Bruce Schneier has a nice little piece which is saying similar things to what I’ve been saying over the last couple of years on the subject of ‘crowdsourcing’ or opening closed-circuits of surveillance. He critiques the Internet Eyes scheme and Texas Border Watch and others. This is also the subject of the paper, ‘Opening Surveillance?’ that Aaron Martin of LSE and I presented at the S&S conference in London in April, and which will hopefully be coming out in the journal’s conference special early next year…
Category: CCTV
Spying on Your Neighbours
One of the characteristics one would expect in a ‘surveillance society’ is that surveillance would become seen as a more ‘normal’ reaction to problems at all levels of society. So we start to see instructive stories about surveillance in all kinds of unexpected places. The ‘Home and Garden’ section of the Seattle Times newspaper carries a very interesting report this week on the use of relatively low-cost surveillance systems (some involving digital movement detection) used by ordinary middle-class homeowners to monitor their property and more specifically to catch their neighbours doing very unneighbourly things, such as tossing dog faeces into their gardens or trying to peek in through their windows.
In most of these cases, it seems the surveillance is primarily about defending property and based around specific observed anti-social behaviours. So, is this just a question of the legitimate defence of property rights and privacy (the legal view) or is this any kind of a social problem? I think it is certainly more complicated than just being a question of individuals empowering themselves with technology to do the right thing.
There is a big unvoiced problem behind all of this which is the decline of civility, neighbourliness and trust. It seems that most of the problems are interpersonal ones and would be ideally best resolved not through the secret gathering of information to inform a police investigation, public prosecution or private legal action, but through communication with the neighbours concerned. Richard Sennett, Jane Jacobs and many others have observed that we live increasingly in a ‘society of strangers’. The turn to surveillance not as a last resort but as a ‘natural’ first option, would seem to me not only a recognition of this, but a contribution to the wider problem. We don’t trust our neighbours so we watch them. But in watching them we diminish any remaining trust we had in them, and certainly they lose any trust they had in us.
This adds up. It is social not just interpersonal. It means people accept the diminution of general rights of privacy in public spaces and justifies the intrusion of all kinds of agencies into the lives of individuals and groups. This is only encouraged by government campaigns to watch out for suspicious activity, corporate pleas to all of us to be permanently on guard against ‘identity thieves’, ‘hackers’ and of course, celebrity magazines and websites that encourage a voyeuristic interest in the intimate lives of others.
New multipurpose traffic cameras in the EU
A new multipurpose traffic camera which can identify license plates, recognise the distance between vehicles, see whether or not a driver is wearing a seatbelt as well as detecting speeding is being created as part of an EU program, ASSET. The program is a research project which means there is no guarantee that any member state will actually take up the scheme, but it would seem to fit with the policies of a number of them, notably the UK, which has already a nationwide network of Automatic License (or Number) Plate Recognition (ALPR or ANPR) cameras.
The story has been reported in The Guardian which notes that, despite concerns about the automation of road justice, many of the UK organisations which currently oppose speed cameras seem to be tentatively in favour of this camera which is even more restrictive of the ‘drivers’ rights’ that such organisations claim to represent… which is somewhat curious.
New Orleans Ditches Surveillance Cameras
For a while now, I have been wondering how long it would be before the combination of cost and manifest ineffectiveness made urban authorities consider removing CCTV schemes. I had thought, given its long history of public space video surveillance, was that it might be Britain where this was most like to happen. What I didn’t expect was that one of the first big examples would be from the USA, which since 2001 has been going through the kind of expansion of CCTV seen in Britain in the 1990s.
But, surprise, surprise, here is New Orleans’ Mayor, Mitch Landrieu, arguing that a mere 6 indictments in 7 years (which is the success rate of New Orleans’ video surveillance system) is not enough to justify the costs and intrusion of CCTV:
“Most of us can agree that based on the way that they were installed, based on the way that they operated and the way that they were not maintained, that they were not a good investment.”
Woah! What was that? Public space CCTV doesn’t work? Who knew?
