ubisurv

Quiet in the Library! Controlling the Internet

For many supposedly liberal politicians and bureaucrats the Internet is just a library of information, and we all know that libraries must be quiet and orderly, used responsibly and under the supervision of trained librarians…

Just a quick one: Boing Boing covered the story of an Australian EFF information rights campaigner, Geordie Guy, who has received a death threat from supporters of the government´s plan to control the Internet – just like so many other states around the world.

Surveillance cameras in Dajuyuan, Shenzhen (Rolling Stone)

It is no accident that the EFF campaign in Australia makes reference to their government´s plan as a ‘great wall’. The first government to do this was, of course, China with its jīndùn gōngchéng (‘Golden Shield’) system which was exposed by Greg Walton.

As Naomi Klein´s more recent investigations have shown, it seems that western governments and companies are not only deeply involved with supplying equipment and expertise to China´s new surveillance state, but also see the development of the combined physical and virtual surveillance infrastructure being built by the authoritarian Chinese government as some kind of model for their own supposedly more liberal nations.

The Internet seems to worry all sorts of otherwise level-headed and well-meaning people. I was invited to speak at a recent conference in Finland on security in the Baltic states, and I got into a small argument with the rapporteur of one of the working groups, who said that one of their conclusions was that ‘we’ must stamp out hate-speech on the Internet. I asked the rapporteur how they would intend to do this without destroying the structures which enabled the creativity and freedom of the Net, and the response was that stamping out hate-speech was too important and just must be done. I suspect this is how a lot of supposedly liberal politicians and bureaucrats are thinking. For them the Internet is just a library of information, and we all know that libraries must be quiet and orderly, used responsibly and under the supervision of trained librarians. If enforcing order destroys everything that makes the Internet so revolutionary and so important, so what? Order must be maintained. There must be quiet in the library!

My plans

Today there probably won´t be that much new here as I am concentrating on preparing for interviews for the next two weeks in Saõ Paulo and Brasília. I will be talking to various NGOs (mainly concerned with urban violence and security), academics, parliamentarians and representatives for the federal police and government ministers. I am also meeting Danilo Doneda later today, who is the leading Brazilian legal expert on privacy and data protection, and a member of the Habeus Data network, which campaigns for information rights in Latin American.

(My netbook has also decided not to work today, so if I can´t get that fixed there might not be much here at all for the next two weeks! Why do these things always happen just when it is least convenient?)

Google Latitude: no place to hide?

the mixture of assumptions seems dangerous: a lack of genuine understanding combined with categorical friendship (analogous to categorical suspicion, the basis of profiling in policing) and technologies that unless actively adjusted all the time for all of those massive number of connections, allow you to be utterly exposed…

I’ve just seen that Google has launched its Latitude service, which allows you (once you register and add your phone number) to be tracked by all your ‘friends’, and correspondingly, for you so see your ‘friends’ – if they have signed up. I put the words friends in inverted commas with some sadness because the word seems to have become increasingly meaningless in the age of Facebook when accumulating ‘friends’ seems to have become a competitive sport. This is not entirely irrelevant to Latitude for reasons we will come to in a minute.

There are various questions about this.

A colleague comments that like many other tracking services, the way it is set up he assumed you could access the project if you just had access to someone else’s phone and a computer (or WAP/3G phone) at the same time. Perfect for a over-protective or suspicious parent, a suspicious, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend – or anyone else for that matter.

The privacy policies are a mixture of Google’s standard (and already questionable) privacy statement and a new set of policies on ‘location privacy’, which state that:

“Google does not share an individual person’s location with third parties without explicit permission. Before someone can view your location, you must either send a location request by adding them as a friend or accept their location request and choose to share back your location.”

You can also change settings so that your location can be automatically tracked, manually selected, or hidden. If you are signed out of the service, you will not be on any map either. You can also change settings for specific friends, including hiding your location from them, share only the city you are in, or removing them from your Latitude list.

Now this all sounds very good, even fun – although it could be a recipe for all kinds of suspicions and jealousies – but it all depends on what the nature of ‘friendship’ means to the person using the service. Friendship no longer seems to require personal knowledge but simply matching categories. I was writing earlier about the loss of trust in South Korea, but the reformation of trust that occurs through social networking seems not to require the dense networks of interdependence in real life that traditional forms of social trust were built on. It doesn’t seem like a substitute, the mixture of assumptions seems dangerous: a lack of genuine understanding combined with categorical friendship (analogous to categorical suspicion, the basis of profiling in policing) and technologies that unless actively adjusted all the time for all of those massive number of connections, allow you to be utterly exposed, laid bare in time and space.

