US border project cancelled… or is it just mutating?

Neoconopticon is reporting that the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) project is to be shelved and replaced with off-the shelf surveillance equipment (UAVs etc.).

The project which was based on contracts with Boeing and Raytheon, had been in trouble for some time. I reported back in 2009 how Boeing had basically wasted most of the money on the Mexican border projects on systems that didn’t work. Neoconopticon gives the figure of $3.7Bn for the project, but in fact estimated costs for the longer-term maintenance just of the Mexican fence component had spiralled to over $10Bn.

The original source for this news, Defence Industry Daily, has a good timeline.

I am left wondering however about whether this cancellation might have anything to do with the discussions that were recently revealed on the North American Perimeter project, which I blogged back in December last year. A complete North American perimeter might reduce the pressure to add further security to the US-Canadian border at least, and Canadian government funds and people could be leveraged by the US, as they were during the Cold War with the DEW Line and BMEWS. A summit on the issue between US President, Barack Obama, and Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, had been scheduled for January and was recently pushed back into February, which has given time for the decision on the cancellation of the SBI.

This could all be coincidence, but it is certainly interesting timing…

Facebook learns nothing

Having been strongly criticised over its ‘Places’ feature for its lack of understanding of the concept of ‘consent’ in data protection, and why ‘opt-in’ is better for users than ‘opt-out’ when it comes to new ‘services’ (i.e: ways they can share your data with other organisations), Facebook is doing it again.

Between today and tomorrow, the new Facebook feature called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-Facebook sites and it is automatically set to “Enabled”.

To turn it off: Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.

(Or of course, you can just ‘Turn Off All Platform Apps” too!)

The really important thing is that if your Facebook Friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. So, copy this and repost to yours…

(Thanks to Lorna Muir for this alert)

The Total Surveillance Society?

Advanced visual surveillance has become prevalent in most developed nations but, being restricted by inconvenient things like democracy and accountability (even if they are not as strong as some would like) and police and local authority funding, such surveillance remains patchy even where it is widespread.

The Chinese state, however, suffers from none of these inconvenient restrictions. Free from democracy, accountability, and with a buoyant economy still largely connected to the Communist Party, it is able to put in place surveillance systems beyond the wildest dreams of the most paranoid western administrators. The target of the new wave of surveillance is internal political unrest, particularly in separatist Tibetan Buddhist and Muslim areas of the massive nation.

Associated Press is reporting official internal announcements about how Urumqi, capital of the Uighur Muslim area of Xinjiang, which saw extensive anti-government protests last year, will be blanketed by surveillance systems. According to the report:

  • 40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective shells have already been installed in the region, with 17,000 in Urumqi itself
  • 3,400 buses, 4,400 streets, 270 schools and 100 shopping malls are already covered
  • the aim is for surveillance to be “seamless”, with no blind spots in sensitive areas of the city (and this includes in particular, religious sites)
  • 5,000 new police officers have been recruited

This is part of a wider ‘Safe City’ strategy – in this context, even more of a euphemistic description that the same words would be in the west – that will see 10 million cameras being installed across the country. Ths numbers keep growing all the time: the last time that I reported on this, the estimate was less than 3 million ! IMS Consultants last year estimated that the Chinese video surveillance market was $1.4 billion in 2009, and that this will grow to over $3.5 billion by 2014. China is now the single largest market for video surveillance in the world.

Condensed CCTV

Video analytics is the thing right now. With so much video information and the limits of human operators, what to do with all that footage? There are numerous answers mostly involving forms of algorithmic movement recognition. From the masses of press releases that come my way every day, I notice one Israeli company (Israel being one of the world leaders in security technology), BriefCam, is marketing a new automated system that not only recognises objects of interest but then condenses hours of video which feature the object of interest into a matter of minutes featuring all the salient points from the whole time, at once. Or according to their own website:

“BriefCam VS Online receives real-time feed from the DVR/NVR and processes data to produce a database that can be called on to create a video summary presentation, on demand.”

I’ve seen the technology at work, but one thing starts to concern me imediately is what is lost by way of this combined footage. Check the video here for example.

The blurb claims that it is ‘easy’ for operators to see something unexpected, yet this is not a ‘real’ image, or in fact it is a hyperreal image, multiple images partly overlaid on what is assumed to be a standardized background. Of course, given the original footage remains available contextual evidence can be sought. However, I do wonder what kind of decisions will result from fast-moving combined footage pre-selected to present to a human viewer… and of course, what exactly it is that the system is programed to recognise and how. It seems that operators of video surveillance systems will increasingly be watching is not reality, but combined, edited highlights, a part-simulated recreation. Jean Baudrillard would be having a quiet chuckle if he could see this…

Corporate Privacy?

