surveillance – Page 9

India invests in surveillance drones

According to The Times of India, the Indian military is investing massively in boom military industry of the moment – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones).

The initial order is apparently for coastal protection and involves the purchase of Heron UAVs from Israel Aerospace Industries, a specialist in such technologies which produces everything from large payload drones to tiny micro-UAVs like the Mosquito, which can be launched by hand and is designed for “providing real-time imagery data in restricted urban areas.” The Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE) have also been developing their own drones in conjunction with IAI, the latest being the Rustom MALE.

A Predator UAV equiped with Hellfire missile (USAF)

Herons are supposedly unarmed but armed versions were used in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon by Israeli armed forces. The ToI article also makes it clear that Indian forces will be buying more overtly aggressive drones such as the US Predator systems that have been used to such devastating effect against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier regions. Far from easing up on the use of these remote-control killing machines, Obama’s administration has accelerated their use. They put fewer US troops in the firing line, and can attack remote areas, from where it is also very difficult to get an accurate independent view on their activities. However they are alleged to have been massively inaccurate, with the Pakistan government claiming that only 10 out of 60 missions between January 2006 and April 2009 had hit their targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders and 687 civilians, an appalling ratio.

With the advent of strategic bombing and then the ICBM, the Twentieth Century saw a massive increase of the role of remote surveillance in warfare, which was intimately linked to the growth in destructive power and the ability to not to understand the consequences in any direct or emotional way. Even with the tank and artillery ground warfare was not so remote, but now in the Twenty-first Century we are seeing surveillance-based, remote-control warfare becoming increasingly normalised. It is not surprising to see both hypocritical states like the USA and Israel intimately involved in the promotion of this form of conflict which looks cleaner and more ‘moral’ from the point of view of the user, but which in fact simply further isolates them from the consequences of their action. Real time surveillance turns everyday life in to a simulation, and drone-based warfare makes war into something like a game. And it’s a deadly and amoral game that increasing numbers of states, like India, are now playing.

US cameras to see the whole of the moon…

There’s been a story developing for a while now on the US-Canadian border. This used to be one of the most casual and friendly of borders, indeed there are families stretched across both sides and in many places the border meant only slight differences in the price of some goods…

But no more. There might be a new president, but Obama seems to be allowing the Bush-era plans for strengthening the border with Canada to continue. There are now CCTV towers being erected, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) patrolling, and new much stricter passport regulations and customs and immigration checks. As usual this seems to be being done with a kind of macho indifference to the opinions of the Canadians that is making the US actions doubly unpopular.

If this seems like some kind of sci-fi nightmare then then most crazy, Philip K. Dick-style element is to be found on the Michigan-Ontario border at Port Huron, where the Sierra Nevada Corporation, a US military aerospace company, has launched a tethered balloon camera (the company calls it an MAA (medium altitude airship) pointed at the town of Sarnia across the border. This isn’t even an official scheme, it’s a private company trying to sell this insanity to the Department of Homeland Security, and naturally the Mayor and citizens of Sarnia are angry about this international violation of their privacy, and many of both sides of this border think that this intensified security as an attack on the trust that exists between Americans and Canadians.

So what are Sarnians doing? They are giving the cameras something to look at, that’s what. More specifically they are planning to drop their pants for a mass ‘moon the balloon’, which in these days of ever more insane surveillance schemes seems just about the only possible response.

At the Tokyo Metropolitan Police HQ

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police HQ in Chiyoda-ku

We had an enlightening interview, which will give me much to analyse later, with three senior officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu (literally, ‘Everyday Life Safety Division’) of the Keisicho (Tokyo Metropolitan Police). Interestingly, this division that was created as a result of the Seikatsu Anzen Jourei (Governor Ishihara’s 2003 Tokyo Metropolitan Government ordinance) and which deals with all the community security and safety initiatives, including CCTV, is separate from the Chiki Bu (the community division) that is responsible for the koban neighbourhood police box system.

Like almost everyone in authority we have met here, the police were convinced that they were not doing surveillance in using the cameras. They also confirmed that almost all of the CCTV systems operated by shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ associations) are not monitored and are simply recorded. They also stressed their deep concern for privacy and the rights of citizens and said that data from the police-operated cameras – of which there are around 150 in Shinjuku (the largest system with 50 cameras in the Kabukicho entertainment district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Roppongi and Ueno – was only kept for 7 days unless there was a specific reason to retain it. This is a legal requirement not just a police guideline. The police cameras are monitored both in local stations and in a central control room, but we were told that it was strictly forbidden for us to visit (unlike every other city in which I have done research) as everyone who enters has to be pre-enrolled in the police iris-scan security database.

