videosurveillance – Page 11

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.

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…)

Sao Paulo Metro Surveillance and Security

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.

Sao Paulo Surveillance and Security

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.

Surveillance and the Recession

In the editorial of the latest issue of Surveillance & Society, I speculated that that the global recession would lead to surveillance and security coming up against the demands of capital to flow (i.e. as margins get squeezed, things like complex border controls and expensive monitoring equipment become more obvious costs). This was prompted by news that in the UK, some Local Authorities were laying off staff employed to monitor cameras and leaving their control rooms empty.

However an article in the Boston Globe today says different. The piece in the business section claims that – at least in its area of coverage – the recession is proving to be good business for surveillance firms, especially high tech ones. The reasons are basically that both crime and the costs of dealing with it become comparatively larger in lean periods. The article doesn’t entirely contradict my reasoning: organisations in the USA are also starting to wonder about the costs of human monitoring within the organisation, but instead they are installing automated software monitoring or are outsourcing the monitoring to more sophisticated control rooms provided by security companies elsewhere.

Shouting cameras in the UK (The Register)

They also note that human patrols are in some case being replaced (or at least they can be replaced – it’s unclear exactly how much of the article is PR for the companies involved and how much is factual reporting) by ‘video patrols’, i.e.: remote monitoring combined with reassuring (or instructive) disembodied voices from speakers attached to cameras. Now, we’ve seen this before in the UK as part of New Labour’s rather ridiculous ‘Respect Zones’ plan, but the calming voice of authority from a camera, now what famous novel does that sound like? Actually if it’s not Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is also rather reminiscent of the ubiquitous voice of Edgar Friendly in that odd (but actually rather effective) combination of action movie and Philip K. Dickian future, Demolition Man. The point is that this is what Bruce Schneier has called the ‘security show’. It doesn’t provide any real security, merely the impression that there might be.

How long will it be before people – not least criminals – start to get cynical about the disembodied voice of authority? This then has the potential to undermine more general confidence in CCTV and technological solutions to crime and fear of crime, and could end by increasing both.

Britain is a surveillance society and it must change: detailed anaysis of the Lords Constitution Committee report

This is probably the best parliamentary report on surveillance I have ever read, and if only half of the recommendations are given any attention by the government, then Britain will be a much better place.

It’s 3.00am here in Brazil, and I have just spent the last four hours reading, analyzing and writing about the House of Lords Constitution Committee Report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. My expectations of the work of the committee have generally not been disappointed. This is probably the best parliamentary report on surveillance I have ever read, and if only half of the recommendations are given any attention by the government, then Britain will be a much better place. However it is not only relevant to Britain. The UK seems to have come to be regarded as some kind of model for other democracies to follow in terms of surveillance and security – at least by governments. Reading this report should serve to disabuse others of any notion that Britain is a good example.

Here’s the detailed analysis. It is long and there are no pictures! But this is serious stuff. I have gone through the whole report and thought about all the recommendations. It is worth remembering first of all what the Committee was asked to do. Here are the questions they started out with:

Have increased surveillance and data collection by the state fundamentally altered the way it relates to its citizens?
What forms of surveillance and data collection might be considered constitutionally proper or improper? Is there a line that should not be crossed? How could it be identified?
What effect do public and private sector surveillance and data collection have on a citizen’s liberty and privacy?
How have surveillance and data collection altered the nature of citizenship in the 21st century, especially in terms of citizens’ relationship with the state?
Is the Data Protection Act 1998 sufficient to protect citizens? Is there a need for additional constitutional protection for citizens in relation to surveillance and the collection of data?

The answers to the first and last questions are, in short ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Their basic conclusion is that increasing surveillance by the state is the greatest change to the nature of the relationship between state and individual in Britain since the end of the second world war. In opposition to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report from last year, and largely in support of our Report on the Surveillance Society form 2006 and that of the Royal Academy of Engineers from 2007, they show that Britain is a surveillance society, and that this must change. They do not go so far as to recommend an Information Act to bring all legislation in this area together, as I have been arguing, but they do advocate significant new legal / constitutional measures to rebalance the state-individual relationship in favour of the individual.

