surveillance – Page 38

Surveillance and the ‘Open-source Insurgency’

Hierarchical, national and corporate bodies are profoundly afraid of the openness, apparent lack of interest in conventional goals and absence of obvious leadership or deference that is represented by the new collaborative networks like Open-source. They are not ‘under control’. The answer for the military-industrial complex is a consistent one, and as usual it combines strategic military and economic goals. This answer is surveillance.

The US military-industrial complex is always trying to identify new threats to bolster its budgets. There was a minor outcry a few years ago when US military powerpoint slides on strategy seemed to indicate that it regarded international civil society organisations, including the Red Cross, as a potential source of such threat. Then came 9/11 and the war on terror and for a while it didn’t need these phantom menaces as there were real global enemies, and fortunately for the military-industrial complex, it seemed that those enemies might be infinitely expandable and malleable into what was briefly termed the ‘long war’.

But the war on terror isn’t what it was. So there seems to be some effort to resurrect previous threats. One of these is ‘the war on drugs’ now rebranded as ‘narco-terrorism’ or ‘narco-insurgency’. And the particular focus of the concern is closer to the United States: Mexico. Writing in the self-proclaimed ‘capitalist tool’, Forbes magazine, Reihan Salaam argued that Mexico’s ongoing struggle with drug-related violence was a major threat which could ‘blind-side’ the USA. Now, Republicans like Salaam are struggling to find anything important to say when its obvious what the major global problems are, and the US electorate has decided that the Republicans aren’t the people to solve them. He is of course correct that there is a serious situation in Mexico – and indeed elsewhere in Latin-America: the drug-trafficking gangs are also the major problem for the Brazilian government in any attempt to include their excluded favela communities. However, he makes no mention of the other underlying cause of destabilization in the USA’s southern neighbour – the way in which NAFTA has transformed Mexico into a subordinate economic role to the USA as source of cheap production facilities and cheap labour, all the while being told that its people are not wanted in the USA. The EU has its critics, but at least its building of free-trade has been accompanied by a far greater degree of free movement of people and reciprocal political rights. Nor is there any reference to the consumption of cocaine and crack in the USA that is driving the trade (as the first comment on the article notes).

Instead Salaam tries to analyze the Mexican situation using a recent strategic theory, and one which is profoundly worrying in its implications. In an essay in the New York Times in October 2005, John Robb argued that the Iraq war had turned into what he termed an ‘open-source’ insurgency, “a resilient network made up of small, autonomous groups”. He argued that those resisting the US occupation and other armed groups were like open-source software developers in that “the insurgents have subordinated their individual goals to the common goal of the movement”. (Never mind once again, that there is an obvious underlying common goal – that of getting rid of an occupying foreign power!).

Now of course, in many ways this was just a restatement of the whole post-Cold War, network-centric warfare hypothesis. There are also echoes back to the kind of language which has been used to describe ‘eastern’ or ‘foreign’ peoples for centuries – the British in India being unable to tell ‘them’ apart, the faceless and numberless ‘yellow peril’, the ‘godless communists’ who subordinated their individual will to the collective, and the ‘clash of civilizations’. It’s the hive-mind, the fear of humans who don’t appear to act ‘like us’. Without the overt racism of course: this is Orientalism 2.0, the politically-correct version!

However the addition of the label ‘open-source’ is no accident. Hierarchical, national and corporate bodies are profoundly afraid of the openness, apparent lack of interest in conventional goals (profit, advancement, etc.), and absence of obvious leadership or deference that is represented by the new collaborative networks like Open-source. They are not ‘under control’.

So how to bring them ‘under control’? John Robb’s first (and rather refreshing) answer was that in many ways you probably can’t and that in Iraq, the US should have probably ‘let them win’. But this is an unpopular response for the uneconstructed military-industrial complex. For them the first answer is a consistent one, and as usual it combines strategic military and economic goals. This answer is surveillance. For the Internet, we have seen, and continue to see, attempts in multiple countries to attack the basis of what makes the Internet creative and free, in the name of all kinds of ‘risks’ (mainly terrorism, identity crime, pirating and paedophilia). Of course these risks are no greater on the Internet than in the material world, but the Internet is still for many people, and many politicians in particular, a vast, unknown terrain which they do not understand: ‘here be dragons’ as the old maps used to have it of any such ‘terra incognita’.