The most extreme examples of this personal surveillance are not in the relatively comfortable worlds that tech enthusiasts inhabit but firstly, in conflict zones – after all ‘I know where you live’ has always been one of the most terrifying and chilling expressions you can hear in such circumstances (see Nils Zurawski’s article on Northern Ireland in Surveillance & Society) and now it could be in real time; and secondly, in authoritarian, or even just paranoid countries. Here, real-time location data could be a goldmine for intelligence services, and it is not as if Google and Yahoo and others have bravely resisted the attempt of, for example, the Chinese government to suborn them to its illiberal requirements.

Now, perhaps this makes me sound very conservative. I’ve never joined a single social networking service – like, how Twentieth Century is that?! – but I am also sure that this service will be both used and abused in all kinds of ways, some that we expect and some that we don’t. It might be a tool for overprotective parents, for jealous lovers, for stalkers and even for killers; but it will also be a tool for new forms of creativity, deception, performance and play.

Or it could be just utterly pointless and no-one will bother using it at all.

(thanks to simon for the heads up. As it happens, Surveillance & Society currently has a call for papers out on ‘Performance, New Media and Surveillance’, to be edited by John McGrath and Bill Sweeney)

RFID chips readable ´from more than a mile away´

The important thing about RFID chips is not that they are the ´Mark of the Beast´ or any other such nonsense but that they are an appalling security risk

A story that has been circulating around the place over the last 48 hours, but which was originally in The Register on February 2nd, was the latest from Chris Paget´s valiant attempts to show that using RFID chips is just about the worst way to safeguard confidential information. This time he drove around San Francisco with a simple antenna and managed to read the unique number (which can be used to gain access to information on the US Department of Homeland Security database) from passports up to 30 feet (around 13m away), but he claims that with more powerful equipment, chips could be read from more than a mile (1.6km) away. There is also a very informative video on the site.

The important thing about RFID chips is not that they are the ´Mark of the Beast´ or any other such nonsense but that they are an appalling security risk…

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.

Private Security in Brazil: the global versus the specific

One of the purposes of my project here is to differentiate what is the product of globalising forces (or indeed generator of such forces), and what is more specific and particular to each of the countries and cities that I am examining. If you skim Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk´s 2007 collection, Evil Paradises, you can certainly come away with the overall impression that everything bad in the world is down to neoliberal capitalism. But actually, many of the contributors to that book, particularly Tim Mitchell on the reasons why the state and private capital are so entangled in Egypt and Mike Davis himself on Dubai, are quite careful about describing the particular historical roots and contemporary developments that have led to the situations they observe. I am trying to do the same.

As I wrote last week, the private security industry here in Brazil is obvious and ubiquitous. It is easy to see this simply as part of a trend towards privatisation, and the growth of personal, community and class-based responses to risk and fear that is pretty much the same, or is at least in evidence, all over the world. However, there are several factors here that point internally and backwards in time. The first was made clear to me reading James Holston´s superb 2008 book Insurgent Citizenship, which is both an excellent ethnographic study of contemporary conflicts over housing and land in Saõ Paulo and an illuminating historical account of the roots of such conflicts in the development of citizenship, property rights and order in Brazil from its foundation.

Brazilian National Guard troops in the C19th

Holston makes a comparison between the foundation of Brazil and the other, and in many ways superficially similar, federal state in the Americas, the USA. He argues that whilst the USA consolidated itself within a smaller territory before expanding west, Brazil arrived as a massive fully-formed state. In consequence, the USA developed a form of governance that expanded with the territory, and this included centrally-determined land surveying and an emphasis on small townships to control territory and organise development. Brazil on the other hand, being basically divided between highly administered colonial towns and practically no administration at all elsewhere, had ´an incapacity to consolidate itself´ (65). The state therefore depended on large landowners, and in particular after the creation of the National Guard (1831), which was delegated to these property owners, these landowners also acquired a military-police power. Effectively, this conflation of private interest and the law, or coronelismo, was built into the governing structure and culture of Brazil.

One of the thousands of private security firms...