Well actually, it isn’t just New Orleans and its particular unmaintained and faulty system. Most urban authorities already know this. Police forced already know this. I would argue that much the same could be said for those in London, which has an far, far more intensive network in public spaces, yet the police themselves admit that only 3% of street robberies are solved with the help of CCTV. The difference is that now some of them are admitting what they have known for some time. The problem is that the public still largely believe that they ‘work’ (whatever that means anyway). And ironically this means in New Orleans that the cameras are staying up, even if they are turned off (as in fact many all over the world are anyway, and many more are not actually being watched by anyone)…
Meanwhile, in the rest of the USA, Homeland Security and stimulus plan-funded Justice Department CCTV systems continue to proliferate.
(Thanks to Aaron Martin for finding this story!)
US military crowdsourcing communications
Marketing site, Brandchannel, reports on a US Army program, the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS or ‘Jitters’), which they say is going to crowdsource video surveillance on the battlefield. Actually, if you watch the embedded video piece from the US Army itself, you’ll see that the program is much more fundamental than this, it is about integrating different radio systems and trying to make the best use of scarce EM bandwidth in order to allow all kinds of more efficient communications – which would of course include video surveillance data or any other kind of data sent over wireless.
However, all is not what Brandchannel thinks. According to Global Security, the JTRS program was already in trouble back in 2005 and rumours of its demise continued to circulate – Wired’s Danger Room reported on this back in 2007. It is still in existence but has been scaled back, the contractors have switched and the costs have risen to more than $1Bn.
The latest bit of boosterism, and claims from the JTRS people that the system will include the ability for troops to access surveillance images from military UAVs and could be in place by 2014, comes therefore in this context, and also in the context of the hacking of US military surveillance drones by insurgents using cheap Russian TV downloading software. One of the really interesting things about this is how the context of military expertise is changing: one of the key justifications for all this is the concept that US troops will already be familiar with handheld devices and streaming video etc. Network-centric warfare turns out to be no different from kids using their iPhones to watch movies… if, of course, it ever actually works.
Real-time Video Erasure?
There are some reports circulating around the web that researchers from the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany, have invented an algorithm for unobtrusively erasing objects from live digital surveillance camera footage. Now the possibility of post-hoc manipulation of video has long been known, but the idea that live images could be altered is something new. A device that could trigger such an erasure drove the plot of the superb surveillance technothriller, Whole Wide World, written by Scottish author, Paul McAuley back in 2001, but almost ten years later, reality appears to have caught up with a piece of near-future SF that already felt perilously close.
According to Ray Kurzweil’s blog, the software is being demonstrated as I write at the Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in Seoul, although the researchers appear to refer to their invention as ‘diminished reality’. There are links to video on the invention from both there and the university press release (above). The software appears to work by recognised shapes and removing them from the video as the feed comes in and before it reaches any display.
However, neither Kurzweil nor any of the other commenters on this story (e.g. BoingBoing) seem to get the potential seriousness of this development, both for resistance to surveillance and for the credibility of video surveillance: it could be a fantastic tool for privacy, or an equally fantastic tool for social and political control. It’s one thing to be able to manipulate the past (to do what Stalin did to his oppenents and airbrush them out of history -see David King’s excellent book, The Commissar Vanishes), it’s yet another thing to be unsure whether what one is watching on TV or on YouTube is ‘real’ or ‘fake’ or some combination, but it is another thing entirely to be unsure whether the supposedly live images from a surveillance camera are actually real or not…
Drone Britain
Despite the supposed anti-surveillance tendencies of the new coalition government in Britain, one kind of surveillance would seem to be expanding, as it is almost everywhere in the world: that of surveillance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Micro-unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) or flying drone cameras. There are so many previous stories on this blog about drones you’d be better off searching than me providing links here!
The Guardian reported on Friday that a growing number of different agencies are either ordering drones or have plans to do so, including he Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), four police forces (Merseyside, Essex, Staffordshire and the British Transport Police), the Environment Agency, and even some Fire Services (West Midlands and South Wales). This follows the story in January that there was what seemed to be an evolving secret national strategy for drones.
So far, their use has been limited not by ethical concerns but by the requirements of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) which insists that they must be “licensed when flown within 50 metres of a person, property or structure.” This remains its position, but it will be interesting to see how stringent are the licensing requirements as drones increase in number and whether the expansion in UAV use is in any way affected by the government’s stated policy aim to bring CCTV under stricter regulation.
