ACLU is reporting that nursery schools kids in Richmond, California are being issued with jerseys embedded with RFID chips. GPS-enabled and/or RFID-chipped clothing has been available for a while now, and there have also been (pre-)schools in other countries that have issued tracking devices to kids, notably in Yokohama in Japan, but this appears to be the first time in the USA. RFID is a very simple, insecure technology, and this type of initiative gives a false sense of security and is about at once raising and appeasing social anxiety and parental paranoia about the incredibly rare instances of child kidnapping. ACLU note correctly that this is just likely to make stalking and kidnapping easier as harder, but really all this does is enable the school to know where the jersey is – like left on the back of a bus, swapped with a friend or thrown in a ditch. It’s more pointless security theater, but at a more intimate level than the kind we are used to at airports and public buildings.
Category: tracking
Voluntary Self-Surveillance
In a nice bit of synchronicity with the ‘Surveillance and Empowerment’ call just issued by Surveillance & Society, there’s a really interesting little piece on the rise of ‘self-tracking’ by Curetogether founder, Alexandra Carmichael, in the latest issue of h+ magazine, an open-access publication from ‘transhumanist’ pioneer, R.U. Sirius.
The piece concentrates on those who have health problems who want to track and share symptoms and other biometric data, but argues that this is a wider interest: “we do it because we love data, or we do it because we have specific things we want to optimize about ourselves.”
There are also some useful links to life-logging and patient data-sharing sites.
(thanks to BoingBoing for the link to h+)
Information-rich animals
Iris scanning has been proposed for horse by a company called Global Animal Management (GAM) Inc. As bloodstock is a huge and lucrative business – feeding everything from the private obsessions of the super-rich through the horseracing industry to the dreams of teenage horse-enthusiasts – it is not surprising to see such investment in biometrics. Racehorses were, after all, the first living creatures to be regularly microchipped. Vets seem sceptical about the idea, but surely members of the medical profession would be more enthusiastic about non-invasive replacements for invasive identification techniques like RFID?
Ironically, support for the scepticism comes form GAM’s own website, where a very interesting short video shows just how comprehensive the surveillance of animals through RFID chips has become. RFID chips do not just identify, they carry whole life-cycle information on origins, movements, health and disease and legal compliances. And because of the chips this information is carried with the animal not simply associated with it via a distant database as the result of an occasional scan. The system creates what GAM calls ‘information-rich animals’, which presumably is what makes GAM – and it hopes, its customers – cash-rich too…
(thanks to Aaron Martin, whose reading now seems to include Horse and Hound magazine…)
Pigs subvert surveillance
It is not just human beings who are subjects of surveillance. Animals are increasingly under surveillance too, indeed there are techniques of surveillance and tracking used on animals that are designed to achieve levels of control that (for the most part) would not be tolerated for human beings. Animals are tagged, filmed, implanted, tracked, and even used and adapted for surveillance (see Amber Marks’s book, Headspace, for example) for all kinds of reasons from the economic to the environmental. However, this great story from a BBC kids’ news program demonstrates that some animals can ‘fight back’ in ways that are inventive and heartening.
Many farms now limit the food consumption of individual pigs through the use of electronic Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) collars and gates: once the pig has gone through the gate, the collar communicates with a computerised food distribution system which will provide the pig with what is deemed ‘enough’ for the pig. When the pig has eaten and left the feed stall, it cannot get back in for more because the system knows which collar has already been through the gate.
However, apparently pigs in several locations have independently learnt how to get round this surveillance system. Some pigs hate the collars so much that they rip them off. These pigs then don’t get to eat of course, but other pigs have learnt that if they pick up the collars they can go through the gate a second time – and they have even taught other pigs how to this…
Never mind ‘Big Brother’ and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s another Orwell phrase (from Animal Farm) that comes to mind here: “Four legs good, two legs bad”…!
