ubisurv

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…

Major new report on surveillance out next week

I hear on the grapevine that the British House of Lords’ Constitution Committee Report on Surveillance and Data Sharing will be out next Friday 6th February. The inquiry conducted by the committee has been one of the most thorough of any so far conducted, and certainly promises to be more considered than the rather rushed House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report, A Surveillance Society? from last year. Both reports were ordered largely in response to the Report on the Surveillance Society that Surveillance Studies Network wrote for the UK Information Commissioner in late 2006, and which is still getting coverage around the world (see CCTV in Canada for example). Check the Committee’s website for the report itself and, of course, back here for a review, on Friday.

Digital Britain to be just like Digital Brazil?

There has been a serious global push for several years now by corporate content creators to hobble the Internet, and turn it into something more like television.

Time to catch up on a story that I missed this week. Boingboing reported the release of the UK government’s consultation document on Digital Britain. I had a eerie feeling of deja vu because the proposals are just like parts of Senator Azeredo’s bill that is halfway through the legislative process here in Brazil. Effectively it regards the Internet as some kind of untamed zone which must be brought under state control through a Rights Agency and ISPs acting increasingly as surveillance agents over the activities of their users, in this case particularly with regard to file-sharing.

The similarity is not surprising. There has been a serious global push for several years now by corporate content creators to hobble the Internet, and turn it into something more like television. The fact that the Digital Britain plan is filed under ‘broadcasting’ on the government’s website says quite a lot about the lack of tech savvy of state regulators in this area. What governments, in listening only to the corporate argument, don’t appear to realise is that we are actually collectively and autonomously coming up with better ways of ‘regulation’ of content through initiatives like Creative Commons and so on.

As in Brazil, where a serious netizen counter-plan is now emerging, with parliamentary support, there needs to be some serious organisation in Britain to present the alternatives to destroying the Internet and all is messy, unruly creativity. The Open Rights Group are trying to do this – let’s get behind them and make this more than just a few tech-savvy usual suspects.

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…

Who killed Bambi?

Google Street View seems to be the surveillance system we currently love to hate, and now those horrible, nasty people only gone and have killed a baby deer. How can Google possibly top this? Perhaps only if Larry Page was captured on camera punching some cute fluffy kittens…

googlebambi — The Daily What preserves the evidence - they have now been removed from Street View

The ironic thing is that the incident was uncovered by viewing Google Street View. Don’t people have better things to do? The more you discover about participatory surveillance or synopticism, the more you realise that the answer is probably not… which is exactly the urge (or lack of it) that Google Street View taps into: the terminal ennui of spectacular consumer capitalism. Sometimes, it’s not Foucault or Kafka or Orwell we should be reading but J.G. Ballard…

Brazil as surveillance society? Privacy International´s view (1)

Every year, Privacy International publishes a kind of index of privacy. The methodology is qualitative and has a strong element of subjectivity based on PI´s campaigning objectives (for example my colleague, Minas Samatas, finds their assessment of Greece as the best country in Europe in this regard, ludicrous). There are also problems with the equivalence of the all the different categories, both in terms of whether all the surveillance identified is even ethically ´bad´ anyway, and in the adding up of categories to conclude that you can lump together the USA, UK, Russia and China. However, it remains a good focus for discussion and no-one else does anything similar.

Let´s see what they concluded about Brazil. Brazil ends up in the 3rd worst category overall, with a ´systematic failure to uphold safeguards´. In particular, PI condemned:

the role of the courts in weakening constitutional rights of data protection (something I will be coming back to next week);
the lack of a privacy law;
the lack of habeus data provisions;
the lack of a regulatory of personal data and privacy;
an overly simplistic test for the legailty of communications interception;
the new ID law;
recent Youtube censorship;
increasing workplace surveillance, which has only been partially addressed by the courts;
widepsread private interception of intenet and e-mail traffic;
that fact that ISPs are required to keep and hand over traffic data to police;
the extensive road transport surveillance using RFID.

However they also noted:

the protection of the right to privacy of children under a 1990 law; and
the fact that bank records are protected under the constitution, and warrants are required to seize them

I will be going through their country in report in more detail next week and using this as one of the bases for the questions I will ask NGO representatives and parliamentarians in the weeks after wards.

Come to Britain and we will fingerprint your kids…

Last week I mentioned the approval of the biometric passports scheme by the European Parliament, and that there were several countries that planned to fingerprint children under the age of 12 despite the legal, ethical and technical problems with this.