We talked a lot about the history of the development of CCTV and of community safety initiatives in Tokyo, and Governor Ishihara’s absolutely central role in backing video surveillance became very clear (it’s a shame he has so far refused an interview with us!). What was also particularly interesting was that the police themselves did not think that apparently obvious ‘trigger events’ were as important as it might seem. For example, they claim that the police only really began considering the use of CCTV cameras not after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground but because of the influence of G8 summit security. One officer specifically mentioned the Gleneagles summit (which was just starting when terrorists attacked the London transport system), but this was in 2005, well after the TMG had already introduced CCTV, and after which the Tokyo police have not introduced a lot more cameras. So I don’t quite understand their point. It may become clearer once I have the complete transcripts… They also claimed that it was the Tokyo police rather than Japan Railways themselves or the Tokyo Metro authority who insisted on installing CCTV in the Tokyo transport network after the Aum attacks.

The officers talked a lot about community involvement. They dismissed the objections to their public space CCTV systems for several reasons, not least as I have already mentioned that they were not doing ‘surveillance’, but more importantly because they claimed to have done extensive consultation with local community groups, businesses etc. The claimed that they could not do anything without this support. This may have been true for Kabukicho, which was undoubtedly afflicted by an influx of Chinese gangs in the 1990s, but we heard from the local government of another ward that is being lined up for one of the new volunteer-based child safety camera systems being introduced from 2010 that they were given no choice by the police, and that local people were not happy about it. The problem is that this local authority don’t want to be interviewed further about this as they are in a rather delicate position over this new system.

(Thank-you very much to the officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu for giving us their time)

Big Mothers not Big Brother? Women changing Rio

The Guardian today has an interesting report on how women are getting to more senior positions in the police in Rio de Janeiro and changing the way policing is done as a result. I reported on my own observation of this back in April, an whilst there are many bright young female officers who want to do things differently, the top echelons of Brazilian policing are still a long way from being feminized and these young guns may not ever get much higher up to where policy is made. There’s also suspicions that such officers are being used largely for their PR value and to defend the police against being just another macho gang.

Of course, there’s more going on than just in the police. A whole generation of men lost to the drugs war has left women in more influential positions within community organisations in the favelas of Rio – we met several during our research. Considering the lack of effective state surveillance and the relative increase in power and local knowledge of these women both in community associations and the police in Brazil, I jokingly referred to them as ‘not so much Big Brother as Big Mothers’…

The paranoid bubble of Offender Locator

TechCrunch reports that one of the Top 10 current iPhone apps in the USA is something called ‘Offender Locator’. This is a little mash-up that overlays the location of those on registries of sex offenders onto google maps, so you can check where sex offenders live whilst you are on the move.

This is such a world of wrongness, its hard to know where to start.

Let’s begin with the categorisation. The category of ‘sex offender’ varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. This app is clearly targeted at parents worried about paedophiles, yet depending on the state, offender registers can include people convicted of innocuous things like public nudity, public urination and simple underage sex (and please don’t try to tell me that a 17-year old kid who has consensual sex with a 15 year-old kid is a technically a paedophile, that’s just normal, whatever the laws of some backwards states may say).

The second thing is that even the US Department of Justice says that such registers cannot be guaranteed to be accurate. So now these non-guaranteed lists are available to you mapped out on your iPhone. Does that somehow make them more accurate? No, but all those red arrows on a map do look much very ‘real’ and scary though, don’t they?

Which brings me to the third point. What are you supposed to do with this ‘information’? It’s hardly empowering, in fact it creates a false view of the world based on fear. Will you not let your kids out within several miles of any red marker on the map, will you take a detour to avoid neighbourhoods with high concentrations of offenders when you are driving, or of course, in contrast, will you deliberately go to such places with a baseball bat to show those sex offenders who’s boss?

