Tag: security

Ambient Government Revisited

A few years ago I was talking around the place about surveillance, security and “ambient government” (or “ambient governance”), but it turned out that so were plenty of other people and no one person really has a claim on this phrase or others like it. It was, somewhat appropriate, in the academic air at the time… and it still should be!

Looking back on it, I don’t think I’ve bettered how I discussed this back then, and I never fully published what I was talking about. So here is the vastly underwatched talk I gave in Victoria back in 2014. If you have 45 minutes to spare, I think it’s worth a watch. Plus, I look so young!

CSS/Lab launches soon…

Following the launch of my CRC, I am launching a new virtual research lab here at uOttawa. CSS/Lab is basically an envelop for my current projects (see Research). The here will be a website soon linked to CLTS here at uOttawa, but here is what will be on that site:

CSS/Lab 

research group on critical surveillance & security studies at uOttawa

About CSS/Lab

CSS/Lab (pronounced “slæb”) is built around the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance & Security Studies at the University of Ottawa. 

CSS/Lab exists to examine, question and critique the ubiquity of surveillance at all scales from body to planet (and beyond). It is a transdisciplinary research group that brings surveillance studies into conversation with many other disciplines and fields. It aims to push surveillance studies in new directions, both in building critical social theories of surveillance and security, and through active empirical work in multiple locations and contexts.  

CSS/Lab Research

CSS/Lab’s current active projects consider:

  1. “Platform Cities in an Age of Planetary Surveillance” 
    • Surveillance and the governance of (post-)smart cities
    • Enclaves, Zones and City-States
  2. Planetary security and surveillance
    • Surveillance and authoritarianism
    • Surveillance and the climate crisis
    • Security intelligence agencies and the climate crisis
  3. Artificial Intelligence (AI), data and dataveillance
    • Genealogies of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT)
  4. “AI East/West” – an ongoing effort to bring scholars from Japan and Canada together to rethink the ethics and politics of AI
  5. “Hired Hackers and Private Spies” – private surveillance companies and the political economy of the surveillance industry
  6. “Speculative Security” – thinking positive global futures beyond dystopian surveillance scenarios 

CSS/Lab Director

David Murakami Wood

Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance & Security Studies / Full Professor, Department of Criminology / Co-editor-in-Chief, Surveillance & Society / Board of Directors, Surveillance Studies Network.

CSS/Lab Members

Azadeh Akbari, CCS/Lab Visiting Scholar, 2024-7 / Assistant Professor, University of Twente NL / European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSC) Global Fellow, “Authoritarian smart cities”

Jennie Day, CSS/Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-5, “Hired hackers and private spies”

Ashley Poon, PhD researcher, Department of Criminology, “Public perceptions of authoritarian surveillance policies”

David Eliot, PhD researcher, Department of Criminology / Trudeau Foundation Fellow, “A Genealogy of Artificial Intelligence”

Zimo Meng, PhD researcher, Department of Criminology / CSS/Lab Research Assistant, “(Post-)smart cities in China and Singapore”

Claire Wang, PhD researcher, Department of Criminology, “Surveillance and the Internet of Things”

CSS/Lab Associates (*more tbc)

Vincent Mirza, Associate Professor, School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies / Director, Research Centre on the Future of Cities

Valerie Steeves, Full Professor, Department of Criminology / Co-leader, e-quality Project.

CSS/Lab Connections

CCS/Lab is connected to several research centres and organizations across the University of Ottawa: 

CCS/Lab works globally:

Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada

The New Transparency project is coming to an end, and we are launching our major final report, Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada / Vivre à nu: La surveillance au Canada, in Ottawa on Thursday 8th May (which is also my birthday!). The report is being published as a book by Athabasca University Press, so it is available in all formats including a free-t0-download PDF. We want as many people in Canada (and elsewhere) to read it as possible.

The launch will be covered by the Canadian press and was already blogged in the Ottawa Citizen a few days ago.

A website with resources and summaries will be here very soon, and there is also a promotional video / trailer here in Youtube.

