surveillance – Page 37

Surveillance in the UK and the USA: commonalities and differences

In one of those fortuitous instances of synchronicity, there are two stories today that illustrate some of both the commonalities and the differences between state surveillance practices and regulation in the UK and the USA.

In the UK, The Guardian has revealed that the Surveillance Commissioner (a separate office to the Information Commissioner) has been very critical behind the scenes, as the Lords Committee was in public, of the uses to which the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) (RIPA) has been put, not this time by local government, but by national ministries like the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and agencies, including Ofcom (the broaadcast and communications regulator) and the Charities Commission. DEFRA came in for a particular telling-off over its spying on fishermen. The chief commissioner, Sir Christopher Rose found generalised lax practice, a lack of proper justification for and proportionality in the used of RIPA, and little training or accountability. In short, RIPA is being used because the powers exist not because there is any pressing justification to use surveillance in this manner – the used of surveillance has expanded because it is available.

It is very interesting that The Guardian had to discover all this through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and that the Surveillance Commissioner had not put all of this in the public domain as a matter of course. It highlights for me, once again, the clear difference in attitude and regulatory practice between him and the open, accountable, and active Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). It confirms my view that we would be much better off if the Surveillance Commissioner’s work was absorbed into the ICO.

In the USA, it is to lawyers that people immediately turn if some bad practice is suspected on behalf of the government. The Los Angeles Times reports that on Friday, the US government lost the case it had been bringing to try to stop an Islamic charity based in Oregon from suing them over what they claim were illegal wiretapping operations targeted at them. The case stems from the Bush administration’s attempts to bypass what were already very weak regulations governing the surveillance of American citizens which were introduced in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) (FISA) and recently amended in the Protect America Act (2007). Requests are supposed to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) which meets in secret and does not have to publish its rulings and so far as we know, has never turned down a request – so it is somewhat mystifying except as a matter of speed and convenience that the Bush administration did bypass the court.

Now the Obama administration is (shamefully) defending the actions of his predecessor. This is not entirely surprising. Intelligence is one area of continuity between governments: it is what Peter Gill called the ‘secret state’, a core that remains constant regardless of changes of administration. Nixon and Bush were both stupid enough to get caught, but the NSA, CIA and FBI are continually looking for different ways to get around domestic regulations on surveillance. Political devices like the UKUSA agreement served this purpose for many years – whereby Canadian and British intelligence services would collect SIGINT on Americans and supply it to the NSA and vice-versa. But GCHQ and others just don’t have the capabilities to carry out the amount of monitoring that now goes on. It’s been the reality for many years now that the NSA in particular does spy on Americans. Again, they have the capabilities so those capabilities are used.

Of course, unlike in the UK, we are talking about the threat of terrorism not anglers catching one-too-many fish; that really does say something about the petty bureaucracy that characterises the UK! However RIPA was also justified originally with reference to terrorism and serious and organised crime. Anyway, the ruling in the Oregon case clearly states that state secrets privilege was not enough to justify warrantless surveillance of suspects, whatever they had allegedly done. It seems that at least is one point of hope that the USA and the UK have in common. Let’s see where these situations now lead in each country…

Australia gives up net censorship plan

Some good news for once. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the heinous plans that the Australian government had for surveilling and censoring the Internet have been iced. The plans would have introduced mandatory filtering of the Internet in Australia despite the technical impossibility and political and ethical objections. The fight over these proposals had been vicious with opponents even receiving death threats, but the side of both sense and liberty appears to have won an important victory.

Now, let’s see if similar good sense will prevail in other countries which are advocating similar, if not quite as extreme, China-style net-disabling proposals like the UK and Brazil…

(Thanks to bOINGbOING who’ve been keeping us up to date on this one)

Surveillance to be ‘hardwired’ into British culture?

Labour simply needs to admit that it has been wrong on this and to develop some more credible plans which recognises that real security protects liberties rather than undermining them in the name of security.

