Category: security

The Total Surveillance Society?

Advanced visual surveillance has become prevalent in most developed nations but, being restricted by inconvenient things like democracy and accountability (even if they are not as strong as some would like) and police and local authority funding, such surveillance remains patchy even where it is widespread.

The Chinese state, however, suffers from none of these inconvenient restrictions. Free from democracy, accountability, and with a buoyant economy still largely connected to the Communist Party, it is able to put in place surveillance systems beyond the wildest dreams of the most paranoid western administrators. The target of the new wave of surveillance is internal political unrest, particularly in separatist Tibetan Buddhist and Muslim areas of the massive nation.

Associated Press is reporting official internal announcements about how Urumqi, capital of the Uighur Muslim area of Xinjiang, which saw extensive anti-government protests last year, will be blanketed by surveillance systems. According to the report:

  • 40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective shells have already been installed in the region, with 17,000 in Urumqi itself
  • 3,400 buses, 4,400 streets, 270 schools and 100 shopping malls are already covered
  • the aim is for surveillance to be “seamless”, with no blind spots in sensitive areas of the city (and this includes in particular, religious sites)
  • 5,000 new police officers have been recruited

This is part of a wider ‘Safe City’ strategy – in this context, even more of a euphemistic description that the same words would be in the west – that will see 10 million cameras being installed across the country. Ths numbers keep growing all the time: the last time that I reported on this, the estimate was less than 3 million ! IMS Consultants last year estimated that the Chinese video surveillance market was $1.4 billion in 2009, and that this will grow to over $3.5 billion by 2014. China is now the single largest market for video surveillance in the world.

New Year, New Walls

A few years ago the European Union was celebrating the demise of national borders. At the same time, critics were warning that the Schengen Agreement foretold a ‘Fortress Europe’. Up until recently, that fortress was largely composed of information systems and conventional border controls, but now Greece is making it very physical with a new ‘border wall’ with its old enemy, Turkey. Admittedly this wall is not on the same scale as those erected by Israel (in unilaterally establishing a border with Palestine) or the USA (along the border with Mexico), and will be placed at a site near the river Evros in Thrace, described as ‘highly permeable’ to illegal immigration which tends to funnel through Turkey into the EU via Greece.

The EU is making vaguely protesting noises, which are likely almost entirely insincere and will in any case be ineffective (see the similar quickly withdrawn complaints over France’s disgraceful expulsions of Roma and Sinti people last year). The real reasons for the new barrier may be rather more opportunist and cynical in any case: in a time of financial crisis in Greece with the government reeling from popular protest, turning on the ‘Other’, and being seen to be tough in immigration, is a classic populist strategy of diversion.

UK Control Orders to be replaced by Surveillance Orders

There has been a lot of speculation in the last couple of weeks about the fate of the ‘Control Orders’ that have been placed on various people (largely British Muslims) who are strongly suspected by the authorities of involvement with terrorism, but who have not committed any crime that would likely lead to a successful prosecution. These orders tend to amount to forms of curfewing or house arrest without trial, and banning them from using all forms of telecommunications, and needless to say, have been immensely controversial with civil liberties groups arguing that they subvert the rule of law, and that if there is evidence of terrorist activity people should be investigated and charged with such offenses. This has also been a test case for the willingness of the Conservative- LibDem coalition to take onboard key Liberal Democrat priorities and to go further in rolling back the creeping authoritarianism that characterised the final years of the New Labour regime.

So what will replace them? Speculation had centred around the replacement of the order with a system that allowed suspects to move around relatively freely but placed them under intensified ongoing surveillance. Now the BBC is claiming that it has details of what are likely to be called ‘Surveillance Orders’. These, they say, will give the security services the power to:

  • Ban suspects from travelling to locations such as open parks and thick walled buildings where surveillance is hard;
  • Allow suspects to use mobile phones and the internet but only if the numbers and details are given to the security services;
  • Ban suspects travelling abroad; and
  • Ban suspects meeting certain named individuals, but limited to people who are themselves under surveillance or suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Some of this is hardly new: those suspected of involvedment in football hooliganism in the UK have been subject to travel bans since the 1980s, and it seems to be from this that precendent is taken for at least this part of the new place. It is also almost funny that certain locales are seemingly specified as being difficult for surveillance – and I know this won’t be in the actual Bill – but, surely it is actually quite useful for real terrorists to know this? 😉

But this is all very interesting not least because it uses ‘surveillance’ as a supposed replacement for ‘control’, or as something synonymous with increased freedom. That may be so in physical terms, but the constant monitoring suggested under these new orders creates something very far from freedom. However in many ways it constitutes simply an intensified version of the kind of low-level constant monitoring or mass surveillance that is characteristic of contemporary surveillance societies. It is not so much that there are the ‘unwatched’ and the ‘watched’ rather there is a spectrum of surveillance between the lightly and heavily monitored. The new ‘Surveillance Orders’ would merely seem to push the dial for an individual into the category of heavy monitoring.

