Tag: surveillance society

A Culture of Pornography and the Surveillance Society

The student newspaper here at Queen’s carried a disturbing story this week – a hidden camera disguised in a towel hook was found in a women’s washroom*. Apparently a search was carried out and nothing else was found. I would be very surprised if this was something unique and isolated. Voyeuristic footage is a staple of both private perversion and Internet pornography, and I suspect that this is much more common than we realise. I remember at my old university in the UK a private landlord being prosecuted for having virtually his whole house, which he rented out to female students, wired up like this. Cameras are now so small (and getting smaller), and readily available disguised from shops that deal in equipment (largely intended for industrial espionage and spying on nannies, spouses etc.) and can of course now be wirelessly connected, so could be almost anywhere and everywhere.

We’re also immersed in a culture of pornography: it is what spurred the immense growth of the Internet in the 90s (a subject that remains to be given a proper historical analysis), and it is changing the nature of sexuality, especially in teen boys, in ways we’re only just beginning to understand. I’d hesitate to make any sweeping generalizations, but it would seem that if one puts together the kind of normalization of pornographic understandings of bodies, desire and sex with the rape culture alleged to pertain at Queen’s (as the same paper detailed the week before) and a surveillance society, you end up with not the hopes of an empowering exhibitionism put forward by more utopian feminist thinkers on surveillance like Hille Koskela, but something infinitely more seedy and alienated.

Perhaps if Nineteen Eighty-Four was written today, then O’Brien’s answer to Winston Smith on what the future would look like would not be “a boot stamping on a human head, forever” but “a man masturbating over a mobile phone, forever”. I’m not sure which is worse…

*As a note, the newspaper described it as a ‘co-ed’ washroom, a term so archaic, it made me wonder how much of the culture that engenders such behaviour is down to the continued underlying patriarchal belief that women being in education on an equal footing with men is still unusual, provocative and somehow so exciting to men that they cannot control themselves. And of course ‘co-eds’ is exactly how online porn sites that publish this kind of voyeuristic footage would describe the unwitting participants.

(Thanks to Aliya Kassam for the story)

New Double Issue of Surveillance & Society

I’m very pleased to have got a new double issue of Surveillance & Society out. This one really benefitted from the great work of our new Editorial Assistant, Sarah Cheung, and our new Debates Editor, Laura Huey. It also marked the end of the tenure of Kevin Haggerty as our Book Review Editor, which is sad, but it will mean that we have two new Book Review Editors for the Americas and for Europe (+ the rest of the world): Ben Goold and Chiara Fonio.

Anyway, content…

Articles

Katherine Barnard-Wills & David Barnard-Wills – Invisible Surveillance in Visual Art

Tina Girishbhai Patel – Surveillance, Suspicion and Stigma: Brown Bodies in a Terror-Panic Climate

Joshua Reeves – If You See Something, Say Something: Lateral Surveillance and the Recession of Sovereignty

Doug Tewksbury – Crowdsourcing Homeland Security: The Texas Virtual BorderWatch and Participatory Citizenship

Catherine Luther and Ivanka Radovic – Perspectives on Privacy, Information Technology, and Company/Governmental Surveillance in Japan

Christel Backman – Mandatory Criminal Record Checks in Sweden: Scandals and Function Creep

Clemence Due, Kathleen Connellan and Damien W Riggs – Surveillance, Security and Violence in a Mental Health Ward: An Ethnographic Case-Study of a Purpose-Built Unit in Australia

Andrew Manley, Catherine Palmer and Martin Roderick – Disciplinary Power, the Oligopticon and Rhizomatic Surveillance in Elite Sports Academies

Michele (Michal) Rapoport – The Home Under Surveillance: A Tripartite Assemblage

Debate: Privacy Online

featuring Laura Huey, Micheal Vonn, Reg Whitaker, Paul Rosenzweig, danah boyd, Steve T. Margulis, and Gary T. Marx, and Judith Rauhofer

+ reviews of Ball, Haggerty and Lyon’s Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Bruno, Kanashiro and Firmino’s Vigilância e Visibilidade: Espaço, tecnología e identificação and Braverman’s Zooland: The Institution of Captivity

Check it Out!

Oxford taxi cabs will record your every word…

Just when you thought that having just about your every move recorded in the UK was bad enough, Oxford City Council, which runs the city I once called home, has decided that all taxi cabs in the city will record both sound and vision, and these records will be kept for up to 28 days, just in case.