(thanks to Charles Raab for this)
The city where the cameras never sleep… New York, New York
The Gothamist blog has a brief report on the massive upgrading and expansion of the video surveillance system in the New York public transit system. Like Chicago, which I’ve mentioned several times here, the cameras in New York are really just collection devices to feed an evolving suite of video analytic software, that can track suspects or vehicles in real-time or search through old footage to find multiple occurences of particular distinctive objects or people.
The other notable thing is that the new camera system is just completely overlaying the old – in other words there is no attempt to connect the older cameras which are not compatible and have far poorer image quality. As cameras and software gets cheaper, this option looks like being the one many urban authorities will pursue, so cities like London, which pioneered widespread video surveillance, but which, with their disconnected mosaic of incompatible systems, have started to look increasingly ineffective and out-of-date, could deal with this not by expensive and unreliable fixes but simply by sticking in an entirely new integrated algorithmic system on top of or alongside the old ones. Technological fallibility and incompatibility can no longer be relied on as protections for the privacy rights of citizens in public spaces.
Further details on the new UK government’s Civil Liberties agenda
The UK full coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrat parties has just been published. It includes a section on civil liberties which is much more than we could have hoped for and which makes no mention of rolling back the Human Rights Act or the more ludicrous fringe Conservative demands… In full it is as follows:
“The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion.
This will include:
• A freedom or great repeal bill;
• The scrapping of the ID card scheme, the national identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point database;
• Outlawing the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission;
• The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency;
• Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database;
• The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury;
• The restoration of rights to non-violent protest;
• The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech;
• Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation;
• Further regulation of CCTV;
• Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason;
• A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.”
All of these points are excellent. They lack detail of course, and the devil is always in the detail, and I would have liked to have seen a little more on what would be included in the ‘great repeal’ given that later it only talks about ‘safeguards’ against the abuse of anti-terrorism laws, but really this is as good as anyone could have hoped for, even, though they may not admit it, many of the more socially-liberal Labour Party supporters. The reform of libel laws and commitment to transparency is equally as welcome as the rolling back or regulation of surveillance, and this seems to extend into other parts of the agreement for the reform of government and elections. I hope the eventual full programme will also include some rationalisation of the crazy landscape of multiple ‘commissions’ to regulate different aspects of state-citizen information relations, in favour of an expanded and more powerful Information Commissioner’s Office, but we will see. However, this is a great start (and I never, ever, thought I would be saying that about a Conservative government…).
UK ID Card Program scrapped after election (and more)
As both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats in the UK had the scrapping of the National Identity Card card scheme as part of their manifesto, the unpopular program has been suspended immediately by the new coalition government, pending further announcements.
The full statement reads as follows:
“Both Parties that now form the new Government stated in their manifestos that they will cancel Identity Cards and the National Identity Register. We will announce in due course how this will be achieved. Applications can continue to be made for ID cards but we would advise anyone thinking of applying to wait for further announcements.
Until Parliament agrees otherwise, identity cards remain valid and as such can still be used as an identity document and for travel within Europe. We will update you with further information as soon as we have it.”
But although the cards will almost certainly go, despite the statement it is unclear yet what will be the fate of the National Identity Register (NIR), the new central database at the heart of the scheme. Neither party, and the Tories especially, said anything specific in their manifestos about scrapping the database, so we will see what happens here – although the statement issued seems categorical about this too. Although the end of the card scheme reduces opportunities for the ‘papers, please’ style abuse of minorities, it is the database that is of biggest concern to those interested in surveillance and social sorting. I have long favoured a secure central government Information Clearinghouse, which whilst transferring necessary information as needed and consented to between different parts of government, would not in itself hold any data. I suspect however, that some fudge will emerge!
In the meantime, the price of the coalition also was reported to include new legislation regulating video surveillance (CCTV) cameras (only about 20 years too late, but that’s the speed of British politics for you), and the review of many of the new powers in the (Anti-)Terrorism and Civil Contingencies Acts (and perhaps the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act too – though it hasn’t yet been mentioned specifically). It is very rare that legislation is repealed or rolled back but we may yet see an increase in civil liberties under the new coalition. The one big worry in this are though is the Conservative opposition to the Human Rights Act – however with their Liberal Democrat partners being committed to the HRA, I can’t see any moves to repeal the act in this Parliament.
I am cautiously optimistic…
ubisurv 