surveillance – Page 20

Canadians should be concerned about camera surveillance

A new report by the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN) at Queen’s University shows that Canadians believe surveillance cameras promote safety, but their perceptions don’t match the actual evidence. The first of its kind in Canada, A Report on Camera Surveillance in Canada will be used as background to help structure new federal surveillance legislation.

“There is little or no evidence that surveillance deters crime,” says David Lyon, coordinator of the report and director of the school’s new Surveillance Studies Centre. “Media such as TV police shows and crime stoppers promote the perception that cameras are more important than they really are.”

The report looks at the rapid growth of surveillance in Canadian society based on studies about:

The lack of Canadian legislation addressing public camera surveillance
Camera surveillance as big business
An exploration of camera operators
Research on public opinions about camera surveillance
Camera surveillance as one of the legacies of hosting the Olympic Games
Camera surveillance in Ottawa taxicabs
Camera surveillance in shopping malls

“The public should be concerned,” adds Professor Lyon. “Surveillance technology is constantly changing. Closed-circuit television does not accurately describe it anymore; now surveillance footage is increasingly digitized and free to flow online. What stops are in place to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands? We need to question the social ethics of surveillance footage as well as establish legal limits on how the footage can be used.”

(The Surveillance Camera Awareness Network at the Queen’s Surveillance Centre completed the report with funding from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The report is the topic of a surveillance workshop on January 15 and 16, 2010 at Queen’s University).

Press Release from Queen’s University.

Contact: Jeff Drake
jeff.drake@queensu.ca
613-533-2877
Queen’s University

What now for the UK’s anti-terrorism laws?

On the 12th of January, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in the case of Gillan and Quinton v. the United Kingdom, that UK police powers to randomly stop and search people under Sections 44-47 of The Terrorism Act (2000) were unlawful. This is the third recent ruling by the ECHR against the current direction of the UK’s security policies (after the ruling in S. and Marper v. the UK, against the police retaining DNA profiles and fingerprints from people not convicted of any offence). It also follows the furore over the London Metropolitan Police’s interpretation of Sections 43, 44 and 58s of The Terrorism Act in relation to public photography.* The case was brought by two people, Pennie Quinton a journalist who was on her way to cover a demonstration against an arms fair in London in September 2003,, and Kevin Gillan, who was cycling past.

Section 44 allows the police to stop and search anyone on the basis of a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that they may be in posssession of information or items that may be useful in committing an act of terrorism. The case in the ECHR was on several principles, most of which were rejected, but most importantly the Court found that arbitrary stop and search dis violate Article 8 of the European Convention, on the right to privacy. This was because “the use of the coercive powers conferred by the legislation to require an individual to submit to a detailed search of his person, his clothing and his personal belongings amounts to a clear interference with the right to respect for private life”.

Furthermore the UK government once again argued, as it did equally unsuccessfully in the case of Peck v. UK back in 2003, that Article 8 did not apply as there was no right privacy in public places. This argument, the Court not only rejected but actually argued that the publicness of the stop and search made the violation of privacy worse:

“Although the search is undertaken in a public place, this does not mean that Article 8 is inapplicable. Indeed, in the Court’s view, the public nature of the search may, in certain cases, compound the seriousness of the interference because of an element of humiliation and embarrassment. Items such as bags, wallets, notebooks and diaries may, moreover, contain personal information which the owner may feel uncomfortable about having exposed to the view of his companions or the wider public.”

This was a well-thought out ruling which made the arguments pretty clear. However the response of the UK government, as in the DNA case, leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, it has basically said, “make me”! The government intends to ignore the ruling in everyday practice, as it did with Peck, and will continue to allow police to carry out such searches whilst it appeals the case. This also means that there will be no disciplinary action against any officer who follows this policy, despite its now being unlawful.

*This of course is by no means over either, and there will be a mass photography action, “I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist!”, on January 23rd at 12 Noon, Trafalgar Square in London.

Moscow cops watch pre-recorded video footage

The police in the Russian capital have admitted that their police officers in several districts were watching pre-recorded video footage in place of live streaming surveillance pictures for an undetermined proportion of the five months from May to September last year, according to RT. It seems that the private company subcontracted to maintain the system, StroyMontageService, was defrauding the police of the equivalent of over a million dollars by recycling footage and not actually servicing the city’s video surveillance system.