(Thanks to Aaron Martin for this)
US Congress debates online data protection
The US House of Representatives will finally get to debate whether online advertising which tracks the browsing habits of users is a violation of privacy and needs to be controlled. A bill introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia will be propsing an opt-out regime that gives users information about the uses to which their data will be put, and allows them to refuse to be enroled. At present many such services work entirely unannounced, placing cookies on users’ hard drives and using other tracking and datamining techniques, and without any way in which a user can say ‘no’. Of course, we have yet to see the results of the inveitable industry scare-stories and hard-lobbying on the what will be proposed, let alone pased. But the proposal itself is particularly significant because so far the US has so far always bowed to business interests on online privacy and data protection, and if this bill is pased, it is a sign that what EFF-founder, Howard Rhiengold, long ago called the ‘electronic frontier’ might start to acquire a little more law and order in favour of ordinary people.
Project Indect and the NeoConOpticon
Following the release of the NeoConOpticon report, Ben Hayes of Statewatch has set up an interesting blog monitoring EU security policy, called (ahem…) Notes on the European Security Research Program. One the first post (and a follow-up) concerned one particular EU 7th Framework Program-funded project called Indect, which seems to think that it is a great idea to have an Enemy of the State-style comprehensive surveillance system across Europe. It appears to be filmed in Poland – you think the Poles at least would have learned from almost half a century of totalitarian rule…
There are of course, hundreds of these security projects being funded by the EU that Ben’s report detailed (with a tiny, tiny number of alternative or critical ones, and of course some token nods to simple ethical concerns like privacy within some of the projects). One that finished in 2007 was the SAFEE project that proposed (amongst other things) to put cameras in the back of every aircraft seat so that passengers’ facial expressions could be monitored automatically for signs off threat… it’s unclear how many of these ever get beyond the research stage – and I hope most don’t – but if they do, the future of the EU is one of a tightly controlled society of people constantly monitored even at the most personal level in case they step out of line. The great thing about the NeoConOpticon report is that it puts all of these things together rather than treating them in isolation. I wonder if the individual researchers involved would think differently if they actually considered their work in this context and in the context of the political architecture of security that is being built in the EU.
Anyway, here’s the PR video for Indect, for those who are interested in such things. It’s typical of the genre: a dumbed-down, hyped-up, over-macho, TV-detective series pastiche with a ridiculous voice-over and music. No doubt it goes down a storm at sales events.
Anyway, keep an eye on Ben’s blog. I will be.
Meanwhile, back in the USA…
Just when you though the USA might not be going down the same kind of vehicle tracking route that the UK, Japan and Brazil are following, former Congressman, longtime privacy advocate and erstwhile scourge of ECHELON, Bob Barr, reports in his Atlanta Journal and Constitution blog, that increasing numbers of jurisdications in the States are indeed investing in license plate reading systems. California seems to be leading the way, but there’s plenty of others states following, and no doubt this will be another way of wasting (sorry, investing) Obama’s massive recession-busting boost for security…
Vehicle tracking in Japan: N-system
Back in February, I reported from Brazil about the progress of a proposed RFID-based vehicle tracking system, SINIAV. Of course RFID is not at all necessary for tracking. In the UK, the police have used Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) systems based on roadside cameras since 1993 in London – following the Provisional IRA bombings of the City and Docklands (see the account in my erstwhile collaborator, Jon Coaffee‘s book, Terrorism, Risk and the City – and since 2005, this has been in the process of being expanded into a nationwide network (see also the official Press Release from the Association of Chief Police Officers concerning the launch here).
What is rather less well-known to the outside world is that Japan developed such an automated camera system far earlier, from the early 1980s. The so-called N-system thereafter was gradually expanded to cover almost all major expressways and strategic urban locations in Tokyo and Osaka. Kabukicho, the entertainment district in Shinjuku, which I have spent some time studying over the last few years and will write about more tomorrow, is surrounded by N-system cameras and it is, I estimate, impossible to drive into this area without your license plate being recorded. These cameras are in addition to the 50 CCTV cameras that cover just about every street within the district. N-system is supposed to have played a major role on snaring suspects from the apocaylptic cult, Aum Shinrikyo, which carried out the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground in 1995, and who also assassinated top policemen and judges. Aum, now renamed ‘Aleph’, has been under official state surveillance ever since.
The Japanese police are not very forthcoming about N-system, let alone the details of how long data is kept and what it is used for. However one particular lawyer’s office in Tokyo did a very good investigation of the constitutional, legal and practical aspects of N-system back in the late 90s, and the updated pages are available here, including a nice little animation explaining how the system works.