I’ve been arguing a lot recently that individual privacy, state secrecy and corporate confidentiality should be regarded as clearly separate things. Keeping this separation is important precisely because it stops organisations which we should expect to be open to inspection and accountable to us, from using ‘privacy’ as an excuse for avoiding such inspection. Philosophically, the distinction should be clear, but legally it may not be so obvious. One problem however lies in the nature of the whole notion of ‘incorporation’, which in its very language already assigns certain individual human attributes to organisations. And corporations are very much aware of this.

Marc Rotenberg points me to a very interesting legal test case in which the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in the USA is currently involved. This case originally started when in 2008 the Federal Communications Commission ruled that corporations could not use ‘privacy’ as a reason to reject Freedom of Information requests. In 2009, a court overruled this decision. And now the FCC, ironically aided by EPIC, an organisation which frequently finds itself challenging rather than supporting the state on such issues, is seeking to have this ruling overturned in the Supreme Court.

This strikes me as a vital case, not just for the USA, for other jurisdictions where corporations will be observing the outcome and seeking to bring similar challenges if they can. If privacy, and indeed any other fundamental human right, is to mean anything it can neither be granted to companies who find it simply a convenient cover for a desire for confidentiality, nor to states who seek to maintain secrecy. Clearly there is information possessed by corporations and by states that might have elements that could be damaging to personal privacy. Private individuals acting in a corporate or state capacity may perhaps in some clearly delineated circumstances have the right not to be personally identified, even more so for individuals from outside the organisation concerned, but the ‘what’ of the information should still not, by association with an individual expressing a desire for privacy or anonymity, acquire the protection of privacy.

Doping, Surveillance and Radical Transparency in Sport

Surveillance studies people tend not to look at sport very much. Sure, sports mega-events and the kinds of security crackdowns and surveillance surges that occur around them are an object of research, but sport itself, less so.

This is interesting because the bodies of athletes are amongst the most closely monitored and at the same time, contested sites that one could imagine, none more so than professional cycling. Professional cycling may be the most difficult sport on the planet and not surprisingly it has acquired a bad reputation for the prevalence of cheating, particularly in the area of doping. The reputation is in some ways unfair as cycling also has some of the most onerous regulations governing everything from the movements of the riders – the so-called ‘whereabouts rule’, where riders must be available for testing at all times, so must tell doping testers where they are going to be and be there – to bodily function, with top level cyclists now required to have a ‘biological passport’ which establishes baseline values for levels of various aspects of blood and so on, so that anything which alters these values in an unusual way can be taken as prima facie evidence of doping.

However, there has been a reaction from many cyclists against the increasingly intrusive surveillance regime. Privacy has been cited (see for example the challenge by Kazahk rider, Andrey Kashechkin to be his positive test for an illegal blood transfusion), as well as the riders’ right to a good night’s sleep (testers now often arrive in the early hours of the morning). Critics have been less sympathetic with accusations of a code of ‘omerta’ towards anyone who tells the truth about doping in cycling, and riders generally failing to understand the seriousness of cheating.

In opposition to the complaints, a growing number of top teams and riders have been taking the initiative and arguing not against the surveillance regime but embracing it even more fully than the UCI, the sport’s governing body or WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency. One example is British rider, Bradley Wiggins. He’s an ex-Olympic track cycling champion who has previously finished 4th in the Tour de France, generally acknowledged as the pinnacle of the sport. That result was a surprise to everyone as Wiggins had never really shown such prowess on the road, and there were mutterings about doping. What Wiggins did was radical and even more startling: a rider who has always insisted that he has ridden clean, he published his biological passport readings for the whole period of the Tour and more.

Now he is taking this ‘radical transparency’ stance further and arguing that all biological passport data for all riders should be made available on the Internet. He argues that this would give both individual riders and the sport, credibility, and stop the rumour mill and the often unfounded allegations around particular performances, as well as shaming those who really are trying to get away with doping. Of course it does damage privacy, but in this case, the virtues of privacy and very much less clear than they might be in other domains. Of course there is also a big difference between such transparency being a voluntary gesture and a requirement.