Several questions are raised immediately here. Firstly, how closely were police actually watching if they didn’t even notice that they were watching recorded footage (surely the time-codes would have been wrong?); secondly, if the codes had been changed, how would there have been any way of them knowing, unless and until a major live situation was quite clearly not visible? Thirdly, how frequent is this kind of either deliberate fraud by subcontractor elsewhere, and indeed how common are simple errors that might lead to the same outcome? And finally, did this lack of live video feed make any difference to Moscow’s crime rate or clear-up rate. If they took five months to notice, it does rather suggest that video surveillance plays little role in either…

After the Thighbomber: Virtual Strip Searches at every airport?

The botched attempt to bomb a flight into the US by a the son of a wealthy Nigerian family, using explosive components strapped to his thigh, has led to an immediate techno-economic consequence, which is to speed up the process of installing terahertz wave or other body scanners in major airports, which if nothing else will provide a guaranteed income stream to Rapiscan and Qinetiq, who make these kinds of machines. Schipol in Amsterdam, where announced they would be extending their body scanning operation and the British government almost immediately followed by saying that major British airports would be rolling out body scanning within weeks. Now, Canada is to do the same.

But, will this make a real difference or is it just more symbolic security? The scanners certainly ‘work’ in the sense that they do provide pretty good images of what is under the clothes of passengers (see below). However, interpreting what is seen is still no easy task and will the scanners will certainly not replace physical searches, but will add yet another extra layer of surveillant sorting and therefore delay. And there are questions over the effectiveness of the scanners in particular areas of the body. The Toronto Sun reports that trials at Kelowna Airport in British Columbia “left blind spots over the head and feet”, so these machines are certainly not the ‘silver bullet’.

Then of course, there are the privacy issues. I don’t have any particular problem with the technology, provided it is restricted to airports and doesn’t start to get used in other, more everyday, social settings (which given the rapid development of this technology is by no means certain). However, as I noted the last time I wrote about this, there will be many religious, gender-based and personal reasons for objecting to their use. The other question of course is whether, every time some lone lunatic tries something like this – that was, let us not forget, poorly planned and ineffective, and which should have been prevented by other conventional intelligence operations working properly – it makes sense to jump and harden security (or at least be seen to harden security) for everyone travelling internationally. Doing this just plays into the hands of terrorists as it disrupts the ordinary workings of an open society.

New UAVs in Afghanistan

The USAF continues to use the Afghanistan / Pakistan conflict as a test bed for new military surveillance technologies and robotic weapons. The latest thing is apparently the RQ-170, codenamed Sentinel, which is a radar-evading UAV or drone aircraft.

This picture of the aircraft was apparently shot near Kandahar…

500x_kandahar_uav — The Sentinel (source unknown)

It seems that as this conflict drags on, more and more of these things will get wheeled out. Its only purpose seems to have become to field test all these black-project developed technologies that the US security-industrial complex has been churning out. It wasn’t that long after the Predator drone emerged that we saw a weaponized version. It is unclear whether there is any such version of the Sentinel yet, but no doubt there will be soon enough. The increasing reliance on remote-controlled and robotic weapons seems to be a new article of faith amongst the world’s wealthier militaries.

UK government to make CCTV useful?

That’s the way The Register puts it anyway… and there is more than a grain of truth in this. After 20 years of open-street video surveillance in Britain, it is not a safer place and the cameras are not event helping to solve that many crimes, let alone preventing them (which, let us not forget) was what was promised back at the beginning. The government in the UK is now (finally) becoming concerned about this and is apparently going to appoint a CCTV Commissioner or something similar and try to rationalise the crazy landscape of video surveillance in Britain.

However, the key lesson from the fact that video surveillance doesn’t really work should surely be that they might want to start reducing the numbers of cameras and putting the investment into something else. This isn’t going to happen. Instead, the UK government is still promoting video surveillance around the world and more and more places in every country seem to think that they should install CCTV because it ‘works in Britain.’ I even saw one story the other day saying that there had been no formal studies of the effectiveness of CCTV, which of course is simply not true – there have and they generally show little effect on crime, but the conclusion of this article was that in the absence of evidence, cameras were a sensible precaution.

How does that logic work? Since when did effective public policy on crime consist of throwing money at shiny toys? I think it was Harold Macmillan who said that when we need to be seen to be doing something, form a committee. In a high-tech age, people aren’t bought off by committees any more, but shiny gadgets will do it. And if the shine wears off, if the ordinary dull old cameras now don’t work, then there will be even shinier and newer mobile cameras, flying cameras, and probably cameras with frickin’ laser beams… Public policy on crime seems to be stuck on a technological treadmill. It’s time to step off.