There are 8 chapters of consideration of all of the evidence given, which is treated in a very careful and even-handed way. The Home Office, the police and the Surveillance Commissioners for example, all come in for a telling-off at various points, but at the same time, some of the current government’s initiatives on openness are quite rightly praised (although of course they don’t go far enough in tackling the culture of secrecy that has plagued British government for far too long).

Who comes out of it well? First of all, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas and his office (the ICO). This is entirely right. None of this debate would have happened without him and he continues to push the agenda forward in an activist manner that many campaigners should look to as an example. Secondly, the media. The Lords seem to be very aware of the role of investigative journalists in holding the government to account. People are too willing these days to make blanket generalisations about the media as if they were all superficial and obsessed with celebrity. In the case of surveillance, the BBC and The Guardian in particular have done a great job. Thirdly academics and campaigners alike come across as far more informed and sensible about this than the state, which leads the Lords to recommend that the government pay us far more attention. On a personal note, it is a bit disconcerting to see myself, Surveillance Studies Network and other people and organizations with whom I work mentioned (approvingly) quite so much in such an important document…

The Committee place the two values of privacy and freedom as the foundations of its recommendations. The Lords argue that privacy and the restraint of state powers are at the heart of liberty, and that they should be taken into account at all times. There is, I am very pleased to see no mention of ‘trade-offs’ between freedom and security and it seems that they accepted my argument (they do quote me on this) that when claims to protect fundamental freedoms by increasing security are actually eroding those freedoms, the tacit agreement that binds people and state is broken. They stress that all organisations involved in surveillance and date handling need to give far more attention to privacy at all stage, indeed that it should be built in.

There are many individual recommendations.The first concern the Information Commissioner. Basically, the Lords argue that he should be given more extensive powers and more resources, specifically:

to have a role in assessing the effect on any new surveillance measure on public trust;
to be able to monitor the human rights (Article 8, ECHR) effects of government and private surveillance practices on the public;
to be consulted by the government at the earliest stages of policy development – they specifically attack the government for not doing thus far; to extend the ICO’s power of inspection to private companies (again something I am quoted on) – they don’t note that the power of inspection over government departments was only granted in a rush by Gordon Brown following the revelations of disastrous losses of data by various state bodies;
to speed up the implementation of the ICO’s new power to fine bodies that break the rule on data protection and freedom of information;
to be a statutory consultee on all surveillance and data processing laws and for the ICO to report to Parliament on this;
for the government and the ICO to undertake a review of the law governing citizens’ consent to use of their personal data – there is quite a lot of interesting discussion in the body of the report on how consent might operate, and I am very pleased that they haven’t, unlike the government, given up on the importance of consent;
for the government to work with the ICO on raising public awareness as it should already be doing but has failed to do;
and finally, and this is really important – for the Data Protection Act to be amended to mandate a Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) “prior to the adoption of any new surveillance, data collection or processing scheme, including new arrangements for data sharing” with a role for the ICO in overseeing these. The government will probably try to ignore this, but this is the most crucial recommendation for future policy.

On the various other commissions – of which there are too many in my opinion – they merely recommend that the Surveillance and Communications Commissioner work together better and seek the advice of the ICO, especially with regard to the misuse of powers under the Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), and that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal stops hiding from the public. These are weak recommendations. Later they are rather more robust about the problems of having too many ineffectual regulators of RIPA, but despite a brief mention, any recommendations regarding the regulation of the Intelligence Services get quietly dropped along the way (not surprisingly). I would have thought that recommending at the very least that the offices of the Surveillance and Communications Commissioners are brought under the control of the ICO, if not completely absorbed into the ICO, would have been a much better long-term move.

