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? 😉
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…)
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.
If mass surveillance (through CCTV and huge databases) is often ineffective, then surely targeted surveillance, through judicially-approved orders warranting the use of high-tech secret cameras, listening devices and tracking, must at least ‘work’. However, The Canberra Times reports that in Australia at least, this does not appear to be the case.
In fact out of 311 such warrants issued in 2007-8, just 86 individuals were prosecuted and only 10 criminal convictions resulted. Now we don’t know exactly why this was in each case, however it does suggest that Bill Rowlings, the Civil Liberties Australia chief executive is right to describe the conviction rates as “appallingly low” indicting that the many if the warrants for targeted surveillance are “fishing expeditions” by the police, rather than backed by serious evidence.
It would be interesting to see how the Australian figures compare to those available for similar countries, particularly the UK (if indeed the figures are available and comparable).
I spent some time on the Sao Paulo metro system yesterday so I tried to get some pictures of security and surveillance underground… Some things I would have loved to have got pictures of: the military policemen stalking a groups of favela kids through the crowds; the very tired and twitchy officer who looked to be absolutely itching for a fight, who got on the Metro after me; the perfect shot of two policemen standing under a camera. But I didn’t get those ones, so my words will have to do. The main reason is that I have a healthy instinct for self-preservation and taking pictures of men with guns – particularly when they are caressing the handgrip and trigger like it was an intimate part of their anatomy as the twitchy officer was – is a sure way to end up attracting unwelcome and possibly fatal attention. The officers in the stations did notice me taking pictures pretty quickly too – which perhaps suggests both the pervasiveness and the effectiveness of trained human surveillance. Anyway, I only have two shots, one of which was an experiment in a longer take, which didn’t quite come off so I might have to try this again…
I am sure I will have more to say today tomorrow on this after I have met up with Marta Kanashiro, the scholar of surveillance studies from the State University of Campinas.
Top story on many news channels today is the collision of a US Iridium telecommunications satellite with an obsolete Russian military satellite. Iridium is an interesting company that is almost permanently bankrupt (due to the rise of GPS-enabled mobile telephones) yet whose largest single customer is the US Department of Defense, which uses a Hawaii-based gateway for a secure network using NSA-approved handsets.
Even more interesting however is that the story mentions the obscure work of the Space Surveillance Network or SPACETRACK, formerly operated by US Space Command (USSPACECOM), now along with all of that influential body’s operations, part of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). This global network of 25 bases using Phased-Array Radar and other tracking systems includes the RAF station at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire.
SPACETRACK continually watches earth orbit for new objects, which are then added to the US space catalogue. It also tracks debris fields, which are increasing in number and becoming more of a hazard for new space craft, and therefore problems for both military and civilian communications, weather, mapping and surveillance systems. This collision would seem to have been in relatively low orbit which causes the most problems. Cleaning up earth orbit would be a very good idea, but few people seem to have any serious ideas as to how it might be done. Some even argue that such a clean-up could destroy a valuable source of historical information!
Brazil can’t really be called a surveillance society… talk of surveillance is just science fiction. It doesn’t mean anything to the people at the bar.
Back at the bar last night I got talking with the regulars – in the limited way I can manage to in Portuguese – about all sorts of things particularly the upcoming carnival – I’m invited – and the football: Brazil beat Italy yesterday in a friendly match. But it was how these ordinary guys – one is a factory worker, one works in an office, and another runs his own one-man business that seems to do anything and everything to do with IT – talked about fear and danger, security and safety, in the city that really interested me. We got talking about where they lived, and the centre of Sao Paulo and how they felt in each place. I told them what I had been advised about not going out at night here, and despite the fact that we were all out at night, Milton, the IT guy, a chunky black man in his 40s, agreed that this wasn’t bad advice for the centre. The area, he said, was full of thieves and drug-addicts, and whilst anyone would be safe amongst friends (and here he gestured expansively to include me and practically everyone else at the bar), even he wouldn’t want to spend much time alone. Milton is from out east – he’s a Corinthians fan; the centre-west is Palmeiras territory, and the red Metro line goes from one to the other – and in his own neighbourhood he says he doesn’t have much to worry about, although of course he has security. Everyone has security. You have to. Joao, the fat, slightly lugubrious office worker, nods in silent agreement.
