My picture of the week comes from a fascinating-looking exhibtion at the Arts Centre, Washington (in the north of England) from October to November 2009.
(Thanks to Roy Boyne for sending this.)
Surveillance picture of the week…
Category: surveillance
UAE plans DNA database of entire population
Police in the United Kingdom have recently been forced by the European Court of Human Rights to scale back their increasingly large National DNA Database (NDNAD), which previously potentially included DNA profiles of anyone arrested by the police, whether charged with any offence or not. This at least shows that there is some recourse to law and and a higher authority that will protect the rights of citizens against the extension of state power… in reasonably democratic Europe at least.
However authoritarian regimes need have no such concerns. The Persian Gulf state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has decided that it is to create a national DNA database of the entire resident population. According to The National newspaper, this will not even need any kind of debate or even new legislation. They estimate that this will take up to 10 years if population growth is factored in.The paper claims this will be the world’s first such comprehensive database, but this is only partly true. Iceland, Sweden and Estonia have all set up comprehensive DNA databases run by their health services. But the UAE’s certainly appears to be the first attempts at a comprehensive law enforcement DNA database.
DNA pioneer, Sir Alec Jeffrys, has his doubts of course. But learned critique, or opposition or overt resistance are probably all largely irrelevant to the UAE government. However, if there is to be a roadblock, it may be the economy: the UAE’s population is made up to a great extent of temporary foreign workers of all skill levels and occupation types, and the economy depends largely on the willingness of such workers to continue to come to the UAE. Whilst those at the bottom may feel they have little choice, those at the top may decide that such a policy would make the difference between them coming to and investing in the UAE, or not. The second article claims that ‘visitors’ will be exempt, but not ‘residents’. How this plays out remains to be seen. I have no doubt that the UAE will give in to the pressure of global wealth and find some way of exempting rich foreign residents, whilst making absolutely sure that poor immigrant workers are the first to be sampled.
Project Indect and the NeoConOpticon
Following the release of the NeoConOpticon report, Ben Hayes of Statewatch has set up an interesting blog monitoring EU security policy, called (ahem…) Notes on the European Security Research Program. One the first post (and a follow-up) concerned one particular EU 7th Framework Program-funded project called Indect, which seems to think that it is a great idea to have an Enemy of the State-style comprehensive surveillance system across Europe. It appears to be filmed in Poland – you think the Poles at least would have learned from almost half a century of totalitarian rule…
There are of course, hundreds of these security projects being funded by the EU that Ben’s report detailed (with a tiny, tiny number of alternative or critical ones, and of course some token nods to simple ethical concerns like privacy within some of the projects). One that finished in 2007 was the SAFEE project that proposed (amongst other things) to put cameras in the back of every aircraft seat so that passengers’ facial expressions could be monitored automatically for signs off threat… it’s unclear how many of these ever get beyond the research stage – and I hope most don’t – but if they do, the future of the EU is one of a tightly controlled society of people constantly monitored even at the most personal level in case they step out of line. The great thing about the NeoConOpticon report is that it puts all of these things together rather than treating them in isolation. I wonder if the individual researchers involved would think differently if they actually considered their work in this context and in the context of the political architecture of security that is being built in the EU.
Anyway, here’s the PR video for Indect, for those who are interested in such things. It’s typical of the genre: a dumbed-down, hyped-up, over-macho, TV-detective series pastiche with a ridiculous voice-over and music. No doubt it goes down a storm at sales events.
Anyway, keep an eye on Ben’s blog. I will be.
Towards Open-Circuit Television
The era of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance may be coming to an end. Surprised? Unfortunately, this does not mean that we are likely to see less surveillance, and cameras being torn down any time soon – quite the contrary. Instead a number of developments are pointing the way to the emergence of more Open-Circuit Television (OCTV) surveillance. These developments include technological ones, like wireless networking, the move to store data via ‘cloud’ computing, participatory locative computing technologies like CityWare, and the increasing affordability and availability of personal surveillance devices (for example, these plug and play mini-cameras unveiled at DemoFall 09). However they also include changes in the way that video surveillance is monitored and by whom.
Back in 2007, a pilot scheme in Shoreditch in London, which enabled residents to watch CCTV cameras on a special TV channel, was canned. However the project had proved to be incredibly popular amongst residents. Now The Daily Telegraph reports that an entrepreneur in Devon, Tony Morgan has set up a company, Internet Eyes, which is marketing what is calls an ‘event notification system’. They plan to broadcast surveillance footage from paying customers on the Internet, with the idea that the public will work as monitors. They won’t just be doing this for nothing however: the whole thing is set up like a game, where ‘players’ gain points for spotting suspected crimes (three if it is an actual crime) and lost points for false alarms. To back this up, there are monthly prizes (paid for out of the subscriptions of the organisations whose cameras are being monitored) of up to 1000 GBP (about $1600 US). Their website claims that a provisional launch is scheduled for November.