They also have a number of other recommendations on the egregious RIPA, firstly that the (inadequate) administrative procedures are reviewed and secondly that the government should think again about the whole business of allowing Local Authorities police powers, and that in any case, these powers” should only be available for the investigation of serious criminal offences which would attract a custodial sentence of at least two years.” In my opinion, this effectively amounts to saying ‘repeal RIPA’ without saying so directly. The use of intense targeted surveillance powers to deal with minor infractions is what a lot of RIPA is all about whether that was the intention or not. It is an ill-thought out and badly worded law, like so many in this area.

The Lords recognize this deficiency in detail and specificity and argue as a general point, following the Human Rights Committee, that “the Government’s powers should be set out in primary legislation.” Crucially they also note that the government has not seemed very concerned with what happens after legislation is passed or how it works. They recommend the formation of a new Joint Committee in parliament on surveillance and data powers that would have post-legislative scrutiny as one of its key functions.

There are several measures concerning particular technologies. Their coverage of technologies of surveillance and data-collections is not too bad. I gave a seminar to the Committee on the range of surveillance technologies before they started their hearings, and I was beginning to despair at the levels of knowledge – “can they really do that?” was a common cry – and yet here they consider everything from CCTV to ubiquitous computing / ambient intelligence. There are still major deficiencies however. Although they take my point that government needs to get ahead of the technological game in order to regulate effectively, they still have not. They don’t recommend anything specific about the use of scanners in public places, location tracking, about the increasing dependence on RFID, or about the new flexibility, mobility, decrease in size and bodily intrusiveness of surveillance technologies and what this means for regulation. Mind you that is all in our report to the ICO that inspired all this (see Paragraph 4!)

They recommend that:

the Government comply fully with the recent ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that DNA profiles of innocent people are no longer kept indefinitely on the National DNA Database (NDNAD) – they also rule out a complete national database on both liberty and cost grounds, and argue that there should be a single, clear law governing the NDNAD and better transparency all-round.
On CCTV, they recommend more research on “the effectiveness of CCTV in preventing, detecting and investigating crime”, and more importantly that the government finally put CCTV on a proper statutory basis, with clear regulations, and systems of complaint and redress.
The report is at its weakest on the proposed new National Identity Register (NIR) and ID card. No2ID will not be happy, as all that they say is that “the Government’s development of identification systems should give priority to citizen-oriented considerations.” This is practically meaningless.Considering that this is the Constitution Committee report, and that the NIR and ID card are at the heart of how the government sees the information relationship between state and individual, this is also an unacceptable and compromised omission. No doubt it is evidence of a key area of disagreement amongst members, but the Chair should have banged some heads together on this one!
Although it is treated as a legislative measure, the Lords recommend mandatory encryption of personal data “in some circumstances.” This should have been stronger – bear in mind that most of the data lost by the state over the last few years was not encrypted
They also recommend that the government incorporate ‘design solutions’ in particular Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in all new schemes. This is good as a minimum – we have to make sure that the government doesn’t use PETs as a way of claiming to have dealt with the problem – ooh, look: technology!

In other general measures for the whole of government, the Lords return to their central themes, specifically:

that Government should instruct government agencies and private organisations involved in surveillance and data use on compliance with Article 8 ECHR and in particular the legal meanings of necessity and proportionality. They also recommend legal aid should be available for challenges under Article 8.
a system of judicial oversight for surveillance carried out by public authorities, with compensation “to those subject to unlawful surveillance by the police, intelligence services, or other public bodies” acting under RIPA. This would be a severe blow the ad-hoc and effectively extra-legal expansion of surveillance powers under the present government. It would be great if it happens, but I am not going to hold my breath until it does…
increasing the stature and power of the data protection minister
lots of general blah about improving safeguards and restrictions on data handling and implementing standards and training, and education, to improve public confidence. But the thing is, public confidence isn’t really the main issue. Public confidence is low because the government and its private sector contractors have been time and again demonstrated to be incompetent.
there are also several paragraphs of recommendations which basically amount to saying ‘listen to the public’ and particularly, pay attention to pressure groups and research in this area because they know what they are talking about. They are right, you know – we do! They also want more research to get better information on public opinion in this area. We can do that too!