I tell them I’d quite like to talk to some women. This prompts laughter and a lot of nudging and punching of arms: of course you do, don’t we all? No, no, I mean I’m interested in what women think about all this – what about her? I ask, gesturing to a handsome black women probably about the same age as Milton. Carla? No, you don’t want to talk to her. Not without paying. Open your eyes! (he makes an eye-opening signal with his right hand). Of course I could see that Carla wasn’t just here for fun. And that’s exactly why I wanted to talk to her. She agreed with the guys about the danger, but added that it was much worse for her, not because she was working nights, but because she was black. Being a black woman in Brazil is not good. Everyone, she said, pinching the skin of her forearm, just sees the colour of your skin. especially if you are on your own. With her white friend, people don’t care. I told her that some people think that Brazil isn’t racist or dangerous for black people. She laughed and not in a happy way. Those people didn’t know her life. I asked her if Lula had changed things – it is something I try to ask everyone at some point – in particular with the Programa Bolsa Familia since Carla had told me she has three kids, one grown up and two still at home. She shook her head. No. Nothing. Nothing has changed. It may be pessimistic or cynical but it’s what everyone seems to be thinking apart from the government and the World Bank.
All this bar talk might be casual and fueled by beer (and it is often difficult to understand exactly what people are saying) but it is a useful corrective to the formal interviews and other research I am doing here. It also tends to add to my growing certainty that Brazil can’t really be called a surveillance society at all in terms of how people experience their lives and relationships with the state. Talk of surveillance is just science fiction. It doesn’t mean anything to the people at the bar. The reality is all about danger (not risk in the bland sociological terminology, but actual danger) and security.
(All the names in this piece have been changed…)
The Online Jounal has published a piece by ex-NSA operative and perennial thorn in the side of the organisation, Wayne Madsen, which gives far more detail of the system of illegal wiretapping of e-mails, in operation over recent years.
According to Madsen, two NSA programs for text interception are known to exist, one called PINWALE, which mainly targets Russian e-mails, and secondly the STELLAR WIND program, which “was initiated by the George W. Bush administration with the cooperation of major U.S. telecommunications carriers, including AT&T and Verizon.” and “was a major priority of the NSA program”.
Madesen gives details of how PINWALE and there’s little reason to suppose that STELLAR WIND is very different. Basically these programs search a range of ‘metadatabases’, repositories of captured text from millions of people around the world, outside and inside the USA. The search parameters include: “date-time, group, natural language, IP address, sender and recipients, operating system, and other information embedded in the header”.
Madesen claims that both STELLAR WIND and PINWALE “negated both USSID 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 [which were introduced following the Church Committee report into illegal operations by the NSA in the 1960s and early 1970s] by permitting NSA analysts to read the e-mails, faxes, and text messages of U.S. persons”
The three metadatabases are called LION HEART, LION ROAR, and LION FUSION and were developed, as with many NSA systems in conjunction with an external contractor, in this case, Booz Allen Hamilton, which Madsen previously revealed was also responsible for FIRSTFRUITS, program used to track the articles, and communications of particular journalists.
There’s more detail in the article, and one other thing is certain. All these exotic codenames will now be history, as all intelligence agencies have a policy of changing them once they are revealed. Journalists still talk about ECHELON as if it exists as an active NSA operation, but that one hasn’t existed under that name for twenty years or more. There are a huge diversity of NSA programs for all kinds of communications interception and sorting. Each component will have its own terminology and many will be temporary parts of a greater whole, which may not even exist by the time they are revealed. At least former insiders like Madsen can keep some track of developments…
Another good piece by Henry Porter on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, against the influence of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), which despite being a private organisation with no public accountability, has a very large influence on policy. The particular concern is with reports that ACPO has set up a new Confidential Intelligence Unit (CIU), to monitor so-called ‘domestic extremists’ which will apparently be based at Scotland Yard. They are currently advertising for a Chief Executive.