Voluntary Self-Surveillance

In a nice bit of synchronicity with the ‘Surveillance and Empowerment’ call just issued by Surveillance & Society, there’s a really interesting little piece on the rise of ‘self-tracking’ by Curetogether founder, Alexandra Carmichael, in the latest issue of h+ magazine, an open-access publication from ‘transhumanist’ pioneer, R.U. Sirius.

The piece concentrates on those who have health problems who want to track and share symptoms and other biometric data, but argues that this is a wider interest: “we do it because we love data, or we do it because we have specific things we want to optimize about ourselves.”

There are also some useful links to life-logging and patient data-sharing sites.

(thanks to BoingBoing for the link to h+)

Call for Papers: Surveillance and Empowerment

Special Issue of Surveillance & Society: Issue 8(3)
Guest editors: Torin Monahan, David Murakami Wood, and David J. Phillips

Publication date: end of October 2010
Deadline for submissions: March 31st 2010

This issue of Surveillance & Society is seeking papers and other submissions that examine the social implications of contemporary surveillance with a particular interest in the complexities of empowerment. In the surveillance studies literature, there have been significant contributions unsocial sorting, digital discrimination, privacy invasion, racial profiling, sexual harassment, and other mechanisms of unequal treatment. In contradistinction, this issue seeks to explore the potential of surveillance for individual autonomy and dignity, fairness and due process, community cooperation and empowerment, and social equality. Key to this inquiry will be questioning the extent to which surveillance can be designed, employed, and regulated to contribute to democratic practices and/or the social good.

The very framing of the issue in terms of “surveillance and empowerment” begs the question of empowerment for whom and for what purposes. Thus, we invite critical attention to the ways in which surveillance practices may unfairly embody advantages for some groups over others and to explore alternatives. Possible research areas might include (but are not limited to):

Surveillance and human security
Surveillance and well-being / flourishing
Surveillance for safety
Ethical surveillance infrastructures and systems, e.g. ubiquitous computing environments that provide care for the vulnerable, dependent and elderly
Surveillance for sustainability, environmental management and environmental justice Surveillance of energy and resource consumption
Social networking tools employed by social movements
Surveillance of corporations, government agencies, or political parties by watchdog groups
Policies for ensuring privacy, accountability, and transparency with video or other surveillance systems
Surveillance in post-authoritarian societies – toward restrictions and counters to the unleashed surveillance of former regimes

We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry, artistic, and audio-visual submissions. Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g., “Author, 2009”).

All papers must be submitted through the online submission system no later than March 31st 2010, for publication at the end of October 2010. Please use submit the papers in a MSWord-compatible format. For further submission guidelines, please see:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact: torin.monahan@vanderbilt.edu

For other current calls (including Issue 8(2) Surveillance, Consumers and Consumption) and announcements, please see:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/announcement

New Issue of Surveillance & Society

NEW ISSUE: Volume 7 Number 1 (Open Issue)
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/issue/current

Keith Guzik – Discrimination by Design: Data Mining in the United States’s ‘War on Terrorism’
Shelly Ikebuchi Ketchell – Carceral Ambivalence: Japanese Canadian ‘Internment’ and the Sugar Beet Programme during World War II
Nicholas Holm – Watching the Paranoid: Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance
Christopher Gad & Peter Lauritsen – Situated Surveillance: an ethnographic study of fisheries inspection in Denmark
Patrick O’Byrne & Dave Holmes – Public Health STI/HIV Surveillance: Exploring the Society of Control

plus…

A video piece by Jan J Knoetze, Brent Meistre – Interrogating Surveillance: The 50 Minute Hour
Responses to previous articles by Sean P. Hier & Josh Greenberg and David Murakami Wood
and Book Reviews by Rodrigo Jose Firmino & Fabio Duarte, Ariane Ellerbrok, Patrick Feng, Jason Pridmore and Tarangini Sriraman

Watching Them Watching You

The city government of Rio de Janeiro has voted 46 to 3 in favour of installing video surveillance cameras inside all new police vehicles, and overridden the veto of the Governor, Sergio Cabral.

Cabral, who is otherwise all in favour of video surveillance, did everything he could to stop this law, but in vain. The reason that the pro-police governor is so against this particular law and order measure is that the cameras are supposed to be installed not simply to ‘protect’ police officers but also to prevent abuse of power, corrupt practice and police violence against suspects. This is a huge issue in Rio (and Brazil more generally), and we saw a good example of this recently with the inhumane actions by officers after the fatal assault on Evandro, the founder of Afro-Reggae.

However, I do wonder how officers will take this development, how the cameras will be used in practice, and how many of them will conveniently experience technical failures at important moments…

(Thanks to Paola Barreto Leblanc for the heads up)