People often ask me ‘where do you draw the line?’. Well, you absolutely draw the line at recording private conversations without a specific justification. Generalized audio surveillance is not just a step over the line, it leaps over the line, lands far beyond it and keeps running.

This is just wrong. No qualification.

It seems that despite having got rid of one government with authoritarian surveillance tendencies, the same impulses are alive and well in local government in Britain. Perhaps the councillors who voted for this would first like to have audio surveillance in their offices, cars and houses, you know: just in case…

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.

UK Control Orders to be replaced by Surveillance Orders

There has been a lot of speculation in the last couple of weeks about the fate of the ‘Control Orders’ that have been placed on various people (largely British Muslims) who are strongly suspected by the authorities of involvement with terrorism, but who have not committed any crime that would likely lead to a successful prosecution. These orders tend to amount to forms of curfewing or house arrest without trial, and banning them from using all forms of telecommunications, and needless to say, have been immensely controversial with civil liberties groups arguing that they subvert the rule of law, and that if there is evidence of terrorist activity people should be investigated and charged with such offenses. This has also been a test case for the willingness of the Conservative- LibDem coalition to take onboard key Liberal Democrat priorities and to go further in rolling back the creeping authoritarianism that characterised the final years of the New Labour regime.

So what will replace them? Speculation had centred around the replacement of the order with a system that allowed suspects to move around relatively freely but placed them under intensified ongoing surveillance. Now the BBC is claiming that it has details of what are likely to be called ‘Surveillance Orders’. These, they say, will give the security services the power to:

  • Ban suspects from travelling to locations such as open parks and thick walled buildings where surveillance is hard;
  • Allow suspects to use mobile phones and the internet but only if the numbers and details are given to the security services;
  • Ban suspects travelling abroad; and
  • Ban suspects meeting certain named individuals, but limited to people who are themselves under surveillance or suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Some of this is hardly new: those suspected of involvedment in football hooliganism in the UK have been subject to travel bans since the 1980s, and it seems to be from this that precendent is taken for at least this part of the new place. It is also almost funny that certain locales are seemingly specified as being difficult for surveillance – and I know this won’t be in the actual Bill – but, surely it is actually quite useful for real terrorists to know this? 😉

But this is all very interesting not least because it uses ‘surveillance’ as a supposed replacement for ‘control’, or as something synonymous with increased freedom. That may be so in physical terms, but the constant monitoring suggested under these new orders creates something very far from freedom. However in many ways it constitutes simply an intensified version of the kind of low-level constant monitoring or mass surveillance that is characteristic of contemporary surveillance societies. It is not so much that there are the ‘unwatched’ and the ‘watched’ rather there is a spectrum of surveillance between the lightly and heavily monitored. The new ‘Surveillance Orders’ would merely seem to push the dial for an individual into the category of heavy monitoring.

Campaigners uncover UK local government spending on CCTV

Using Freedom of Information requests, Big Brother Watch in the UK has managed to get hold of figures from many British local governments on how much they spend on CCTV surveillance systems.

According to the Press Association, the annual spend by 336 local councils on the installation and operation of CCTV cameras over a three year-period from 2007/08 and 2009/10 totalled £314,835,170.39 (around $400M US). That’s a large amount of money in an ‘age of austerity’… however it is still not complete as there are another 80 local governments who did not respond to the requests. Interestingly there were still some local governments, albeit only 15, who still did not operate public-area CCTV. That’s not to say that the local police forces in those areas did not, however. There are some cities in Britain, the exception rather than the rule, like Newcastle for instance, where police own and operate public CCTV cameras. I am not sure if these are the types of councils making the claims, and I will have to look at all the figures in greater detail.

The top ten spenders on CCTV over the three years were listed as:

  1. the city of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, and controversial for its special scheme targeted at ‘Muslim’ areas, but also with a massively regenerated and semi-privatised city-centre. £10,476,874.00
  2. Sandwell metropolitan borough, a large urban area to the north-west of Birmingham £5,355,744.00
  3. the city of Leeds, in Yorkshire, whose downtown district is the epitome of the characterless, over-regenerated urban centre. £3,839,675.00,
  4. the city of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, a wannabe global city, and former G8 meeting host, £3,600,560.00
  5. the borough of Hounslow, on the edge of urban and suburban west London, £3,573,186.45
  6. the borough of Lambeth, a diverse south London district, £3,431,301.00
  7. the city of Manchester, one of the cities we studied in our book on urban resilience, which put a huge amount in to CCTV in the downtown core the wake of a provisional IRA bombing, which has now also been gentrified out of recognition – it also has a signficant suburban gang problem, £3,347,310.00
  8. the borough of Enfield, a leafy north-east London suburb, £3,141,295.00
  9. the borough of Barnet, also in north London, £3,119,020.00
  10. the borough of Barking and Dagenham, in east London, on the borders with Essex, and another area of high racial tensions stoked by a strong local British National Party, £3,090,000.00.