For countries afflicted by the new ‘open-source insurgency’, the answer is the same. The Defense Industry Daily today starts off its story on Mexico with the apparently uncontentious statement that “Mexico needs surveillance.” It then lists with the usual kind of techno-pornographic relish of these publications, all the mainly Israeli UAVs and surveillance craft that the Mexican state is buying. We are supposed to cheer. We are supposed to think that this is evidence of Mexico’s growing maturity. Soon Mexico will be monitored and ‘under control’. No evidence of whether surveillance ‘works’ (even in military terms) troubles these kinds of stories. That is taken as self-evident. And certainly there is no question of whether this could in any way be the wrong approach, or even a counterproductive strategy. As the Brazilian parliamentarian to whom I was talking yesterday said, about the favelas, the only answer to both crime (because, let’s not forget that’s what ‘narco-terrorism’ really is) and the poverty on which it feeds, is in the long-term (and that means starting now not later): sanitation, schools, hospitals, transport, jobs – in other words providing the poor with access to the same society that the wealthier enjoy. Extending intensive high-tech military surveillance across the global south is not only a complete failure to address these underlying issues, it also diverts much-needed money away from social priorities. It is the wrong answer to the wrong question… except for the defense industry.

At the Departamento de Policia Federal

Both human rights advocates and the police seem to be strongly in favour of the new RIC system as a means of social inclusion and to replace the chaotic and corrupt identification system based in individual Brazilian states at present, which allows anyone with any other form of ID to get a state Registro Geral card in each different state.

Departemento de Policia Federal, Brasilia — Departamento de Policia Federal, Brasilia

I have just come back from a very productive interview with Romulo Berredo, from the Director-General’s office at the Departamento de Policia Federal (DPF), who are the Brazilian equivalent of the FBI. There was a lot covered and I couldn’t hope to reproduce it all here. There were however a number of immediately interesting aspects.

The first was more evidence that the whole basis on which identity cards and database issues are being considered here is entirely different from the UK. Now I know this represents a police, and a state, view, but so far, both Brazilian human rights advocates and the police seem to be strongly in favour of the new Registro de Identidade Civil (RIC) system. This is both as a means of social inclusion and to replace the chaotic and corrupt identification system based in individual Brazilian states at present, which allows anyone with any other form of ID to get a state Registro Geral card in each different state. It is fairly easy to acquire 27 different identities in Brazil at present. And identification is important here. The great fear that many people seem to have – indeed it was called a ‘cultural’ characteristic by Berredo – is not the use of identification by the state as a form of control or intrusion but as a guarantee against the anonymity that would allow abuses by the state or indeed by other malicious persons. It provides a metaphysical and material kind of certainty and stability. The legacy of the last dictatorship was not so much an East German-style nightmare of knowledge and order but of corrupt and arbitrary rule.

It is this latter legacy which also drives the divisions between the different police forces in Brazil. The states-based Policia Militar (Military Police) and Policia Civil are both tainted in different ways by associations with authoritarian rule, and the former particularly with extra-legal execution and torture, and they continue to be regarded with caution, suspicion or even hatred by many Brazilians. The other police forces are also suspicious of the growing role of the DPF, which is often seen in terms of a power struggle not rational subsidiarity. Ironically then it is the states-based police forces that are dragging their heels over plans to create the kinds of national databases of criminal information that the UK has, and not for any libertarian reasons. In fact the DPF seem far more concerned with protecting human rights and defending the idea of citizenship, and because they are tasked with anti-corruption investigations have even arrested Senators and Judges, something unheard of even ten years ago. Of course those very same Senators and Judges are now fighting back, in a manner rather similar to Berlusconi in Italy, trying to alter the law to give immunities and protections. For example, handcuffing of arrested suspects was always normal until it happened to a Senator arrested for corruption. The Senate suddenly became interested in the ‘human rights’ of arrested suspects and passed a law limiting the use of handcuffs! Corruption at every level is still an enormous problem here, though Berredo argued that it was largely associated with those who had retained power from the years of the dictatorship.

The concentration on inclusion and joining-up government where it is clearly much needed does however lead to some gaps in thinking. The creation of new databases brings with it new duties and new potential problems of data-handling. As the privacy and data-protection law expert, Danilo Doneda, pointed out to me the other day, Brazil is in an almost unique position in not having any kind of regulator for privacy and information / data rights. He argued it was because the authorities just don’t see the need. Berredo confirmed this. He claimed that the DPF were trusted by the public – and relative to other police forces, that is certainly true! – and that they had to carry out their duties appropriately or they would lose that trust. It sounds nice, but it isn’t a good-enough (or legally-sound) basis for the protection of data-rights.