It is a masterly analysis but Holston´s one slight error, I think, is to call this ´a nationwide privatisation of the public´ (66). It is hard to argue this when the public had never really yet existed in anything like the idealised sense in which it is used by political scientists – in other words the nature of the ´public´ in Brazil was always pre-defined by the private, and by the power of the private, rather than the other way around. In other words, what has happened since, off and on, has been a struggle by the more democratic and progressive interests in Brazil to bring the private into the public. You can see this right up to the present day with the struggles by the state to prohibit and eradicate the so-called Autodefesas Comunitárias, the authoritarian paramilitary groups that have emerged in Rio and other cities in recent years. The struggle is essentially one of creating the ´public´.

Member of the elite Brazilian National Public Security Force in training, 2007 (EPA/Antônio Lacerda) — Members of the elite Brazilian National Public Security Force in training, 2007 (EPA/Antônio Lacerda)

The ADC issue highlights another historical reason for the dependence on and trust in, private security in Brazil. The reason is simply that the law is not trusted. Judges and courts have long been perceived as essentially tools of privilege and the official police in their various forms are not trusted by many people of all social classes. The former, as with coronelismo, goes way back into the post-colonial period, but the latter is also a particular legacy of the dictatorships (which can also be seen as the ultimate private control of the public), the last of which only ended in 1985. This leaves Lula´s government, the first that can really claim to be at all progressive, with several major problems: making an untrusted police more trustworthy whilst at the same time increasing their effectiveness and equipment; regulating the thousands of private security firms and, if possible, reducing the dependence of property-owning Brazilians upon them; and finally, and most importantly, dealing with the massive underlying inequalities, that are also a product of what Holston calls the the inclusive but inegalitarian nature of Brazil´s constitution and subsequent socio-economic development. The latter subject is outside the scope of my project, but I will be continuing to delve into the differentiations and intersections between segurança pública and segurança privada whilst I am here.

Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin American symposium

US No-Fly List is a big fat waste of money

I can’t say I am remotely surprised, but in the journal, Homeland Security Affairs, Marcus Holmes has written a comprehensive demolition of the claim that the US federal government’s No-Fly List is an efficient security policy. He isn’t concerned with civil liberties – ACLU has done that elsewhere – nor with effectiveness – Bruce Schneier nailed that one a while back. He simply demonstrates, using elementary Cost-Benefit Analysis that the policy is a big fat waste of money. The article isn’t complicated to understand, so the best thing I can suggest is that you just go read it… (and thanks to Bruce Schneier and Boingboing.net for posting on this one).

Is Facebook going to sell your data or not?

the primary limitation to any social networking tool being used for purposes that users don´t like is that the users can just walk

There´s been some discussion recently over surveillance on Facebook and in particular, the question of whether Facebook is planning to make the vast amounts of data it has for more targeted and intrusive marketing. Britain´s Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, based on an interview with Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s global markets director (and not coincidentally, sister of founder Mark Zuckerberg), that it was going to do this. It based its conclusion on the fact that Facebook was demonstrating new instant polling tools at the Davos World Economic Forum, Facebook´s development of so-called User Engagement Advertising, and the fact that unnamed ´marketing experts´ say that Facebook could be ´worth millions´to advertisers.

But, it turns out this is putting 2+2 together to make 5. Techcrunch was one of many tech blogs that questioned the Daily Telgraph´s story. They asked Facebook what was going on and were told that the WEF polls were nothing to do with Engagement Ads (which have been on Facebook for a while already) and that ´Facebook has, for many years, allowed the targeting of advertising in a non-personally identifiable way, based on profile attributes. Nothing has changed in our approach, and Facebook is committed, as always, to connecting users in a trusted environment.´

Now I don´t trust The Daily Telegraph, which has been declining in quality over the last few years and cutting experienced journalists in favour of using agency stories rewritten by trainees. But equally I don´t trust Facebook (or for that matter, any company run by rich kids whose only experience of the world is college, but that´s another story…). It is easy to imagine that they encourage such stories to test the waters. If the reaction was less worried, they might indeed decide to reveal themselves as a massive marketing scam, but the primary limitation to any social networking tool being used for purposes that users don´t like is that the users can just walk. Facebook appeared from nowhere to become a global player within a few years and it could disappear just as quickly when the next big thing arrives. The rise and fall of net-based companies is only going to get faster.

(Thanks to Sami Coll and Jason Nolan for bringing this to my attention)