However, what I didn´t mention is that – surprise, surprise – Britain is one of the countries that does fingerprint kids, and indeed it has already been fingerprinting foreign children resident in Britain as young as 6. As Privacy International´s Gus Hossein argues on The Guardian´s Comment is Free website, the UK government claims that this is only bcause the EU has forced this upon them when in fact it was the UK government that forced the EU into adopting that position in the first place!

Now, as I mentioned, the European Parliament has pushed the age limit upwards, but will this make any difference to the UK Home Office? Given that the Home Office is still ´carefully considering´ its responce to the kicking it received from the European Court of Human Rights over the taking and retention of the DNA of 857,000 children, I wouldn´t bank on it.

New Issue of Surveillance & Society Out Now!

It’s taken a lot of time and effort but finally we have… a New Website, New Automated Submissions System, New Calls for Papers and a NEW ISSUE OUT NOW!

6.1 Relaunch Issue: Revisiting Video Surveillance

New papers from Chris Williams, William Webster, Francisco Klauser, Dietmar Kammerer and Jeremy Douglas, insightful comment from Mike Nellis, a police surveillance film from 1935, and loads of book reviews.

Still to come this year: 6.2 Surveillance and Medicine; 6.3 Gender, Sexuality and Surveillance; 6.4 Open Issue; 6.5 Surveillance and Resistance.

Calls for Papers:

Surveillance, Children and Childhood (ed. Val Steeves and Owain Jones) – deadline August 31st 2009;
Performance, New Media and Surveillance (ed. John McGrath and Bill Sweeney) – deadline March 30th 2009.

Check the Announcements section of the website for details. As always, we have an open call for submissions on anything related to surveillance. And if you’re a postgrad or an early career researcher, you can even qualify for our new prizes! We also have a new video stream to handle films and slideshows.

Got a great idea for an issue? Any other questions? Get in touch. Contact our Editorial Assistant: Emily Smith.

Do you have a book that would be of interest to S&S readers, or want to review for us? Contact our Book Review Editor: Kevin Haggerty.

…and we are still completely free of any charges for publication or access. Want to support us? Join the Surveillance Studies Network, which runs Surveillance & Society and supports the development of Surveillance Studies worldwide.

Behind the scenes at Surveillance & Society

I’ve been keeping quiet about this on the blog so far because it’s too close to me and probably of little interest to anyone who’s reading this, but what’s been occupying just about all my so-called spare time, and driving me crazy, for the last few months has been finally getting Surveillance & Society converted to a new website which runs on the really rather excellent Open Journal System, run by the Public Knowledge Project.

If it’s so excellent, why has it been driving me crazy? Well, being a piece of Open Source software, there’s a lot that is down to the user in terms of trouble-shooting and fixing unexpected problems. And unfortunately, despite being someone who often researches software, and computer systems, I am not massively geeky (ok, so my Geek Quotient is probably higher than some but that’s mostly down to teenage role-playing activities!). I originally taught myself HTML to design the original site, but using OJS has meant that I have had to develop a familiarity with CSS, XML and PHP. If I’d known how simple it was at the beginning it probably would have only taken me a few days, but I had periods of utter despair just looking at the site every so often over days and then weeks, and wondering why the <bleep> it wasn’t working… by the end I was just wondering how I could have been quite so stupid.

Well, there’s still lots to do but the site works. That makes me happy. And, more importantly it confirms both my and Surveillance & Society‘s commitment to open flows – Open Source, Open Access and the Creative Commons. The latest issue has even been produced entirely on a Linux-driven netbook from here in Brazil using Open Office (ok, maybe I am getting just a tiny bit geeky!). There is still a perception especially amongst those who buy into the corporate model of publishing that online journals are just pale imitations or easier to get published in, but Surveillance & Society is no weak online version of anything else, it is a proper academic journal with proper academic standards. Of course it is free to publish in and free to access. We aren’t going to go down the route of pay-to-view or pay-to-publish. Knowledge should be free. The downside is that our organisation has been literally amateurish and our ability to keep to deadlines has depended way too much upon my timetable and state of mind: the new issue was the result of another overnighter – I haven´t slept for 36 hours…

What has kept the journal just about going until this new website was developed has been time given mainly by me, but also by the other members of the Editorial Board and our Editorial Assistant, oh and also Nilz, and the techs from all-inkl.de and the OJS Support Forum who have really been very patient! It is sometimes like an extra full-time job for which I don’t get paid… hopefully now, with a site that is at least partly automated and to which many people can contribute, that will no longer be the case. Surveillance & Society will finally be able to stick to a timetable, and I will be a lot less stressed.