Richard Thomas is no longer a lone voice in the top echelons of the British state against the growing culture of surveillance, but he remains the most persistent and hard-hitting critic, not least because of he makes the best possible use of his position as UK Information Commissioner when most government watchdogs are largely toothless.

Now in an interview in The Times newspaper, he has renewed his attack on the government’s data-sharing and surveillance proposals,arguing that we risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life. He has clearly fully absorbed the report we wrote for him back in 2006, in which we warned of the possibility of a ‘technological lock-in’ and is building on it in a serious and creative way.

Thomas is clear in the interview that government plans are ‘excessive’ and so much so that they ‘risked undermining democracy’. With Thomas now joined in his stance by eminent critics like the House of Lords Constitution Committee, former MI5 chief, Stella Rimington and most recently, former far-from-liberal Home Secretary, David Blunkett, as well as just about all media and academic opinion, it seems difficult to see how the government can continue to claim that its plans are in any way credible. Labour is now obviously isolated, unpopular and wrong on surveillance. This needs more than token gestures like the resignation of the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith (she has other reasons why she should resign anyway), it needs some real soul-searching and a complete reconsideration of the direction in which the government is heading. Labour simply needs to admit that it has been wrong on this and to develop some more credible plans which recognise that real security protects liberties rather than undermining them in the name of security.

Austin no longer the coolest city in the USA

The latest city to fall for the current wave of government enthusiasm for surveillance that is sweeping the USA is, unfortunately, the city of Austin… Sorry Austin – unless you people do something about this, you are off my list of cool cities…

Austin, Texas… lone island of sanity and liberalism in a less-than-liberal state. With its laid-back attitude, massive urban bat population, superb music scene and reputation for weirdness, it must for some time have been a candidate for coolest city in the States.

Well no longer. The latest city to fall for the current wave of government enthusiasm for surveillance that is sweeping the USA is, unfortunately, the city of Austin, whose authorities have voted to install a CCTV system. The local newspaper, The Daily Texan, jauntily informs us that the city has voted to sacrifice privacy for security: that does not sound like the attitude of a confident, hip place. Sorry Austin – unless you people do something about this, you are off my list of cool cities!

Seriously, though: Austin is not a city with an especially high crime rate, nor has it seen any massive recent increase in crime – even if CCTV was any good at reducing crime, which we know from the multiple assessments done in the UK and elsewhere that it isn’t. Yet Police Chief Art Acevedo is quoted as praising CCTV in the UK, specifically in London. Perhaps he has been reading too much of the hype and hasn’t read the British government’s own assessments of CCTV (conducted under the auspices of the Home Office)?

So why the sudden urge to install cameras? Could it be because of the lure of federal funding from the Department of Homeland Security? It could be. Austin has acquired $350,000 to install cameras, and what set of city fathers turns down cash (whatever it is for)? That was one of the main lessons of the expansion of CCTV in Britain in the 1990s and of course cities are now paying the long-term price of their enthusiasm as they struggle to find the money to monitor and maintain their camera systems. Chief Acevedo seems to have no worries about this though – this techno-evangelist is already talking about automation and computer recognition systems. He really sounds like a guy who has started to believe the sales pitches at all those law enforcement technology trade fairs…

Battle lines being drawn in UK surveillance debate

there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK…

The UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the influential think-tank that was behind the New Labour project, has released a report on intelligence and national security that argues that privacy and human rights will have to take second place in the War on Terror. The report, National Security Strategy, Implications for the UK Intelligence Community, is written by former civil service security and intelligence coordinator, David Omand, is part of the IPPR’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, whose rather unimpressive launch event I attended last year.

The Guardian newspaper’s story on this is trying to build this up into an ‘end of privacy’ / ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ story and Omand certainly comes down firmly on the side of security over liberty. He recognises that his arguments are contrary to ours and go “against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society.” But he is not actually making a total ‘by any means necessary’ argument. Even the Guardian’s own report quotes his rather qualified statement that “in some respects [new intelligence methods] may have to be at the expense of some aspects of privacy rights.”