It all confirmed once again that Brazil is not yet a surveillance society – the state does not yet have the capabilities. There is no national database of fingerprints (even for convicted criminals) for example. But as Berredo said, it is moving in that direction. He was keen that there should be be limits. I liked the fact that he used this word. ‘Limits’ is a word that I found that the neither the UK government nor the European Commission seem to like, and they seem very unwilling to say what limits might be. However Berredo was quite clear that a technologically-driven surveillance future in which individuals could be tracked – he used the example of Google Latitude – was not one which he wanted to see. He recognised that he was both a policemen (at work) and a private citizen (at home) and that he, as much as anyone else, valued his privacy.

(Thank-you very much to Delegado Romulo Barredo of the DPF, for his openness, time and patience, and also to Agent Alessandre Reis, for his help)

The Costs of the Surveillance State

£34Bn is probably a small proportion of this wider surveillance economy, and may not even be anywhere near the total ‘cost’ to citizens of the obsession with surveillance.

How much does surveillance cost? It is a key question which is very difficult to answer with any precision. The groups associated with the Convention on Modern Liberty (mainly Liberty, No2ID and Privacy International) have come up an estimate of £34 Billion (about $50Bn US) for the UK. This seems to be mainly costs related to central government databases, and includes £10Bn for the setting up and running of the proposed new communications database. Is it correct? Or even close? Well, it’s a good start as a guess. It doesn’t of course differentiate between costs for aspects of the systems that might be desirable or even necessary (like parts of the NHS Spine system). But then I’ve had this argument with No2ID before – the don’t get the idea that ‘surveillance’ includes things that without which there would be no welfare, education or health services at all. It is worth thinking about it from the other way, from the supply side too – the question of what is the overall size of the surveillance industry. Because of course, it isn’t just government that is spying on us. The biggest databases are run by private corporations (especially retailers, insurance companies and loyalty-card operators)… there are all sorts of private security and surveillance operations. £34Bn is probably a small proportion of this wider surveillance economy, and may not even be anywhere near the total ‘cost’ to citizens of the obsession with surveillance.

China calls for better international regulation of space

…it is the USA that effectively controls earth orbit. However many other emerging economies see no reason why this should be the case….

Following last week’s collision between an obsolete Russian military satellite and an US Iridium communications satellite, there has been a lot of discussion about the management of orbital space (or, more accurately, the lack of it). Orbital positions are managed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), but the effective control of orbital space is a matter of power projection – i.e.: which country can maintain a stronger and more pervasive presence in space. With the Russian program almost defunct, and European satellites limited in number, it is the USA that effectively controls earth orbit. However many other emerging economies see no reason why this should be the case. India now has a regular launch program and in particular China is massively expanding its space presence, even making noises about its ability to destroy satellites if necessary.

China seems now to be using this incident to sound out other countries and the international scientific community about a more coherent and comprehensive international management of orbital space. In an article published on the official English-language news site, Chinadaily, various senior Chinese scientists and People’s Daily journalists are quoted in favour of “establishing a system for the promotion of space safety is an important method of space traffic management”, through “long-term cooperation from the international community”, and perhaps even a “space traffic law”, although it is acknowledged that this is “still a very remote concept”.

The one organisation that is not going to like this at all is the US military. USSTRATCOM has absorbed the space power doctrine developed in the 1990s by USSPACECOM, which argued effectively that orbital space should be part of US military plans for ‘Full-Spectrum Dominance’ (FSD) and that international projects like the International Space Station would be tolerated only insofar as they could be ‘leveraged’ to US advantage. The US military wants to maintain the ‘ultimate high ground’ that dominance of earth orbit gives them, for communications, for surveillance, for weapons targeting. They are not even very keen on the EU Galileo project, the new and more technically-advanced rival to GPS (which is a US military system).

Just as with the discussion about internationalising management of the Internet and moving it beyond US government control, any suggestions of a more comprehensive international management of space are likely to be resisted even at the expense of logic and reason. The Chinese know this very well, and are being rather cleverly provocative. They are however, right.