We will hopefully be talking to them before we leave Tokyo. We still have time for a few more interviews here including the East Japan Railways security research lab, the Japanese consumers’ association, the organisation for the welfare of foreign workers, and the Suginami ward community safety people. And I will also just about have time to shoot down to Kobe to talk to Professor Kiyoshi Abe, a friend and collaborator, who is also one of the leading surveillance researchers here.
Locational Privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a very good little report on locational privacy, “the ability of an individual to move in public space with the expectation that under normal circumstances their location will not be systematically and secretly recorded for later use.”
As usual for EFF, it is written in clear, understandable language and is free-to-access and download.
* I’m going to be away up to the mountains for a couple of days, so there won’t be any more posts here until Sunday at the earliest… next week is a slow one here in Japan as it is O-bon, the Buddhist festival of the dead, and many people go back to their family home and offices are generally closed for some or all of the week. I won’t be doing much in the way of interviewing, but I still have quite a few interviews and visits from the last two weeks to write up.
The paranoid bubble of Offender Locator
TechCrunch reports that one of the Top 10 current iPhone apps in the USA is something called ‘Offender Locator’. This is a little mash-up that overlays the location of those on registries of sex offenders onto google maps, so you can check where sex offenders live whilst you are on the move.
This is such a world of wrongness, its hard to know where to start.
Let’s begin with the categorisation. The category of ‘sex offender’ varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. This app is clearly targeted at parents worried about paedophiles, yet depending on the state, offender registers can include people convicted of innocuous things like public nudity, public urination and simple underage sex (and please don’t try to tell me that a 17-year old kid who has consensual sex with a 15 year-old kid is a technically a paedophile, that’s just normal, whatever the laws of some backwards states may say).
The second thing is that even the US Department of Justice says that such registers cannot be guaranteed to be accurate. So now these non-guaranteed lists are available to you mapped out on your iPhone. Does that somehow make them more accurate? No, but all those red arrows on a map do look much very ‘real’ and scary though, don’t they?
Which brings me to the third point. What are you supposed to do with this ‘information’? It’s hardly empowering, in fact it creates a false view of the world based on fear. Will you not let your kids out within several miles of any red marker on the map, will you take a detour to avoid neighbourhoods with high concentrations of offenders when you are driving, or of course, in contrast, will you deliberately go to such places with a baseball bat to show those sex offenders who’s boss?
Finally, of course, this information isn’t ‘live’. It shows you where sex offenders live, but they aren’t chipped yet, so not where they actually are at any one moment in time. It provides at once a false sense of reassurance and the nagging feeling of doubt that they could really be right behind that tree over there, or in the shadows. And what do ‘they’ look like? That man over there with the 5 o’clock shadow at 11 in the morning sure looks like a sex offender… and there’s definitely some in this neighbourhood, your iPhone says so!
Apps like this, policies like this, also increase the pressure for more ‘comprehensive’ solutions – especially this app. Because it isn’t ‘live’, they’ll be people asking ‘why not?’ Why not tag these people for the rest of their lives with GPS cuffs, or implant them with RFID chips?
Finally, the thinking behind this app is just wrong in terms of what we know about sex offenses. Most real sexual violence and sexual abuse of children takes place within the home and within ‘normal’ family relationships (and ‘normal’ schools and nurseries too). That’s what Mr or Mrs iPhone doesn’t want to hear. ‘It couldn’t be my husband, okay he gets angry with the kids sometimes, but he’s under a lot of pressure at work and I know he loves us…’ Far easier to externalize the ‘threat’, to cast it ‘out there’ amongst the red arrow markers on the streets of some other neighbourhood…
Surveillance isn’t necessarily the same thing as paranoia but when surveillance becomes pathological, paranoia is the result. Some paranoia is about surveillance, some is expressed in surveillance. This kind of apparently democratic, freedom of information app, demonstrates the worst and most pathological places that a society of ubiquitous surveillance can start to go. It creates defensive bubbles of individualized, desocialized paranoia, of protecting ‘the kiddies’ against the threats from the ‘Other’, outside. Perhaps you should just stay inside and buy everything from amazon.com and make your kids live in some virtual world where only those nice marketers can prey on them…
(thanks to Aaron Martin for pointing this snippet of news out to me)
ubisurv 