surveillance – Page 10

Secure Cities

Following in the footsteps of leading urbanists like Mike Davis and Michael Sorkin, is a project led by Dr Jeremy Nemeth, an assistant professor at University of Colorado. which traces the degradation, securitization and privatization of what we used to optimistically refer to as ‘public space’. This project aims to map and quantify the space in three contemporary cities (New York, Los Angeles and San Fransisco) now restricted in the name of security. The website is online now, and their findings are summarized on the front page:

“Even before [the 9/11] terror attacks, owners and managers of high-profile public and private buildings had begun to militarize space by outfitting surrounding streets and sidewalks with rotating surveillance cameras, metal fences and concrete bollards. In emergency situations, such features may be reasonable impositions, but as threat levels fall these larger security zones fail to incorporate a diversity of uses and users.

Utilizing an innovative method developed by our interdisciplinary team, we find that over 17% of total space within our three study sites is closed entirely or severely limits public access. The ubiquity of these security zones encourages us to consider them a new land use type.”

(thanks to Dr Nemeth for the corrections to my original misattribution of his excellent project)

Contact Point goes live

The controversial new central database of all children in the UK has gone live today for the North-west of England, and will gradually be rolled out across the UK. The £224M ‘Contact Point’, one of the main planks of the ‘Every Child Matters’ initiative, will be accessible to around 390, 000 police, social workers and other relevant professionals. It is mainly being promoted as a time-saving initiative, allowing quicker and more informed intervention in the case of vulnerable children, which we all hope it does, although this of course depends on the correct information being on the database in the first place. In addition, as the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust review, Database State, rated the system as ‘red’ for danger in terms of privacy:

“because of the privacy concerns and the legal issues with maintaining sensitive data with no effective opt-out, and because the security is inadequate (having been designed as an afterthought), and because it provides a mechanism for registering all children that complements the National Identity Register.”

CCTV: expensive and limited says Home Office study

Back in 2002, David Farrington and Brandon Welsh published a study for the UK Home Office which showed that CCTV had only small effects on crime, except in car parks. Now they are back with a study that confirms all that, plus which shows that despite the evidence, more money is spent on CCTV in Britain than on any other single form of crime prevention. So much we knew, but what is a slightly unexpected finding is that CCTV apparently works better in Britain than in other countries. This is not a plus for the UK, rather it shows that in other nations it is even worse value-for-money – and it is clearly not an efficient use of public funds here as currently used. Instead the authors recommend that CCTV should be more narrowly focussed – in other words, we don’t need mass surveillance, we need targeted surveillance At the same time however, more and more money is going into CCTV in the USA in particular, where all the same ‘silver bullet’ arguments are being made as were made in the UK in the 1990s, and have now been shown to be largely unwarranted. The government has now fallen back on populism to justify the continued expansion of CCTV: ‘people want it.’ Well, on that basis, they would bring back public flogging and hanging… it would make rather more sense if they listened to the evidence from the reports they themselves are commissioning.

The full report is available from The Campbell Collaboration library, but there’s a summary in The Guardian today.

UK Ministry of Justice sounding old, tired and defeated

I was at a meeting organised by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) today (Wednesday) in London where both Jack Straw and Michael Wills from the Ministry of Justice spoke. In the wake of the expenses revelations it was not surprising that both sounded somewhat conciliatory, but the degree of both overt and tacit admission of mistakes and changes needed was quite surprising. I had a bit of a set-to with Michael Wills on the apparent lack of knowledge amongst government ministers of the results of their own research on the (in)effectiveness of CCTV, to which he responded with the Melanie Phillips defence – i.e.: come and talk to ordinary people and they will tell you they want CCTV. This is a diversion for many reasons, not least of which is that unlike both the Daily Mail’s moral minority and the minister, I actually live in places where they only visit on official business and I also understand that what people mean when they demand CCTV is not the technology itself but a solution to the real and perceived problems of crime and anti-social behaviour that they face. They only demand CCTV because they see the programs on TV and are convinced that CCTV ‘works’ – however if you talk to senior police officers or anyone who has done research on this, they will tell you, yes, targeted mobile CCTV surveillance to deal with specific problems can be very effective (in terms of both cost and results) but mass camera surveillance is not the same thing. It is rather disappointing that a Justice Minister did not appear to understand the difference.