Despite this slight degeneration into well-meaning generality at the end, and despite the glaring hole when it comes to the NIR and ID cards, the principles advocated by this report, if implemented, would transform the direction of government in Britain. Many of the individual recommendations are things that I and others have been arguing for, for some time.

So what was the government’s first response? Well, the thoroughly useless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, according to the BBC has “rejected claims of a surveillance society as “not for one moment” true and called for “common sense” guidelines on CCTV and DNA.” When she has read the report she will realize that such guidelines are right in front of her – indeed, she got ‘common sense’ from the European Court on the DNA database some time ago and her department still does not know what to do with it!

As I said, if even half of this reported is acted on, Britain’s ways of dealing with surveillance will be transformed. I am not paying much attention to the Conservatives – in opposition you can say anything and they will beat the government with the liberty stick one day and the security stick the next. The question is, are New Labour brave enough to admit that their approach to surveillance has been almost entirely wrong?

We will soon find out.

The case of the serial killer and a South Korean surveillance surge

the case of the serial killer, Kang Ho-Soon, looks like it will be the signal for a surveillance surge in South Korea

Martin Innes described how certain ´signal crimes´ can trigger major cultural shifts, changes in policy or in many cases what, a few years ago, I called a ´surveillance surge´. In the UK, the case of James Bulger was one such incident that continues to resonate in all sorts of ways, but in particular has been held to be a major factor in the nationwide expansion of CCTV. 9/11 can be seen as another for the expansion of surveillance in the USA. Now the case of the serial killer, Kang Ho-Soon, looks like it will be the signal for a surveillance surge in South Korea.

Kang, described as a classic psychopath, killed seven women in Gyeonggi province between late 2006 and 2008. He met the women through personal ads and by offering them lifts home as they were waiting at bus stops at night, and then raped and killed them before disposing of the bodies in remote locations. His capture was at least partly down to CCTV images of his car near the sites of the murders.

According to Kim Rahn´s story in the Korean Times, South Korea seems to in the grip of frenzy of fear of strangers, with massive increases in applications to companies offering mobile phone location and tracking services, all schools in Seoul installing CCTV apparently to prevent violence and kidnappings, and in Gyeonggi province, 1,724 surveillance cameras, many with high resolution night vision will be installed. The murders have also sparked new debates about the use of the death penalty in the country.

But, and there is always a ´but´, one interesting fact in the story is that the bus stops where Kang met his victims were unlit. Street lighting is now apparently also to be added. Now it is one of the truisms of studies of CCTV that improved street lighting is a far better deterrent of opportunist crime than cameras – not that you are ever going to deter a true psychopath. Neither street lighting nor all the CCTV cameras in the world will do that.

More broadly however, I wonder whether South Korea is going through a similar breakdown of the feeling of social assurance that Japan is experiencing. At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush, I know Japan is not South Korea and South Korea is not Japan, but both societies traditionally had highly structured, ordered cultures which have been rapidly transformed in the face of industrialisation and globalisation. From my own research in Japan, it seems that the move towards increasing surveillance is strongly connected to this transformation. However at the same time, increasing surveillance is also encouraging the further decline of trust and a move toward a society of strangers. This can be seen as part of what David Lyon is starting to call the ´surveillance spiral´, a self-reinforcing movement in which more surveillance is always the answer to the problems that can at least partly be traced to living in a surveillance society.

Corrupting automated surveillance

OK, so automated surveillance systems are always right, aren’t they? I mean, they wouldn’t allow systems to be put into place that didn’t work, would they?