The New North American Perimeter

Canadians have been angered to discover recently that a deal to create a new US-Canada perimeter security initiative has been going on behind their backs. This plan has been some time in the making, as we uncovered during our current research on border security. In particular, alliances of major corporations and US and Canadian government organisations have been planning together in the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) – who back in 2007 produced a document, Building a Secure and Competitive North Anerica (pdf), that seems to prefigure exactly what this ‘new’ soon to be announced plan will contain.

And already the state public relations machines have rumbled into place to prevent dissent. The government clearly has nothing but contempt for the Canadian Charter rights that this deal will damage (most notably those around information and privacy). And there seems to be no doubt that this deal will further embed US security priorities in Canadian-US relations, and effectively add an inner core of security to the economic layer of NAFTA (excluding Mexico, of course… no doubt the perimeter will continue exclude them, even while we exploit their cheap labour and resources). Indeed the ‘success’ of NAFTA (read: the success of NAFTA for business elites) is one of the reasons given for supporting this so-far unseen plan by five former Canadian ambassadors to Washington in an Opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today.

This first volley from the big guns seems to have come straight from the Ottawa PR stategy. There are references to ‘common sense’ and the ‘reassertion of sovereignty’ and attacks on ‘bellyaching’ and ‘knee-jerk anti-Americanism’. Indeed it is worth quoting the final paragraph in full because it is a masterpiece of old-fashioned continentalist propaganda combined with post-9/11 fear-stoking:

“Knee-jerk anti-Americanism is an indulgence without purpose in today’s interconnected, interdependent world. Our future economic prosperity relies on an efficient border, and we should welcome any agreement that smoothes the way for jobs and growth while toughening up our borders to security threats against both our countries.”

In this worldview, asserting sovereignty means giving it up, ‘interconnected and interdependent’ means allied with the USA rather than all the other multiplicity of friendships Canada had carefully crafted around the world prior to the Harper era, and security threats to the USA are seen as one and the same as those to Canada. In other words, we should hitch our wagon more firmly to Washington and prevent any return to that ‘indulgent’ Canadian emphasis on global security, peace-building, human development and human rights – you know, the values that once gained Canada respect around the world.

It’s quite eye-opening in a way to see former representatives of the Canadian state to the USA openly acting as US assets in Canada, clearly trying to educate the Canadian public in how to think and how to behave towards their rulers (sorry, slip of the tongue, of course I meant ‘neighbours’), and trying to preempt and predefine reaction to a plan that we haven’t even seen yet not least because people like this seem to think that Canadians don’t deserve to have a say in something that amounts to nothing less than the future sovereignty of their country.

(thanks to Harrison Smith for the NACC document and David Lyon for pointing out the Opinion piece)

The Internet Must Be Defended (3): Everything is Terrorism?

One of the most ominous developments in the current conflict over Wikileaks has been the move in some quarters to define the publication of leaked information as something more than just ‘irresponsible’ or ‘criminal’ (e.g. ‘theft’ or even ‘espionage’). I have a lot of difficulty with those kinds of labels anyway, but it was only a matter of time before we saw serious, official calls for such activities to be defined as ‘terrorism’.

The Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, Laszlo Kover, yesterday called for the action of leaking confidential and secret information to be redefined as ‘information terrorism’. He seemed to be referring here not just to Wikileaks but to all ‘online news reporting’, in other words, he is advocating treating those who report on such information as ‘terrorists’ too.

Terrorism, let us not forget, is the use of violence to influence politics, in other words to impose one’s political will through fear of death or injury. There is no way in the world that one can argue rationally that releasing information that allows people to see what happens inside the organisations making claims to rule over us, or act on our behalf, is that kind of violence, indeed it is highly irresponsible to try to associate the term with any processes of nonviolent communication.

The problem is that to many people this probably doesn’t seem unreasonable – people already talk about ‘information war’ as if that meant something clear and comprehensible. But this kind of action would be to extend the definition of terrorism, already stretched to breaking point by legislative changes in the USA, UK and other western countries, into the realm of freedom of speech and the politics of transparency and accountability.

Since 9/11, we have seen a gradual movement, at first indirect and associational as with John Robb’s talk of the ‘open-source insurgency’ back in 2005, and now increasingly overt, to define the advocates of openness and transparency as terrorists. This must be resisted before it takes root in any kind of legislation because ultimately this means that the Internet itself, the communications architecture which supports such activity, is portrayed as the vehicle for such ‘information terrorism.’ This will simply increase the movement of the drive to close the Net away from a crazy, fascistic notion (which it is) towards ‘common-sense.’ It will stifle the development of any genuine global polity.

What to do? Well the first thing is to respond immediately any time something like this is said by any politician or even commentator. This kind of talk should remain in the realm of the ridiculous and the repressive. We need to change the direction of the discourse.