Britain ‘risks a police state’

Following the damning reports of the House of Lords Constitution Committee and yesterday, the International Commission of Jurists, now Stella Rimington, ex-Head of the security service, MI5, has warned that Britain risks becoming a police state. In an internview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia reported by the Daily Telegraph, Ms Rimington attacked government plans for the National Identity Register and the soon-expected plans for a database of all communications (delayed from last year). If even ex-heads of the security service are now asking the government to change direction, in addition to civil liberties experts, independent judges, and just about everyone else, their stock of excuses must be rapidly diminishing. The current cabinet must know that their actions smack of the desperation of a failing government desperately searching for votes in being ‘tough on crime and terrorism’… but they seem to be locked into a trajectory of ever-increasing surveillance and security that they cannot justify but cannot escape. You do wonder who is actually advising them that this is all a good idea…

The loneliness of personal data

Surveillance like this harms us all: it makes our lives banal and reveals only the sadness and the pain.

There is something at once banal and heartbreaking about what is revealed through the examination of personal data. The episodic film, I Love Alaska, captures this beautifully. The film by Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug is based on AOL’s accidental exposure of the search data of hundreds of thousands of its users, and focuses on just one, 711391. The film consists of an actress reading out the (unusually discursive and plain language) search terms of User 711391 like an incantation, with background sound from Alaskan locations and static camera shots that serve to emphasize her boredom, isolation and loneliness.

I was watching episode 5 of the film when two stories popped into my inbox that just happened to be related. The first was from the New York Times business section and dealt with the other side of the recent US sporting scandal over revelations that baseball player Alex Rodriguez has taken steroids. Like User 711391, Rodriguez had given up his data (in this case, a sample) in the belief that the data would be anonymous and aggregated. But it wasn’t.

So, then we come to how the state deals with this. The Toronto Globe and Mail comments on the way the Canadian federal government is, like so many others, proposing to introduce new legislation to monitor and control Internet use. The comment argues that there is no general need to store personal Internet use data (or Canada will end up like the UK…), and that Internet surveillance should be governed by judicial oversight. Quite so. But, as the NYT article points out, it isn’t just the expanding appetite of the state for data (frequently coupled in the UK with incompetence in data handling) that we should fear but the growth in numbers of, and lack of any oversight or control over, private-sector dataveillance operations.

Some people will argue that any talk of privacy here is irrelevant: User 711391 was cheating on her husband; Rodrguez was taking steroids; there are paedophiles and terrorists conspiring on the Internet. With surveillance the guilty are revealed. Surely, as Damon Knight’s classic short story, ‘I See You’, claimed, with everything exposed we are truly free from ‘sin’? But no. In its revelations, surveillance like this harms us all: it makes our lives banal and reveals only the sadness and the pain. For User 711391, her access to the Internet served at different times as her main source of entertainment, desire, friendship, and even conscience. The AOL debacle revealed all of this and demeaned her and many others in the process. Most of us deserve the comfort of our very ordinary secrets and the ability for things to be forgotten. This is the true value of privacy.

(Thanks to Chiara Fonio for letting me know about I Love Alaska)

Leaving Sao Paulo

It’s my last morning here in Sao Paulo. I have to say that, with the greatest respect to my friend and Sao Paulo native, Rodrigo, I am not going to be sorry to leave. A lot of what I thought when I arrived here hasn’t changed. This is big, dirty, noisy, exhilarating city with an unapologetic commercial drive, and all the divisions and human debris that this creates. In many ways, it reminds me of Osaka in Japan, but the extremes are greater. The problem is that the huge divisions can’t be ignored if you are in any way sensitive to human suffering, and the suffering here cries out from every raw-smelling homeless man sleeping on the street, from the ragged kids sorting through rubbish at night, from the women selling themselves in the parks, stations – well, everywhere. Certainly, these things are part of city life in many places in the world, and there are many far, far poorer places, but there is something profoundly saddening, depressing, about the gulf between the helicopter-chauffeured elite and the people on the street in O Centro, and especially in the ignorance and indifference – which I have not only been told about but have seen. By the end of just one week, during which I have tried to be as much a part of the place as I could, when I have spent time talking to everyone from human rights groups to people in ordinary bars, I feel like retreating, curling into a ball in the corner of my room.

So thank-you, Sampa, but I am not sorry to be leaving. Here are some pictures of the hundreds I took, of aspects booth good and bad…

Talk to Parliamentary Committee

I’ve been invited back to the British Parliament (yes, I know – I’m surprised they keep asking me back too!). This time it is to address a meeting of the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee on the subject of “Security Technology and Individual Freedom” in April, just after I get back from Brazil.