According the Emergency Services News, the CIU will target environmental groups and those behind anti-Israel demonstrations and ” infiltrate neo-Nazi groups, animal liberation groups and organisations behind unlawful industrial action such as secondary picketing.” In other words we are back to the bad old days of defining everyone who doesn’t agree with the state as ‘subversives’ and putting them under surveillance. This is hardly new. I was one of a quite a large number of environmental protestors targeted by a private detective agency employed by the government back in the early 1990s, and in fact this kind of activity, far from being incidental to ordinary policing was at the heart of the ‘new police’ in Britain from their foundation in the Nineteenth Century. Statewatch founder, Tony Bunyan’s excellent history of The Political Police in Britain (Quartet, 1977) shows how the experience of colonial rule of India and Ireland was imported back to Britain. Targeting organised labour is hardly new either: immediately after the first world war, the British government introduced the Emergency Powers Act (1920) which was specifically targeted at strikes, and was used many times against striking workers. This was also always one of the major functions of MI5.
This isn’t the only recent story of this nature either. Last year The Guardian drew attention to the practice of ‘blacklisting’ workers, mainly those who are known as union activists or radicals. It was in reference to the new National Dismissal Register (NDR), which keeps a record of all workers who are dismissed from their jobs, supposedly for wrongdoing. The initiative was originally set up a joint venture between the Home Office and the British Retail Consortium through an organisation called Action Against Business Crime (AABC), although after revelations about its activities, the government rapidly withdrew leading to the announcement of its closure to new business on December 19th, 2008. However the website now seems to indicate its resurrection…
We have been here before too. Another product of the post-WW1 paranoia about organised labour was The Economic League, a right-wing anti-communist, anti-union organisation, that had attempted to prevent those it saw as dangerous subversives from gaining employment. (see: Arthur McIvor. 1988. ‘A Crusade for Capitalism’: The Economic League, 1919-39. Journal of Contemporary History 23(4): 631-655). The League was finally wound up in 1993, following the end of the Cold War, and more importantly the massive negative publicity it had endured. However, some of those involved went on to form CAPRiM, which continues to do much the same job of selling blacklists of workers to subscribing companies, and which may or may not be connected to the NDR.
The very significant point here though is that ACPO is an undemocratic, unaccountable, private organisation. Yet it is being allowed to operate a new private intelligence service from within New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, a publicly-funded and accountable body. This is effectively a kind of privatisation of MI5 functions. There are several questions here.
Firstly, what is the CIU’s relationship to the Metropolitan Police’s National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU), which sprung to prominence last year with much the same agenda and a disgraceful planted scare story in The Observer implying that environmental activists were terrorists? (the story has since been removed, but see my old blog for some details).
Secondly and more importantly, how can the Home Secretary possibly justify this outsourcing of anti-democratic internal security activities? It was unable to do so with the NDR, and it seems the only reasons for this new public-private initiative is to keep the CIU free from examination (and Freedom of Information requests) from the public and ‘off balance-sheet’ so not subject to National Audit Office or Parliamentary budgetary scrutiny. Yet in that case, how can its position within police headquarters be justified? If it is public, it should be subject to parliamentary and judicial oversight – as the Lords Constitution Committee on Surveillance recently demanded for all surveillance activities – and if it is private, it should not be allowed to benefit from public funds.
They can’t have it both ways.
Nor surprisingly there is very little surveillance in the area around the hotel, except the old fashioned kind and you better be sure that people are watching you from the little shops and street corners. However when you head down the Av. Sao Joao into the financial district, it’s a different story. I was cautious about taking obvious pictures of police and security guards, let alone the serious security inside the bank entrances (metal detectors, scanners, guards etc.) because I just don’t know what kind of trouble that would bring, but here’s a flavour.
ubisurv 