New Report on UN ‘Blacklisting’

There is a new report out from the European Centre on Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) on blacklisting practices, particularly the UN’s , after 9/11. The report by Gavin Sullivan and Ben Hayes, suggests that the UN 1267 list of supposed Taliban and Al-Qaeda members and supporters in particular, which I have described as ‘kafkaesque’ in the past here, is:

“beyond the powers of the Security Council. While international terrorism remains an atrocious crime … it does not justify the exercise by the Security Council of supranational sanctioning powers over individuals and entities. “

Czech Republic operating illegal ‘gay’ screening

The Czech Republic is violating the European Convention on Human Rights by using a controversial and highly privacy-invasive method of screening those seeking asylum on grounds of being persecuted for their sexual orientation.

A BBC report (via BoingBoing) says that the country’s interior ministry has been criticised by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights for using a ‘penile plethysmograph‘ on such claimants.

This so-called ‘phallometric test’ uses sensors attached to the penis which measure blood flow when different images are shown. The evidence from such tests is not recognised by courts in many countries due to its many problems including lack of standardization and the highly subjective interpretation of results.

New Book – Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine

The Surveillance Studies Centre says: Congratulations to Elia Zureik, David Lyon, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and all the contributors on their new book Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine, now available from Routledge. The book is an edited collection of papers from the research workshop, States of Exception, Surveillance and Population Management: The Case of Israel/Palestine, organized by The New Transparency Project in Cyprus, December 2008.

ISBN: 978-0-415-58861-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface – Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban

Part I: Introduction

1. Colonialism, Surveillance and Population Control: Israel/Palestine – Elia Zureik

Part II: Theories of Surveillance in Conflict Zones

2. Identification, Colonialism and Control: Surveillant Sorting in Israel/Palestine – David Lyon

3. Making Place for the Palestinians in the Altneuland: Herzl, Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish State – Glenn Bowman

Part III: Civilian Surveillance

4. Ominous Designs: Israel’s Strategies and Tactics of Controlling the Palestinians during the First Two Decades – Ahmad Sa’di

5. The Matrix of Surveillance in Times of National Conflict: The Israeli-Palestinian Case – Hillel Cohen

6. The Changing Patterns of Disciplining Palestinian National Memory in Israel – Tamir Sorek

Part IV: Political Economy and Globalization of Surveillance

7. Laboratories of War: Surveillance and US-Israeli Collaboration in War and Security – Steven Graham

8. Israel’s Emergence as a Homeland Security Capital – Neve Gordon

9. From Tanks to Wheelchairs: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Zionist Battlefield Experiments, and the Transparency of the Civilian – Nick Denes

Part V: Citizenship Criteria and State Construction

10. Legal Analysis and Critique of Some Surveillance Methods Used by Israel – Usama Halabi

11. Orange, Green, and Blue: Colour-Coded Paperwork for Palestinian Population Control – Helga Tawil-Souri

12. “You Must Know Your Stock”: Census as Surveillance Practice in 1948 and 1967 – Anat E. Leibler

Part VI: Surveillance, Racialization, and Uncertainty

13. Exclusionary Surveillance and Spatial Uncertainty in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Ariel Handel

14. “Israelization” of Social Sorting and the “Palestinianization” of the Racial Contract: Reframing Israel/Palestine and The War on Terror – Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan

Part VII: Territory and Population Management in Conflict Zones

15. British and Zionist Data Gathering on Palestinian Arab Land Ownership and Population during the Mandate – Michael Fischbach

16. Surveillance and Spatial Flows in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Nurhan Abujidi

17. Territorial Dispossession and Population Control of the Palestinians – Rassem Khamaisi

Part VIII: Social Ordering, Biopolitics and Profiling

18. The Palestinian Authority Security Apparatus: Biopolitics, Surveillance and Resistance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Nigel Parsons

19. Behavioural Profiling in Israeli Aviation Security as a Tool for Social Control – Reg Whitaker

Japanese data losses expose surveillance of foreign residents

A scandal over leaked security documents has exposed the Japanese security service’s monitoring of foreigners, amongst other ‘anti-terrorist’ operations. The documents were posted on the web in November, and according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun last month, include “a list of foreigners being monitored by the division, and files related to secret police strategies – for example, guidelines for nurturing informants”.

Not only does this expose the concentration of the Japanese security services on foreigners, many included on the list simply by virtue of being ‘foreign’, rather than being any actually determined threat, but it is also a reminder that the Japanese laws on information sharing, leaking and so on, are archaic. As the newspaper says:

“At present, there is no law to punish those leaking confidential information. Even worse, stealing electronic data is not included in the list of offenses punishable under the Penal Code. In many cases, this makes it impossible for suspects to be held criminally responsible.”

I am not quite sure that the theft of electronic data is actually unpunishable, at least from conversations I have had with specialists in Japan, however I should add that there is, I am told, no law against selling stolen electronic data, which means that even if the theft could be punished, it would not reduce the economic incentives to steal data (which I have mentioned before is not uncommon).

Then of course there is the wider issue of whether it serves a higher purpose that this information is released anyway. No doubt it does embarrass the government, but there is not reason to think that this actively compromises real security in Japan as the NPA are quoted as claiming. If anything this does us a favour in reminding just how prejudiced much of the Japanese state’s relationship with its foreign residents, especially those who are non-white, is, and how much state surveillance is directed at them.

(thanks to Ikuko Inoue for sending me this story)