Mark Andrejevic has been arguing, most recently in iSpy, that those who watch Reality TV are engaging in a form of labour, now we see the idea transferred directly to video surveillance in ‘real reality’ (a phrase which will make Bill Bogard laugh, at least – he’s been arguing that simulation and surveillance are increasingly interconnected, for years). This idea might seem absurd, indeed ‘unreal’ but it is an unsurprising outcome of the culture of voyeurism that has been engendered by that combination of ever-present CCTV on the streets and Reality TV shows that came together so neatly in Britain from the early 1990s. It certainly raises a shudder too, at the thought of idiots and racists with time on their hands using this kind of things to reinforce prejudices and create trouble.
But is it really so bad? At the moment, UK residents are asked to trust in the ‘professionalism’ of an almost entirely self-regulating private security industry or the police. Neither have a particularly good record on race-relations for a start. Why is it intrinsically worse, if there are to be cameras at all (which I am certainly not arguing that there should be) to have cameras that are entirely open to public scrutiny? Is this any different from watching public webcams? Wouldn’t it actually be an improvement if this went further? If say, the CCTV cameras in police stations were open to public view? Would it make others, including the powerful, more accountable like a kind of institutionalised sousveillance?
In Ken Macleod‘s recent novel, The Execution Channel, the title refers to an anonymous but pervasive broadcast that shows the insides of torture chambers and prison cells, which functions as a device of moral conscience (at least for literary purposes) but also a Ballardian commentary on the pervasive blandness of what used to be the most outrageous atrocity. Accountability is in the end as far from this project as it is from Internet Eyes. Set up like a game, it will be treated like a game. It strips out any consequence or content from reality and leaves just the surfaces. What is ‘seen’ is simply the most superficial – and seen by the most suspicious. Participatory internet surveillance is Unreality TV. In any case, I don’t think it will either be successful in terms of crime-control (other such participatory surveillance schemes, like that on the Texas-Mexico border, have so-far proved to be failures) or useful in social terms, and may also be illegal without significant safeguards and controls anyway.
And there is nothing to stop multiple people signing up with multiple aliases and just messing the system up… not that I’d suggest anything like that, of course.
(Thank-you to Aaron Martin for badgering me with multiple posts pointing in this direction! Sometimes it just takes a little time to think about what is going on here…)
UN 1267 and kafkaesque justice
I have just come back from a talk by Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen of Sudanese origin who has just in June returned to Canada after six years in Sudan. He wasn’t there by choice but because he was arrested by the Sudanese intelligence services (NISS) – who have been frequently condemned by Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – imprisoned and tortured and then prevented from returning by the Canadian government, until a Federal Court Judge, Russel Zinn, ruled in his favour. He has never been charged with any offence let alone convicted, and it has been made clear on a number of occasions that there is no evidence against him. Furthermore he alleges (and Judge Zinn agreed) that the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) was involved almost every step of the way, including harassing him and his family, and participating in his interrogation in the Sudan – CSIS is, of course, as unacountable as most of the intelligence agencies of supposedly democratic western states. You can read more about the case here.
Now he’s back, but he is effectively a persona non grata, as since 2006, at the request of the US government, he has been on The Consolidated List established and maintained by the 1267 Committee with respect to Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden, and the Taliban and other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with them (the ‘UN 1267 List’). This list, established by UN Resolution 1267, and administered by the permanent members of the Security Council (not the General Assembly or other more accountable UN organisations), goes much further than the US ‘No-Fly List’. It is supposedly a list of the most dangerous Al-Qaeda and Taliban members and affiliates and no signatory state is allowed to provide those listed with any financial or material assistance, including services, employment, healthcare and so on. You would think that this extraordinary (and so far as we know, indefinite) punishment would require equally extraordinary proof, but the situation is the opposite: there is no public evidence or accountability offered. It is theoretically possible to get off the list, but appeal is only to the UN 1267 List committee itself, seems to work on the principle of ‘prove that you are not a terrorist’ – an all but impossible task for anyone – and no reason for refusal is published or given to the appellant.
But the list itself is entirely public. On the website, you can find Abdelrazik, listed under ‘Individuals associated with Al-Qaeda’ – and let’s make it clear, no evidence has been offered to suggest that he is in any way associated with that terrorist organisation or its affiliates. The entries are telling in that they are basically a series of ‘known aliases’ of various degrees of apparent strength of evidence (which of course is not provided). Each group of aliases could really be anyone or any number of people for two main reasons. Firstly, there is the acknowledged lack of expertise of western intelligence agencies in Arabic and Muslim countries – just as a random example, see this article from earlier this year which makes clear that the CIA is still massively deficient in all foreign language skills. The second is the fact that any information they do have was in many cases either paid for or obtained by forced confessions through intimidation and torture, which as everyone knows, provides nothing of value and is counterproductive in a wider political sense (in addition to being wrong, of course). And to add another layer of bleak irony, some of this unreliable information is obtained from the very organisations (like NISS) condemned by the UN for their appalling human rights records! Yet a web of certainty and indefinite punitive restriction is being spun around these dubious data.