The report is simply not as strong or even as interesting as The Guardian‘s story suggests. Most of it is simply a description of how intelligence works (and not even a very comprehensive or insightful one at that). Much, as we predicted in our recent book (see My Publications), it tries to set the creation of ‘resilience’ as a key rationale for reducing civil liberties, as if resilience in itself was a good thing that needed no justification when in fact it is being used as a bland container for all sorts of questionable policies – from the use of torture and imprisonment without trial to the everyday use of intrusive high-tech surveillance. The references to the political controversies over surveillance are rather cursory and don’t really say much other than that people are worried and really they shouldn’t be. These are just the usual ‘trust us, we know what we are doing’ and ‘these are exceptional circumstances’ arguments that we have heard many times before, and they are as weak and old-fashioned coming from Omand as from anyone else.

It is worth noting that there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK. I reported yesterday on David Blunkett’s conversion to the cause of limiting surveillance society, and a few days ago, Stella Rimington, the former Head of the Security Service, MI5, condemned the current government’s approach to liberty and security in even stronger terms, arguing that the approach that Omand typifies would lead to ‘a police state’.

Surveillance has finally become an issue on which it is becoming less possible to be unengaged, apathetic or even neutral. That in itself is a good thing, however it does not guarantee a good outcome even if more major public figures suddenly discover their enthusiasm for liberty once they leave office. However, I hope this reflects a split which is growing within the current government too – normally when retired politicians and civil servants speak out, they are conscious of the way in which they speak on behalf of friends and colleagues who feel they cannot be so candid.

German Corporations in Trouble over Surveillance

t seems that there is a mood in Germany for much stronger action, and a growing awareness that the country cannot, unlike in the UK at present, or indeed Germany in its own recent past, be allowed to slip into a situation in which surveillance becomes normal…

There is a major ongoing storm in Germany over the behaviour of its major corporations in spying on workers. There is a nice summary news report from the BBC which you can watch here.

The newest scandal emerged in January when it was revealed that the railway company, Deutsche Bahn, had conducted surveillance operations against thousands of its staff, both workers and management, possibly over years. The operations, with names like ‘Squirrel’, involved all kinds of intrusive internal espionage including tracking family members. The company’s aim was apparently to do with corruption and links to other rival corporations but the management have now admitted they went too far.

Internal security was also the reason behind the massive surveillance operations at Deutsche Telekom, the communications giant, possibly dating back to 2000. Here journalists and managers were targeted by a private detective agency. And of course then there was last year’s scandal over the way that the Lidl supermarket chain created a kind of Stasi-style operation at many of its stores and warehouses in Germany and the Czech Republic with secret cameras and operatives making detailed notes on the movements (especially toilet breaks) of its employees. According to The Guardian, the level of personal detail recorded by the store was incredible, one entry read: “Frau M wanted to make a call with her mobile phone at 14.05 … She received the recorded message that she only had 85 cents left on her prepaid mobile. She managed to reach a friend with whom she would like to cook this evening, but on condition that her wage had been paid into her bank, because she would otherwise not have enough money to go shopping.”

In the BBC report, the conclusion seems to be that better data protections laws are needed. Certainly this is true. But the cases involving corporations are important because they provide clear and comprehensible examples of how people ‘with nothing to hide’ can be targeted anyway and do have to be worried. There are enough of them too to show that this is not a series of isolated cases, but a part of a ‘culture of surveillance’. However it seems that there is a mood in Germany for much stronger action, and a growing awareness that the country cannot, unlike in the UK at present, or indeed Germany in its own recent past, be allowed to slip into a situation in which surveillance becomes normal. This means more than stronger DP, it means not allowing corporations and government to reduce fundamental liberties with arguments about ‘exceptions’. There seems to be growing awareness from the strong German Trades Unions in particular about this, we will see if this translates into wider social, and state, action.