Jack Staw gave a weird speech. It was both full of matey bonhomie and characterised by stuttering hesitancy and vagueness. He made a number of historical errors, for example in claiming that the culture of secrecy was a product of the Cold War, when the first Official Secrets Act was a product of WW1. He also claimed that CCTV was all about ‘low-level disorder’ and ‘reassurance’, which will be news to all those (like his ministerial colleague) who still think it prevents crime. But he did rightly take some credit for Freedom of Information, including allowing parliamentary expenses to be included, even as it turned out, to his latter-day embarrassment.

Where it got very interesting was in his comments on the government’s consultation on the future of the DNA database following the damning verdict of the European Court. Contrary to Jacqui Smith, Straw indicated that he would be quite happy with the proposed 12 year retention period being reduced to 9 or even 6 years. He also claimed that there was a behind-the-scenes review of The Terrorism Act and other post-9/11 measures going on, which I don’t think many people in the room even appreciated. He admitted that the Labour government got many things wrong after 9/11 and that the environment had now also changed.

It was all very interesting, but you really got the feeling that this was a government on the way out anyway. The Tories will no doubt scrap the ID cards and register, but listening to the Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, I got the impression that they don’t have much to offer apart from caution. That might be welcome for a while, but as a speaker from Google remarked, the debate is so far behind the reality of technological change that none of this will really matter very much unless there is a real culture shift. The ICO under the massively influential Richard Thomas, for whom this was very much a valedictory event before he steps down, has made great strides in this direction, but the government and opposition parties are still a long way away from understanding the need to establish a new basis for informational relationships between people, state and private companies that we desperately need.

US court rules GPS tracking is the same as the naked eye

CNET’s ‘Technically Incorrect’ blog leads me to a rather disturbing story in the Chicago Tribune last week about a ruling from a court in Wisconsin, USA. The judges in the appeal court decided that police use of covert GPS tracking devices is equivalent to the naked eye and therefore is not covered by US constitutional prohibitions (in the 4th amendment) on search and seizure. Whilst the local representative claimed that “GPS tracking is an effective means of protecting public safety”, ACLU argued that in fact this is an unwarranted extension of surveillance powers: “the idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else’s property without any court supervision, that’s wrong.”

Now the case itself involved a man suspected of stalking, itself a form of surveillance and not something anyone would want to encourage or defend, however, once again, ends do not justify the means, particularly when the implications of the use of such means are so profound. The ruling illustrates the widespread inability of judges (and lawmakers more broadly) to deal effectively the way in which new technologies change the game or perhaps the inability of constitutional protections to protect effectively in an age of vastly improved technologies of visibility.

In fact the judges in this case themselves expressed some disquiet about their ruling. I can sympathise with them – it is far from obvious how to interpret new surveillance technologies with the constition and laws available. One would think, after the wiretapping cases of the 60s and 70s in the USA, that this lesson might have been learned, but it seems courts will continue to take terms like ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ literally – as perhaps they must. But surely if a device is attached to the ‘outside’ of a car or a house, or indeed is not attached at all and is remote, it does not automatically follow that the information that the device collects is not intimate and personal, and indeed not the same as what could only have been obtained in previous decades by direct human intrusion? For example, a device that can effectively ‘see through walls’ is not the same as the naked eye – it is the equivalent of a police officer being inside the house. Whether this applies to a GPS tracker on a car (whether it is really any more or less than an officer sitting outside the house, or following the vehicle) is a moot point – there will be more and more of these cases, as police test the technological limits of the law, and it seems that most countries, not just the USA, still lack the professional (as opposed to the academic) legal thinking to deal with them.

