTV) – not the the usual Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) we are used to in malls and big cities – is also about ´responsibilizing´citizens, trying to turn ordinary people into civic spies. Luckily, whilst people love to watch, they generally refuse to behave as states would want and do not willingly become agents of surveillance – as this scheme and the experiment in the London borough of Shoreditch with such participatory surveillance schemes, which was similarly successful amongst viewers but achieved no measurable result and was shelved, show.

Note: Hille Koskela of the University of Helsinki, who works mainly on webcams, has been following the Texas border watch scheme and will be presenting a paper on it at our Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America sumposium here in Curitiba in March… I look forward to hearing her analysis.

European Parliament Agrees to Biometric Passports

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.