Is there anything anyone wants me to tell them? 😉

Gentrification and Control in the Old Centre of Sao Paulo

Yesterday, I met up with Brazilian surveillance researcher, Marta Kanashiro, and she showed me around the Luz area of the old centre of Sao Paulo, where she has been working. Luz was once a grand colonial district around the railway station designed by British architect, Charles Driver, in brick and iron, but it lost its importance in the mid-Twentieth Century as the station ceased to be the terminal for the coffee trade. The area acquired notoriety as home to a police headquarters where opponents of the dictatorship where tortured, and as a centre for prostitution, violence and drugs.

In more recent years there has been a real effort by the city authorities to reclaim the area which, despite being in many ways a laudable project, has been controversial both for its effects on the poor, and for its treatment of memory and the particular history of the place. On one side of Parque da Luz, the formal gardens in front of the station, is the Museum of Portuguese language, yet on other side of the station, all memory of the victims of police oppression and torture has been erased with the restoration of the police building.

In the park itself, the park authorities installed CCTV (the story of which can be read in Marta’s article in Surveillance & Society), but they haven’t tried to drive out the prostitutes, many of whom were still standing forlornly under the tall trees in the driving rain as we visited. However, according to Marta, they have tried to persuade the women to dress more respectably in keeping with the desired new image of the the neighbourhood! At one point the prostitute’s union was more involved in the management of the park, as were other community organisations, however the building in the centre of the park where these groups used to meet is now closed for refurbishment and it is unclear whether it will still be available in the same way afterwards. Another building in the corner of the part, next to the rather ramshackle security rooms, has already been restored, and where once the plans and documents about the park were on public display, now the place is prettier but empty.

The Luz regeneration has plenty in common with revanchist redevelopment in many other big cities around the world, and there are big questions about what happens to the already excluded population of the area as the regeneration spreads. There are two contrasting visions for the centre from two different but very similar-sounding organisations: Viva O Centro and Forum Centro Vivo . Both want regeneration – everyone does – but they have entirely different approaches to how it should be done. The former is an association of mainly businesses and police, similar to the Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) which are common in US and British city centres. It is behind a lot of the current redevelopment and has the ear of the city authorities. The latter is a group of academics and community activists who want a more democratic and participatory process, and who hold a lot of local events, cultural and political. They also accuse Viva O Centro of either actively or tacitly encouraging intimidation and violence (which has certainly taken place) against the poor population of the area. It is another reason why the attempt to erase of the memory of the brutality of the dictatorship is so important: it is a memory that needs to be constantly refreshed as the actions are echoed and repeated.

(A very big ‘thank-you’ to Marta Kanashiro for her time and patience! All mistakes in this account, as usual, are my own…)

Some things are just wrong

It is disturbing that… the default position for state officials seems to be that surveillance is a normal, even required part of everyday life.

Ok, there are some things about surveillance that are arguable, some things that are good, but some things are just wrong.

The Guardian today is reporting the story of Nick Gibson who is taking over the tenancy of a pub in Islington in north London. The police have insisted that he will not receive the licence he needs to run the pub unless he installs CCTV and is prepared to hand over footage to them whenever they want. Mr Gibson complained to his Member of Parliament, Emily Thornberry (not Thornhill as The Guardian claims), but she is apparently a spineless New Labour loyalist who has no time for niceties like civil liberties. She refused to represent him on the grounds that other local residents ‘want more CCTV’.

It is one thing to want to install CCTV if you run a business. Your customers can chose whether to patronise your establishment or not. It is however, entirely another matter to be quasi-legally blackmailed into installing it by police. There is no law that mandate the installation of surveillance cameras an in fact there is no statutory basis for CCTV at all in the UK – it is something that the Lords committee report on surveillance recommended as a matter of urgency. The police are simply abusing their right to impose licensing conditions to make local policy. The installation of CCTV is not a matter of ‘common-sense’, it is an ethical judgement, and police should not be be able to override the ethical judgement of individuals by edict in this way.

This is a very worrying case, because it shows that there is a kind of cozy ‘common-sense’ authoritarianism developing in the UK. It is disturbing that despite all the research, including that of the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers, showing that CCTV has very limited utility, the default position for state officials seems to be that surveillance is a normal, even required part of everyday life.