Tracking disease spread on the Internet

Internet disease tracking using interactive maps or mash-ups seems to be be one of the more constructive uses of the surveillance potential that comes with the combination of easy-to-use digital mapping and online communications. Both Computer World and The Guardian tech blog reported a few days back how Google, following on from its use to track previous flu epidemics, is experimenting with tracking swine flue cases in Mexico.

Google flu trends for Mexico — Google Flu Trends mapping system

However other web-crawler-based systems also exist for tracking the spread of disease (or indeed potentially almost anything) as The Guardian reported on Wednesday. Leading the way is HealthMap, which comes complete with Twitter feeds and suchlike.

HealthMap — Swine Flu mapping from Healthmap.com

As the latter report makes it clear however, this is not all just good news; there are many problems with the use of web-crawlers in providing ‘reliable’ data not least because the signal to noise ratio on the Internet is so high. The other problem is that although the might appear current or even ‘predictive’ by virtue of their speed and interactivity, they are of course actually always already in the past, as they are compilations of reports many of which may already be dated before they are uploaded to the ‘net. Better real-time reporting from individuals may be possible with mobile reports, but these could lack the filter of expert medical knowledge and may lead to the further degredation in the reliability of the data. Can you have both more reliability and speed / predictability with systems like this? That’s the big question…

(Thanks to Seda Gurses for pointing out the CW article to me!)

High Court rules innocent man’s DNA must be removed from database

As if the govenrment wasn’t in enough of a bind over the police National DNA databases, in a landmark ruling yesterday, the High Court of England and Wales has decided that the DNA of the innocent should not be on the database in the current legal circumstances. The man from County Durham was maliciously accused of assaulting a pupil at the school at which he was a teacher, and despite volunteering for questioning was arrested, fingerprinted and swabbed. These records were of course kept despite his innocence.

This story reminds us that being on the NDNAD is not an isolated thing, but part of a complex network of records that do imply suspicion (like it or not) – even Sir Alec Jeffreys, who pioneered DNA fingerprinting, thinks so… in the case of this teacher, he would have been wrongly suspected every time he applied for jobs working with children.

This is another indication that the government’s policy on the DNA database and police tactics to populate it, have been not just morally questionable but illegal, and confirms that the response issued this week was inadequate and devious. It will be interesting to see how they might now immediately have to modify their plans to conform to this new ruling (which, being a British court, they can hardly blame on ‘un-British’ European law)…

UK National DNA Database – what will change?

The government’s official response to the damning ruling by the European Court over the retention of DNA and fingerprint samples and data is a farce, which seems utterly contemptuous of the ruling and reasoning of the court, shows no sign of understanding the significance of Article 8 or the British common law principle of innocent until proven guilty.

One thing that has struck me recently in the UK has been the sudden increase in the level of defensiveness by New Labour over the surveillance apparatus it has constructed over the last 12 years. Report after report has damned their slapdash attitude to human rights and civil liberties – we expect the government’s official response to the Lords Constitution Committee report next week – and there have been attacks from various political ‘big beasts’ including David Blunkett, former MI5 Chief Stella Rimington, and most recently Stephen Byers and even current cabinet ministers reportedly asked for the ID card scheme to be scrapped.

As a result, there has been a splurge of sudden backtracks, retreats and promises of change and consultation on future plans but there have also been rather devious attempts to avoid taking real action to remedy already existing wrongs. In the first category, we have seen the abandonment of Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, where a an blanket permission for government data-sharing had been hidden, and there have been suggestions that the proposed new super-database of communications traffic data might not be constructed after all – though largely, it seems, on grounds of cost not principle.

However, in the second category, today we got the government’s official responseto the damning ruling by the European Court over the retention of DNA and fingerprint samples and data by the UK police. It is, to put it mildly, a farce, which seems utterly contemptuous of the ruling and reasoning of the court, and shows no sign of understanding the significance of Article 8 for individual liberty. Mind you, it also shows little sign of comprehending the British common law principle of innocent until proven guilty.