But to do this we need some income and the main way we get this is by membership and donations. If you are interested in surveillance studies and want to support us, you can join Surveillance Studies Network or give us whatever you want – we’re a registered charity that owns Surveillance & Society and works to develop Surveillance Studies worldwide. That, and the income from reprints of articles in books, is about the only income we have.

Top Ten Problems with UK Information Sharing Proposals

Chris Pounder of Amberhawk information consultants sends me his Top Ten Problems with the British government´s new information-sharing proposals that are to be found buried deep in the Coroners and Justice Bill, where perhaps they thought no-one would notice… these are part of much lengthier and more thorough analysis submitted to the Joint parliamentary Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), which explains why the proposals ignore or conflict with the recommendations of 2008´s Data Sharing Review conducted by Richard Thomas and Mark Walport for the Ministry of Justice itself. These are sumarised by me here, and any errors and omissions are therefore my own:

Lack of scrutiny. There is no provision for the JCHR to scrutinise this (or any other) wide-ranging statutory power which impacts on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), nor any attempt to explain how this provision is consistent with human rights legislation.
The extension of information sharing beyond personal data. The use of “any person” in the Bill means that it applies to information sharing by any public or private body or individual. “Information sharing” powers are not limited to personal data and the person who receives the shared information might be a foreign government or organisation. [for example the FBI´s proposed Server in the Sky]
The “exceptional” may become the routine The Data Sharing Review recommended that the sharing of personal data should be legitimised in exceptional circumstances. However, in the Bill there is instead a legitimation of general information sharing, whenever it falls within a “relevant policy objective” [which is basically anything a Minister decides].
The generality of an Information Sharing Order. There is no limit as to how “person”, “purpose” and “information class” are specified in an Order. There is no explicit requirement for the purpose of the information sharing to be one of those specified in Article 8(2) ECHR.
The prospect of unlimited data sharing from large Government databases. The Bill appears to facilitate data sharing from any Government database without Parliament being explicitly informed of this sharing when an Order is before Parliament. The prohibition in the clause only relates to Part 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). By implication, sharing from other national databases (e.g. the national identity register of the ID Cards Act) does not need to be explicitly mentioned in an Order. This means that unlimited data can be shared from these other national databases by means of a general order-making provision.
The exclusion of critical comment on the purpose of the processing. In the Bill, the Information Commissioner is not allowed to comment on whether “the sharing of information enabled by the order is necessary to secure a relevant policy objective”. The effect is to inhibit the Commissioner from commenting on the purpose of the processing, which is the main purpose of the Information Commissioner! Plus, because this applies to more than personal information, much of the proposed sharing is outside his remit.”
The range of the powers. The powers are widely drawn and their application is very broad. There is no explicit provision in the main sharing provisions which would facilitate data subject rights and freedoms (e.g. right to object ; need to obtain consent). Instead, these provisions can “modify” the application of any law (including the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act) which will weaken the protection afforded to data subjects.
The lack of transparency. There is no obligation to disclose to the Information Commissioner or Parliament any background document or legal advice about a proposed Information Sharing Order. There is no obligation to answer any formal request for information from the Commissioner. There is no obligation to engage the public on the subject of a draft Information Sharing Order.
The irrelevance of the proposed Code of Practice. There is nothing in these information sharing clauses which expressly states that the sharing of personal data has to be consistent with the proposed non-statutory Code of Practice. The Code is not subject to approval by Parliament; rather, it is subject to approval by the Secretary of State (SoS).There is no provision which sets out what happens if there is a disagreement between SoS and Information Commissioner about the content of a Code. There is no active role for Parliament in relation to the content of a Code.
Orders can be implemented to achieve purely administrative objectives. For example, suppose Ministers are told by civil servants that the problems associated with one of the Government’s big database projects would be resolved if they used criminal convictions from the Police National Computer. The Bill allows the Minister to argue that the sharing was necessary to secure a policy objective, it was proportionate as there was no other way of securing the policy objective (abandoning a large IT project is not an option), and it was in the public interest to secure the policy objective (given the amount of money committed to the project). This means that sharing which could be excessive and disproportionate in terms of Article 8 becomes necessary and proportionate in terms of realising a policy objective.

Previously, I commented that No2ID were overstating their case that this proposal was the greatest threat to information rights after the ID Register. After reading Chris´s analysis, I think they might be underestimating its importance. The creation of a generalised and weakly accountable ability for the state to share information of any kind with any one they wish, is a far greater threat than the creation of any single database, however extensive. I disagree with their views on the Data Sharing Review, but No2ID’s data sharing site still has the best summary of proposals and action people can take…