Judge Zinn in his judgement, compared the situation to that of The Trial by Franz Kafka, and it’s hard to imagine a more apt word for it than kafkaesque. He not only decried the Canadian government’s attitude to this individual case as flawed (as have been the actions of almost all the major western nations in this area), but he argued that the UN 1267 list as a whole was “a denial of basic legal remedies and untenable under the principles of international human rights” and – I would add – morally indefensible.
New York City expanding surveillance infrastructure
The New York Times reports that $24M US has been assigned from the Department of Homeland Security to expand the city’s CCTV camera system from downtown to midtown Manhattan (the area between 30th and 60th Streets). This of course is justified by Mayor Bloomberg on the grounds of security, with a large number of iconic buildings in the midtown area. However, it bears repeating that firstly, the 9/11 attacks did not come from the streets, and secondly, London already had a comprehensive CCTV system at the time of the 7/7 attacks and whilst they provided lots of pictures for the news media afterwards, they did not in any way prevent the attacks, and it is difficult to see how such a system could prevent any determined attacker. It may make people feel safer, at least temporarily, however even at that symbolic level, there’s likely to be as many people who feel uneasy about the idea of constant monitoring or the loss of privacy (although from my experience of the UK, the actual monitoring is far from constant or comprehensive, and most people also get used to that too). But, whatever the people of New York do feel – and there will many different reactions – they shouldn’t get the impression that they are getting actual ‘security’ (whatever that is) here. This isn’t a message many people like to hear, it seems, least of all those in government…
Rio gets the Olympics – and now the poor will suffer
Most people will probably have heard the announcement that Rio de Janeiro has been awarded the 2016 Olympic Games. While I am pleased that Brazil has beaten the USA in particular in this race in the sense that it shows a slight shift in global power balances towards the global south, I am very concerned as to how the current right-wing administration of both the city and region of Rio will deal with the ‘security’ issues around this mega-event. The Pan-American Games, which Rio hosted in 2007 led to the violent occupation by military police of several particularly troubled favelas (informal settlements), and the new administration has already shown its authoritarian tendencies with the Giuliani- wannabe ‘choque de ordem’ (shock of order) policies that involve building demolition, crackdowns on illegal street vendors (i.e. the poor) and more recently, the building of walls around certain favelas, and most recently the unwelcome imposition of CCTV cameras on favelas that were just starting to enjoy improvements in trust between police and community. The favelas that line the main highways into the city from the international airport were already slated for such ghettoization, and the Olympics will only make this more likely to happen and more quickly – just as has happened in South Africa, similarly afflicted by race and class-based social conflict, during the various international meetings and summits there in recent years. Foreign delegates and tourists don’t like to see all that nasty poverty, do they?
I will write more on this later (I am on the road right now…).
Call for Papers: 4th Surveillance & Society Conference, 2010
A GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY?
THE FOURTH BIANNUAL SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY CONFERENCE
Supported by the LIVING IN SURVEILLANCE SOCIETIES (LISS) COST Action, and the SURVEILLANCE STUDIES NETWORK
City University London, UK
April 13 – 15, 2010
CALL FOR PAPERS
OVERVIEW
Surveillance has become a ubiquitous feature of living in the global north, with citizens routinely monitored by a range of sophisticated technologies. Increasing levels of surveillance are typically justified and legitimated by threats of terrorism, fear of crime and disorder, as info/entertainment tools for the curious and through discourses emphasizing public and private service improvement. In spite of this, little is known about the effect of surveillance on individuals, society, the democratic polity, nation states in the developed and developing world, and the evolving nature of humanity.
THEMES
This conference calls for papers which examine the many facets of surveillance and globality. In particular, we welcome papers which address:
- Living in the surveillance age
- Surveillance, difference and discrimination
- Attitudes and experiences of the watcher and watched
- The development and diffusion of surveillance technologies
- Surveillance technology in practice
- The political economy of surveillance
- The business of surveillance
- The surveillance of consumers and workers
- Public policy, regulation and surveillance
- The philosophy of surveillance and philosophical perspectives on surveillance
- Surveillance, intelligence and war
- Surveillance, sovereignty and the nation state
- Surveillance and the production of space
FEES AND GENERAL INFORMATION
This is a non-residential conference and participants will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation (we will provide advice for this in due course). The Conference will be held in and around the Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre and Foyer, City University London, UK. London is a powerful, global city at the sharp end of surveillance processes, protocols and debates and thus provides delegates with an apt cultural context for the exploration of the above themes.