Two Weeks to Go for Bill C-32

Many people will still not be aware of the imminence of a new bill on copyright for Canada. Everything you need to know (and more) is on Michael Geist’s excellent site. The key thing is that, like most such bills around the world, this bill is still skewed towards industry perspectives and does not place much importance on the rights on the ordinary citizen or resident of Canada, in particular in the areas of ‘digital locks’ that prevent fair use of digital materials, and the lack of provision for copying across form factors for personal use. You have until the end of January to make your views heard.

Spain vs. Google or Freedom of Expression vs. the Right to Be Forgotten

Several outlets are reporting today, the interesting clash between Spanish courts and Google. The argument is over whether Google should carry articles that have been challenged by Spanish citizens as breaching their privacy. An injunction was won in the courts by the Spanish data protection commissioner over publication of material that is being challenged under privacy legislation.

Clearly there are two main issues here. One is the specific issue of whether Google, as a search engine, can be considered as a publisher, or as it claims, simply an intermediary which publishes nothing, only linking to items published by others. This is important for Google as a business and for those who use it.

But the other is a more interesting issue which is the deeper question of what is going on here which is the struggle between two kinds of rights. The right to freedom of expression, to be able to say what one likes, is a longstanding one in democracies, however it is almost nowhere absolute. The problem in a search-engine enabled information age, is that these exceptions, which relate to both the (un)truth of published allegations (questions of libel and false accusation) and of privacy and to several other values, are increasingly challenged by the ability of people in one jurisdiction to access the same (libellous, untrue or privacy-destructive) information from outside that jurisdiction via the Internet.

In Spain, the question has apparently increasingly been framed in terms of a new ‘right to be forgotten’ or ‘right to delete’. This is not entirely new – certainly police records in many countries have elements that are time-limited, but these kinds of official individually beneficial forgettings are increasingly hard to maintain when information is ‘out there’ proliferating, being copied, reposted and so on.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Wikileaks affair. Here, where it comes to the State and corporations, questions of privacy and individual rights should not be used even analogically. The state may assert ‘secrecy’ but the state has no ‘right of privacy’. Secrecy is an instrumental concept relating to questions of risk. Corporations may assert ‘confidentiality’ but this is a question of law and custom relating to the regulation of the economy, not to ‘rights’.

Privacy is a right that can only be attached to (usually) human beings in their unofficial thoughts, activities and existence. And the question of forgetting is really a spatio-temporal extension of the concept of privacy necessary in an information society. Because the nature of information and communication has changed, privacy has to be considered over space and through time in a way that was not really necessary (or at least not for so many people so much of the time) previously.

This is where Google’s position comes back into play. Its insistence on neutrality is premised on a libertarian notion of information (described by Erik Davis some time ago as a kind of gnostic American macho libertarianism that pervades US thinking on the Internet). But if this is ‘freedom of information’ as usually understood in democratic societies, it does have limits and an extreme political interpretation of such freedom cannot apply. Should Google therefore abandon the pretence of neutrality and play a role in helping ‘us’ forget things that are untrue, hurtful and private to individuals?

The alternative is challenging: the idea that not acting is a morally ‘neutral’ position is clearly incorrect because it presages a new global norm of information flow presaged on not forgetting, and on the collapse of different jurisdictional norms of privacy. In this world, whilst privacy may not be dead, the law can no longer be relied on to enforce it and other methods from simple personal data management, to more ‘outlaw’ technological means of enforcement will increasingly be the standard for those who wish to maintain privacy. This suggests that money and/or technical expertise will be the things that will allow one to be forgotten, and those without either will be unable to have meaningful privacy except insofar as one is uninteresting or unnoticed.

New Year, New Walls

A few years ago the European Union was celebrating the demise of national borders. At the same time, critics were warning that the Schengen Agreement foretold a ‘Fortress Europe’. Up until recently, that fortress was largely composed of information systems and conventional border controls, but now Greece is making it very physical with a new ‘border wall’ with its old enemy, Turkey. Admittedly this wall is not on the same scale as those erected by Israel (in unilaterally establishing a border with Palestine) or the USA (along the border with Mexico), and will be placed at a site near the river Evros in Thrace, described as ‘highly permeable’ to illegal immigration which tends to funnel through Turkey into the EU via Greece.

The EU is making vaguely protesting noises, which are likely almost entirely insincere and will in any case be ineffective (see the similar quickly withdrawn complaints over France’s disgraceful expulsions of Roma and Sinti people last year). The real reasons for the new barrier may be rather more opportunist and cynical in any case: in a time of financial crisis in Greece with the government reeling from popular protest, turning on the ‘Other’, and being seen to be tough in immigration, is a classic populist strategy of diversion.