The government proposals are to retain the DNA samples and profiles, and fingerprints (these are just as important and not so often mentioned in the news reports) of all those convicted of a crime. Of the innocent, the National DNA Database (NDNAD) has around 350,000+ people who are certainly in such a position, however the police apparently need two years to go through the Police National Computer to check the other 500,000+ DNA profiles of those not convicted of any crime, as they can’t be sure whether existing profiles match to those who have committed offences (so much for joined-up government…). Then those people, who are, let’s not forget, entirely innocent in law will be sorted into two categories – those arrested but not convicted for serious and violent offences, and those arrested and not convicted of minor offences.

Will the latter have their profiles immediately removed, as we might reasonably expect?

Err, no.

In fact, these innocent people will have their DNA profiles and fingerprints retained for 6 years – more than the number of years (5) that Scotland retains the DNA of those suspected of serious and violent offences. Those in the latter category will have their DNA profiles and fingerprints retained for 12 years. In addition the profiles of children will be retained until they are 18, and then removed only if they have been arrested (again, not convicted) for one minor offence.

Is this an acceptable response? Quite clearly not. It is against the spirit of the ruling by the European Court, even if it might be interpreted as complying with the exact wording issued. More to the point, it is an attempt to get around the difficult issues, not deal with them. It is devious, based on the pre-emptive logic of risk-surveillance principles, and goes against the long-standing principles of British Common Law as well as more recent developments in Human Rights law, and is not the response of a government that has any trust in the people who elected them. It allows the police to continue to populate the NDNAD by stealth. And they certainly are using whatever methods they can to do so – for example, one key indicator is the rise in the number of stop and searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which in London, it was also reported today, rose from 72,000 in 2007 to 170,000 in 2008, a rise of 236%, however it rose by 325% amongst the black population. There seems to be no mention of the role that discriminatory stop and search policing plays in populating the NDNAD in recent government statements, however it is quite clear that stop and search policing is discriminatory, and we know too that young black men are disproportionately represented in the NDNAD.

In this climate, with a government obsessed by pre-emptive security to compensate for its growing loss of power and trust, and a police service that appears, after the G20, increasingly out-of-control, what is the chance of developing a fair, accountable, just and transparent system of personal data retention in law enforcement in the UK? At the moment, it could appear, the answer is ‘very small’.

Surveillance and Resistance

A great new issue of Surveillance & Society is out now on surveillance and resistance, guest edited by Laura Huey and Luis A. Fernandez.

Featuring great new articles…

David Bell – Surveillance is Sexy
Aaron K. Martin, Rosamunde E. van Brakel and Daniel J. Bernhard – Understanding resistance to digital surveillance: Towards a multi-disciplinary, multi-actor framework
Lucas D. Introna and Amy Gibbons Networks and Resistance: Investigating online advocacy networks as a modality for resisting state surveillance
Helen Wells and David Wills Individualism and Identity Resistance to Speed Cameras in the UK
Andrés Sanchez – Facebook Feeding Frenzy: Resistance-through-Distance and Resistance-through-Persistence in the Societied Network

With a special Review section on the UK House of Lords Constitution Committee Report, Surveillance, Citizens and the State, with responses by Oscar H. Gandy Jr. , N. Katherine Hayles, Katja Franko Aas and Mark Andrejevic

Opinion from Gary T Marx , and a poem from Rez Noir

…and lots of book reviews!

Behind the cameras

While the vast majority of those monitoring CCTV screens are probably decent people who stick within the legal and ethical guidelines (such as they are), it is worth remembering that pervasive surveillance offers unprecedented opportunities to perverts, stalkers and sex offenders. This is not just secret cameras set up by weirdo voyeurs, it is the people who work with CCTV. This was noted by Clive Norris and collaborators back in the 1990s in Britain in their work on control rooms when they reported on operators making private tapes of women they saw in the street. Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph reported on a case in the US, where two FBI agents spied on girls changing for a charity fashion show for the underprivileged. They have been charged with criminal violation of privacy, which I am glad to see is a crime in the US. But, don’t forget that behind the cameras, if there is anyone these days, is a human being and that human being has as many flaws and secret desires as anyone else.