The conference web site will be up and running from early October 2009 providing full details of the emerging conference programme (i.e. schedule, plenary speakers etc.), maps, accommodation advice, evening dinner information, payment details and an electronic registration form.
The Conference Fee is £200 per person, which includes attendance, refreshments, lunch and an optional £25 two year membership of the Surveillance Studies Network. The membership fee will be used to promote the charitable activities of the Surveillance Studies Network, support the continued publication of the Journal of Surveillance and Society and give other benefits to members.
There will be a formal conference dinner on the evening of April 14th at an additional charge of £50.
SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS AND NOTIFICATION OF ATTENDANCE
If you wish to present a paper, please submit your 300-word abstract and an accompanying set of three keywords to Lisa, the conference administrator, by November 7th 2009 (email: surveillance_conference@live.co.uk) and please also include the following information so that we can contact you:
• Name
• Country of residence
• Institutional affiliation
• Institutional address
• Telephone number
• Email address
• 300-word abstract and list of three keywords
If you are thinking of attending but do not wish to give a paper, please send us the above information clearly stating that you do not wish to present a paper.
There will be two special issues of Surveillance and Society following this conference. The issues will be spaced to allow time for papers in different states of completion at the conference itself, to be submitted – please see the ‘Event Timetable’ section below. When you submit your abstract, please specify whether you intend to submit your paper to one of these issues.
POSTGRADUATE INFO
We are hoping to offer ten reduced fee places for postgraduate students wishing to give a paper or present a poster display of their research. If you wish to apply for this, please register our interest as soon a possible and send a 300 word abstract to Lisa (or indicate that you wish to present a poster), the conference administrator by 7th November 2009 (email: surveillance_conference@live.co.uk). Allocation of these strictly limited places will be based on the quality of the abstract/research description submitted and not on a first-come-first-served basis.
If you wish to attend, but do not wish to deliver a paper, please indicate this by the November 7th 2009.
EVENT TIMETABLE
2009
September 3rd – Statement of intent issued
September 28th – Full call for papers issued
October 7th – Website goes live
November 7th – Deadline for the submission of abstracts
November 23rd – Second Call issued – with list of key speakers. Electronic booking form available and formal registration and payment begins
December 18th – Final deadline for the submission of abstracts
2010
March 15th – Deadline for the electronic submission of full papers
March 15th – Final deadline for registration and payment for all conference attendees without late booking surcharge
March 24th – Papers published on Web available to all registered conference delegates
April 13th – 15th – Conference
June 30th – Deadline for submission to Surveillance and Society Conference Special Issue 1
Sept 30th – Deadline for submission to Surveillance and Society Conference Special Issue 2
Dec – Publication of Surveillance and Society Conference Special Issue 1
2011
Feb/March 2011 – Publication of Surveillance and Society Conference Special Issue 2
Please register your interest NOW!
We look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks,
Dr Gavin Smith
Professor Clive Norris
Dr Kirstie Ball
Dr David Murakami Wood
Dr Will Webster
Gordon Brown stalls on UK ID cards issue
Despite the news stories saying that he had made a significant announcement on ID cards, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said absolutely nothing new interesting on the subject in his speech on future Labour policy yesterday. As Henry Porter comments on The Guardian website, whilst his announcement that ID cards would not be compulsory in the (increasingly unlikely) event of another Labour term was greeted with enthusiasm by the party faithful, this is not any kind of change in policy and nothing concrete was said about the National Identity Register (i.e.: the database, the important bit!). While the Conservative Party may be limited and rather disingenuous in their apparent opposition to the ‘surveillance state’, Labour appears to be merely self-congratulatory and complacent.
Hoist by their own petard…
I always enjoy stories where those who advocate surveillance and say things like ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ are then caught by surveillance (see for example, this story). In the first place, it shows how bogus and hypocritical that insidious argument is, but in the second place, it can be just really funny. So this week’s amusing surveillance story is provided by a local TV story posted on YouTube, which supposedly shows a team of Lakehead, Florida, cops who were supposed to be raiding the house of suspected drug-dealer, indulging in a nine-hour Nintendo Wii bowlathon… all caught on the householder’s home CCTV system – and now spreading virally all over the world. Ooops…
There are serious issues here though. Of course there is the whole question of 4th Ammendment violation (if you are in the USA), but more generally it raises the question of whether the use of surveillance can itself become a method of resistance to surveillance and of holding the state, private corporations, and indeed other citizens, to account, or whether a society of mutual and reciprocal surveillance (or a ‘transparent society’, as David Brin called it) is one in which we want to live. As surveillance becomes more and more ubiquitous, and in the absense of mass citizen movements to tear down the cameras, it sometimes seems like the only option we have left.
ubisurv 