Newcastle University CCTV comment

Not a million miles away from my office at Newcastle University, back in the UK, this stencil has appeared (“nothing to do with me, guv, I was in Brazil, honest…”)

Claremont Bridge, camera and comment (photo: Jon Swords)

They want us to trust them…

Maybe what Jacqui Smith needs is a dose of ‘Chinese democracy’ to go with her Chinese-style attitude to security and surveillance…

In the last fortnight there have been interesting developments that have reminded us, as if we needed reminding, that those who want to infringe on the liberty of others need to be absolutely squeaky-clean themselves or risk severe censure, and that those who introduce systems which encourage suspicion and spying should not be surprised if people no longer trust them and start to investigate their activities.

The first of course was the saga of Jacqui Smith’s apartment. The basic facts are that the UK Home Secretary has been claiming £24,000 (around $35,000 US) per year in allowances for an apartment that she does not actually live in. The particular irony (and we love a bit of irony in Britain!) was that she has been reported by a neighbour – in other words she was a victim of the kind of suspicious, back-stabbing, trust-no-one society that she has been encouraging. Of course she should resign if she had any intelligence or integrity, but we already know to the cost of our civil liberties that she does not.

Funnily enough, it is to China we go to another example and one with, it seems, a rather more accountable outcome. This is almost the second time in a row that I have unfavourably compared a western country to China – this is getting rather disturbing particularly as I am no friend of the Chinese state, being a long-term Free Tibet supporter. However, Variety (of all places) is reporting that Yu Bing, who is director of the internet monitoring department of Beijing’s Public Security Bureau, and therefore a major figure in the infamous Golden Shield, and surveillance of journalists, bloggers and net democracy activists (as well as those just trying to access unapproved content), has been arrested for taking bribes from a contractor.

Admittedly it is a lot more than the sums in the Jacqui Smith case (40M Yuan, or about $5.8M US), and corruption is endemic within the Chinese state at all levels, but it does show a rather different attitude to the establishment towards top officials who fail to live up to the standards we expect of them. Maybe what Jacqui Smith needs is a dose of ‘Chinese democracy’ to go with her Chinese-style attitude to security and surveillance?

Chicago: the future of US CCTV?

…despite Britain’s reputation as a surveillance society… the USA is now eclipsing the UK. The post-9/11 surveillance surge has seen to that.

Back in the USA again. Chicago has been featuring a lot this week for its CCTV system. Newspapers generally offered glowing assessments of its capabilities based around homey anecdotes of pretty harmless incidents ‘solved’ by CCTV – in this case the stories, for example those in the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Times, featured a theft from a Salvation Army kettle, which sounds like it is straight from a Mayoral press release. It is depressingly poor journalism and once again, all very reminiscent of the situation in the UK in the 1990s before academic and even government assessments dampened the enthusiasm for CCTV. There’s also a depressing naivety (and factual incorrectness) about the insistence from the authorities and from some ‘experts’ that these cameras have nothing to do with human rights like privacy as they are all in public spaces.

But there is one very important difference. Chicago, with massive investment from the Department for Homeland Security, has gone much further than most UK cities, not only in coverage but also in capabilities. First of all, Daley and police-chief Orozco have promised that “We’re going to grow the system until we eventually cover one end of the city to the other” in other words they do want, as the Chicago Sun-Times subheading claims, ” a camera on every street corner.”

The particular innovation that the city is pushing here is the linking up of the law-enforcement aspects with emergency services through something called Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD). This is system that uses a live Geographic Information System to match camera location to reported incident location, so that when an incident is called in via 911, the nearest cameras can immediately turn to picture the scene. This is part of what Chicago calls ‘Operation Virtual Shield’, a fibre-optic cable system which links the cameras with other biological and chemical weapons-detection system in a “homeland security grid.’’