That was probably the attitude of many Italians who were supposedly caught jumping red lights by a new T-redspeed looped-camera system manufactured by KRIA. However, the BBC is reporting today that the system had been rigged by shortening the traffic light sequence, and that hundreds of officials were involved in the scam that earned them a great deal of money.

Now, the advocates of automated surveillance will say that there was nothing wrong with the technology itself, and that may be true in this case, but technologies exist within social systems and, unless you try to remove people altogether or by developing heuristic systems – both of which have their own ethical and practical problems – then these kind of things are always going to happen. It’s something those involved in assessing technologies for public use should think about, but in this case it seems they had thought about it, and their only thought was how much cash they could make…

CCTV in Canada

News from Queen’s University’s Surveillance Project that the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN), a stellar group of Canadian Surveillance Studies scholars, has released the first phase of its report on Camera Surveillance in Canada.

The report shows that public space CCTV is still relatively rare in Canada, with only 14 cities having implemented it. It argues that despite the lack of evidence for any effectiveness, and the absence of proper informed consent to schemes, the vast majority of the public support cameras largely on the basis of an ill-defined hope that they ‘work’.

My view is that the conditions for a British-style expansion would seem to be in place, were it not for the very different and much more activist role of Privacy Commissioners, informed by research like this, in questioning the need for CCTV. Let’s hope Britain’s role as an experimental surveillance guinea pig for the world will at least teach people elsewhere something…

The authors also mentioned that there is a surveillance series in the Ottawa Citizen that began Wednesday January 29. It features many surveillance studies academics from SCAN and more, and the first piece is really very good.

As another part of the series, the Citizen has adapted the 2016 scenarios that Kirstie Ball and I wrote for the Report on the Surveillance Society for the ICO back in 2006. They have pushed a load of things together so that it doesn’t quite makes sense, but never mind…

Learning Surveillance Systems

Several years ago, during my postdoctoral work on algorithmic surveillance, I was warning of the problems associated with the development of heuristic (learning) software applied to surveillance systems. I argued that their popularity would grow as the amount of data acquired through growing numbers of cameras that could not possibly be watched by human operators. Today in CSO Security and Risk, a magazine for ´security executives´, there is a piece by Eric Eaton which summarises the current state of the art, and which makes exactly that argument as a reason why operators of surveillance systems should consider using such learning software. As Eaton says,

¨Various tools have emerged that not only “see video better,” but also analyze the digitized output of video cameras in real time to learn and recognize normal behavior, and detect and alert on all abnormal patterns of activity without any human input.¨

Judge, jury... and executioner (IPC magazines)

The key issue here, and one which I mentioned in my post about angry robots the other day, is the automated determination of normality. As French theorist, Michalis Lianos, argued in Le Nouveau Contrôle Social back in 2001, the implementation of these kinds of systems threatens to replace social negotiation with a process of judgement and sometimes even the consequences (which in some border control systems can be fatal – Judge Dredd as computer).

Eaton identifies the first part of this conundrum when he says that ¨the key to successful surveillance is learning normal behaviors¨and he believes that this will enable systems to filter out such activity and ¨help predict, and prevent, future threats.¨ He does admit that in many cases the numbers of actual instances of systems detecting suspicious behaviour is very small and therefore the cost of systems may not be economically justified, but there is as usual amongst his ´5 musts´ for security operators, no place to be found for ethics, human rights (or indeed humanity outside of systems operators) or consideration of the wider social impacts of the growth in use of learning security machines.

No doubt he would say, as most developers and operators do, that this is simply a matter of how systems are used in compliance with best practice and the law, which in itself ignores the possibility of already consciously or unconsciously programmed-in biases, but the more that systems become intelligent and are able to make decisions independently of human operators, the thinner this legalistic response becomes. I´m not saying that we are about to have automatic car park CCTV cameras with guns any time soon, but it´s about time we had some forward-looking policy on the use of heuristic systems before they become as normal as Eaton suggests…