 

Canada and Mali

I’m privileged to be supervising some great students at all levels, but Jeff Monaghan is something else*. Not surprisingly for someone who previously worked with the awesomely prolific and engaged, Kevin Walby (now over in Victoria – who may be the young researcher I most admire in surveillance studies), he mainly uses Access to Information and Privacy requests (ATIPs – under Canada’s freedom of information legislation) as a basic method, and as far as I can see he is constantly firing these things off and sorting through them for revealing nuggets. Right now, Jeff is working in the way in which Canadian development aid, like that of many wealthy nations, is becoming increasingly entwined with a security agenda, what he calls ‘security aid’. Anyway, he’s in the news today because one of his ATIPs has revealed that Canada was engaged in planning for military intervention in Mali, of some sort, over a year ago, belying their apparent public reluctance to get involved right now.

 

Billions wasted on airport ‘security’

A new report from the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) say that the industry is wasting billions on unnecessary and ineffective security procedures which are slowing down travel and damaging the whole sector’s economic prospects, according to The Guardian. This comes only days after the German government decided not to introduce body-scanners after trials showed them to be unreliable.

The argument is not particularly surprising, but there seem to be interesting aspects of the issue (apart from the basic human rights problems which we should never forget). The first is that clearly someone is benefitting economically, even if it is not the air transport sector, and that someone is the security industry – although as it happens, a whole range of people and companies have benefitted from the aftermath of 9/11. The Guardian article mentions that UK-based scanning company, Smiths, has tripled its profits this year to near $1Bn, despite the problems with scanners. However, it isn’t all bad. In European domestic and regional markets, airlines have lost out to railway travel, and this can only be a good thing in terms of environmental concerns.

The second aspect is that IATA is using this to push the revival of integrated ‘trusted traveller’ plans coming out of the USA. Many countries have bilateral schemes, but the idea is for travellers with ‘nothing to hide’ to submit personal information to a central body that would validate them without the need for time-consuming checks on the airport. So far, such schemes have been largely restricted to business-class passengers, raising the strong possibility of confusion between really improved security and simply buying more convenience. However, there is another problem from the point of view of security here too: one of the major concerns for security is so-called ‘clean skins’, terrorist who have never triggered any suspicion because they are either entirely new converts to the cause, or have been deep undercover for years cultivating an unblemished record.

In any case, it appears that the security companies are trying to get past the criticism by producing new seamless and less intrusive scanning technologies that would not require long waits and would be integrated into the architecture of airport corridors etc. Of course, the delays and inconvenience of obvious security and surveillance procedures have a purpose and are not just by-products. There is, theoretically at least, a consciousness-raising effect of what Bruce Schneier calls ‘security theater’. If these new gadgets work, and the German trial suggests that there is often more smoke than heat in claims about effectiveness, this effect would be diminished in favour of speed and convenience for an as yet unknown proportion of travellers and much greater inconvenience for the remainder. It’s an interesting conundrum for the authorities…

Norway, After the Event

I grew up in Norway until I was about 7, and so it’s hardly surprising that I’ve been thinking a lot about the country and its people following the recent attacks. I’ve spent some time over the last few days reading the manifesto of the self-confessed killer, but I’m not going to spend any time going over that farago of confused reactionary stupidity here.

What I am primarily interested in is how the country reacts, especially as we are now coming up to ten years after the 9/11 attacks -and the world is still living in the aftermath not only of the attacks themselves but of the reaction of the US and its subordinates. Surveillance Studies, along with many other research fields has documented and analyzed the turn to righter security and increased surveillance, and the corresponding weakening of longstanding individual liberties and collective rights.

But, if Norway’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, has anything to do with it, Norway will not be going down the same destructive, counter-productive and vengeful path. Even though he himself and many people he knew were the targets of the attack, he has been emphasizing since that Norway should not compromise its openness and democratic values, on the contrary they should strengthen their commitment to those ideals.The New York Times today quotes him as saying:

“It’s absolutely possible to have an open, democratic, inclusive society, and at the same time have security measures and not be naive. […] I think what we have seen is that there is going to be one Norway before and one Norway after July 22 […] But I hope and also believe that the Norway we will see after will be more open, a more tolerant society than what we had before.”