Half of the top ten are London boroughs, outside of the centre of London, showing that CCTV is still diffusing outwards from the heavily surveilled core around the financial centre of the City of London and the government district of Westminster. Not surprisingly, the diffusion is also continuing primarily to the major urban centres beyond London, and the case of Sandwell perhaps shows that the greater Birmingham area is going through a similar process seen in London. In any case, public area video surveillance is not going away in the UK any time soon, and the new government will have to, at some time, demonstrate what it actually meant by introducing greater regulation of CCTV.

UK Media on the New ICO Surveillance Report

There has been some good coverage (and some less good) coverage of the new ICO surveillance update report, to which we (founder-members of the Surveillance Studies Network) contributed the background research.

There are national press stories in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in regional papers like The Yorkshire Post, and in trade publications like Computer Weekly, The Register, and Public Service.

Although some of the reports get things wrong, and The Daily Mail’s in particular is a masterpiece of selective quotation and context-removal, the response has generally got the main points that we intended to get across. These include the points that the change of government in Britain with its rhetoric of rolling back surveillance doesn’t necessarily affect a great deal of what the state does beyond those headline measures like scrapping ID cards and the National Identity Register; and, even more importantly, both transnational data sharing between states and surveillance by the private sector are intensifying and spreading regardless. We do highlight some particular surveillance technologies and practices but these are largely emblematic in this report – it was not a large survey like the 2006 orignal – so although we talk about drone cameras, Google Latitude and Facebook Places, ubiquitous computing, e-borders and new workplace monitoring practices, we are not trying to say that these are the only games in town.

New ICO Surveillance Report

The UK Information Commissioner is reporting to Parliament on the state of surveillance, based on an update report on developments since 2006 authored by Surveillance Studies Network members (including me).

On Thursday 11th November, Christopher Graham, the UK Information Commissioner, sent his report on the state of surveillance and recommendations for action to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. His report includes the SSN-authored ‘An Update to a Report on the Surveillance Society’, on which it is based.

The update report, co-authored by Charles Raab, Kirstie Ball, Stephen Graham, David Lyon, David Murakami Wood and Clive Norris, was written in the first half of 2010. It features a review of UK surveillance since they wrote the 2006 ‘Report on the Surveillance Society’ for the Information Commissioner’s Office. The new report focuses on developments in information collection, processing and dissemination, and on the regulatory challenges posed by these surveillance developments.

The Commissioner’s overview and recommendations, and the SSN update report, can be viewed here. I’ll put something up about what I think about his recommendations later after I have had a chance to read them…

Article 12: Waking Up in a Surveillance Society

I’m in a film! Article 12: Waking Up in a Surveillance Society is a really essential new documentary made by Junco Films, now doing the rounds of international film festivals. According to the Leeds Film Festival, where it will be shown next

“Article 12 presents an urgent and incisive deconstruction of the current state of privacy, the rights and desires of individuals and governments, and the increasing use of surveillance. The film adopts the twelfth article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to chart privacy issues worldwide, arguing that without this right no other human right can truly be exercised. It assembles leading academics and cultural analysts including Noam Chomsky, AC Grayling and Amy Goodman to highlight the devastating potency of surveillance, the dangers of complicity, and the growing movement fighting for this crucial right.”
Showings will be on Fri 12th Nov, 2010 at 20:15 in the Howard Assembly Room and on Tue 16th Nov, 2010 at 17:00 in Leeds Town Hall 2. The Tuesday showing will feature a discussion involving some of the contributors including AC Grayling (not me, although I was asked – it’s a bit too far to go!).
Future showings will include the Geneva International Human Rights Film Festival in March 2011 and hopefully Hotdocs in Toronto. If anyone else is interested in showing this film as part of an event, I’d be happy to contact the makers…