The Chicago control room (New York Times)

As part of the work we did for our latest book, Jon Coaffee Pete Rogers and I visited and analysed several different cities in the UK to assess their emergency-response and surveillance systems. While most had intentions to use the cameras for more active emergency-response purposes and particular local police were starting to try to install override systems for the multiple local camera systems that exist in the UK in the case of citywide emergencies (like a mass evacuation). And in particular, Manchester (whose high-tech control room looks like the Chicago one as seen in the NYT (picture above) and also often features in media PR for CCTV) has gone further down the Chicago route than most. But they still don’t come close. Britain’s systems are fragmented, ageing, generally not integrated with other functions and certainly don’t link to other kinds of sensors. Britain has introduced some stupid authoritarianism like the infamous ‘shouting cameras’ mostly as part of the Respect (sic) Zones initiative. But despite Britain’s reputation as a surveillance society I suspect that in terms of advanced integrated cameras systems, the USA is now eclipsing the UK. The post-9/11 surveillance surge has seen to that.

There’s two other points worth noting here. The first is that Chicago is bidding for the Olympics in 2016. I can almost hear multiple researchers in surveillance studies around the world, releasing a collective ‘of course!’. Mega-events like the Olympics, the World Cup – there will be a fantastic conference on this theme in November this year in Vancouver – or other non-sporting ones like world summits or the G-8 conference are often the trigger for the introduction of repressive measures and new surveillance systems. This was true in Japan (where state CCTV was first introduced because of the soccer World Cup in 2002), in South Africa (for various major world summits), and in Athens for the Olympics in 2004. Mayor Daley wants the city to be 100% free from the possibility of terrorist attack. Laving aside the actual impossibility of that desire, how far will he go to get there?

Well, the last Olympic venue, Beijing, might give some indication. For it is actually the plans in authoritarian, non-democratic China that seem most similar to what is going on in Chicago. Even the names have an eerie reminiscence: China’s Golden Shield, Chicago’s Virtual Shield. That is trivial, however the substance is not. The Chinese government, as Naomi Klein has written, is installing massive and comprehensive camera systems in every major city in China. It is also, of course, linking this system into its infamous Internet monitoring operation, with the ultimate aim of being able to track individuals in real and virtual space. Of course, the US, like most other nations is now trying to control Internet use too and the NSA already keeps massive data banks of communications traffic information as well as doing real-time monitoring as recent revelations have, once again, shown. But, it’s different in the USA isn’t it? The USA wouldn’t link up all these systems, would it? The Land of the Free? The home of democracy? I wouldn’t bet against it…

Could the US fiscal stimulus lead to a surveillance surge?

Largely unnoticed in commentary on US President Obama’s fiscal stimulus plan has been the $4Bn for the Justice Department. Now there are various very worthy programs nominated for funding including quite a large chunk to combat violence against women, but also a lot of cash washing around for rather more vague aims, in particular the $2Bn (i.e.: half the cash injection) for the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program “to fund grants for state and local programs that combat crime”.

The JAG program has already providing funding for many cities to install cameras as part of ‘demonstration programs’, as well as covert surveillance capabilities. However $2Bn is a massive increase in funding and will allow some rather more ambitious schemes to be funded. With the current popularity of CCTV cameras as a catch-all solution in the USA (regardless of negative assessments of their effectiveness elsewhere – see ACLU’s recent convenient US-focused summary), could one side-effect of the stimulus package be a massive ‘surveillance surge’ in the USA? After all, this is exactly what happened in the UK in the 1990s when central state funding through the ‘City Challenge’ program sparked a mania for installing city-centre CCTV systems – see the editorial and the articles by Will Webster, Pete Fussey and Roy Coleman in the special issue of Surveillance & Society on CCTV.

Those concerned with civil liberties and the intensifying push for videosurveillance in the USA should keep a careful eye on applications to the JAG program.