Let’s hope so. My thoughts remain with the families and friends of the victims, and all the people of Norway. I’ll write more about the wider European reaction tomorrow or over the weekend.

Security systems and trust

Sometimes, little local stories give us the best insight into what living in a surveillance society is really like. This one is from a school in Virginia, USA. According to the local newspaper (via BoingBoing) a middle school student was suspended from school for opening the main door for a women who they knew who was unable to press the entry button because they had their hands full. The reason given by the school auhtorities is that the school has a secure entry system, in which people are supposed to press the entry button, look into a camera, and request entry. The student was suspended on the grounds that they were all supposed to know the rules, and that these rules were potentially of vital importance.

However this security-bureaucratic reasoning misses the key point that the child knew the adult concerned. Whilst security and surveillance systems are at least in part designed to respond to a supposed decline in social trust and an inceased ‘threat’ (which is very poorly supported by evidence anyway), there is good reason to suppose that placing what were previously matters of social negotiation into the hands of such ‘systems’, ‘rules’ and ‘technology’ further damages social trust.

Many questions then arise: what is this school, through this action and these systems, teaching kids about society? That security comes above all else? That no-one can be trusted? And that individual decision-making or social interaction is better replaced by impersonal systems? Surely, if education is the basis of the future of society, then what should be taught are the opposite lessons. This kind of subordination to systems is a form of training, of disciplinary control, not learning and education.

 

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.

Japanese data losses expose surveillance of foreign residents

A scandal over leaked security documents has exposed the Japanese security service’s monitoring of foreigners, amongst other ‘anti-terrorist’ operations. The documents were posted on the web in November, and according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun last month, include “a list of foreigners being monitored by the division, and files related to secret police strategies – for example, guidelines for nurturing informants”.

Not only does this expose the concentration of the Japanese security services on foreigners, many included on the list simply by virtue of being ‘foreign’, rather than being any actually determined threat, but it is also a reminder that the Japanese laws on information sharing, leaking and so on, are archaic. As the newspaper says:

“At present, there is no law to punish those leaking confidential information. Even worse, stealing electronic data is not included in the list of offenses punishable under the Penal Code. In many cases, this makes it impossible for suspects to be held criminally responsible.”

I am not quite sure that the theft of electronic data is actually unpunishable, at least from conversations I have had with specialists in Japan, however I should add that there is, I am told, no law against selling stolen electronic data, which means that even if the theft could be punished, it would not reduce the economic incentives to steal data (which I have mentioned before is not uncommon).

Then of course there is the wider issue of whether it serves a higher purpose that this information is released anyway. No doubt it does embarrass the government, but there is not reason to think that this actively compromises real security in Japan as the NPA are quoted as claiming. If anything this does us a favour in reminding just how prejudiced much of the Japanese state’s relationship with its foreign residents, especially those who are non-white, is, and how much state surveillance is directed at them.

(thanks to Ikuko Inoue for sending me this story)

Olympic surveillance legacies

David Loukidelis, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, speaking today at The Surveillance Games workshop, has made it quite clear that his office does not want the Winter Games to leave a legacy of securitization in the city or indeed, fear (as the Assistant Federal Privacy Commissioner, Chantal Bernier, put it), in the consciousness of its residents. In particular he argued that the 600 (yes, 600) cameras that are being installed at the Olympic venues and beyond should not be allowed to remain after the games. I hope that his office is able to deliver on this view, but I doubt that it will. As Kevin Haggerty and Phil Boyle have noted, security architecture is now an actual deliverable of the Olympics, and as many other researchers have shown, such architecture, including in particular CCTV but also adjusted local or national laws on the thematic and spatial limits of protest and freedom of expression (which, as Michael Vonn of the BCCLA and Chris Shaw, a leading anti-games activist, are describing at this very moment in the conference, are themselves often illegal and unconstitutional) tends not only to persist but to act as a kind of Trojan Horse for an expanded surveillance. And as Vonn’s group has also shown – the city is building a permanent CCTV control centre as part of the security architecture for the Games, and you don’t do that for cameras that are going to be removed.