Finally, of course, this information isn’t ‘live’. It shows you where sex offenders live, but they aren’t chipped yet, so not where they actually are at any one moment in time. It provides at once a false sense of reassurance and the nagging feeling of doubt that they could really be right behind that tree over there, or in the shadows. And what do ‘they’ look like? That man over there with the 5 o’clock shadow at 11 in the morning sure looks like a sex offender… and there’s definitely some in this neighbourhood, your iPhone says so!

Apps like this, policies like this, also increase the pressure for more ‘comprehensive’ solutions – especially this app. Because it isn’t ‘live’, they’ll be people asking ‘why not?’ Why not tag these people for the rest of their lives with GPS cuffs, or implant them with RFID chips?

Finally, the thinking behind this app is just wrong in terms of what we know about sex offenses. Most real sexual violence and sexual abuse of children takes place within the home and within ‘normal’ family relationships (and ‘normal’ schools and nurseries too). That’s what Mr or Mrs iPhone doesn’t want to hear. ‘It couldn’t be my husband, okay he gets angry with the kids sometimes, but he’s under a lot of pressure at work and I know he loves us…’ Far easier to externalize the ‘threat’, to cast it ‘out there’ amongst the red arrow markers on the streets of some other neighbourhood…

Surveillance isn’t necessarily the same thing as paranoia but when surveillance becomes pathological, paranoia is the result. Some paranoia is about surveillance, some is expressed in surveillance. This kind of apparently democratic, freedom of information app, demonstrates the worst and most pathological places that a society of ubiquitous surveillance can start to go. It creates defensive bubbles of individualized, desocialized paranoia, of protecting ‘the kiddies’ against the threats from the ‘Other’, outside. Perhaps you should just stay inside and buy everything from amazon.com and make your kids live in some virtual world where only those nice marketers can prey on them…

(thanks to Aaron Martin for pointing this snippet of news out to me)

Mega-events, Security and Surveillance

The connection between what are often called ‘mega-events’ (international summits, major sporting competitions etc.), securitization, and he intensification of surveillance is becoming a very interesting area and one which we wrote about in our recent book on urban resilience. I am writing some further stuff on this with Kiyoshi Abe on how mega-events have been managed in Japan.

It seems that in general, such events are either used as ‘test-beds’ for new technologies and procedures which are then either continued afterwards (as with The Olympic Games and CCTV in Greece in 2004 and The FIFA World Cup and video surveillance in Japan/Korea in 2002), or become ‘islands’ of temporary exemption where normal legal human rights protections are reduced or removed and whole areas of public space are often literally, fenced off (as in Rio de Janeiro for the Pan-American Games of 2007, whose model will apparently be extended to include walling off the poor favelas in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup). There’s going to be a very interesting conference on The Surveillance Games later this year to tie in with the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Now The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the London Olympics 2012 may make use of a proposal originally designed to stop the proliferation of unofficial commercial advertising near games venues in order to prevent protest. The legislation even allows police to enter private houses to seize material.

Of course the government say that they have no plans to use it in this way, but it’s interesting to see the way in which the ‘standards’ being imposed by such travelling cicuses of globalization tend to end up looking more like the authoritarian regime in Beijing (host of the highly securitized 2008 Olympics) than the supposedly liberal west, whilst at the same time promoting a very controlled but highly commercialized environment. Even the original purposes of the 2006 law (necessary for London to host the Games) are an interesting reflection of the massive corporate interests involved in the Olympics, for which they apparently need a captive and docile audience.

In the USA, Big Brother is listening…

Well, according to the Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Transit Authority will be listening if it implements a proposal for recording all conversations between passengers and employees on its buses. This is not the first attempt to introduce audio surveillance of the public. In 2006, in the Netherlands, a microphone system attached to existing CCTV cameras was introduced to supposedly prevent fights by detecting distinctive vocal sounds.

Now, there may well be problems with aggressive or abusive passengers in Maryland (although I’ve also encountered enough abusive drivers in my time!) but that does not mean that any kind of action is justified in the name of preventing or discouraging this. This, as in the Netherlands situation, is a problem of incivility (or ‘respect’ to use Tony Blair’s favourite policy word) but civility develops between people and cannot be imposed by authority or surveillance. What you get by going down this road, if indeed the strategy ‘works’ at all is simply a society of resentful, distrustful, quietude where civility is simply a set of superficial Pavlovian responses not genuinely felt values that people work to create and would want to defend. Problems of incivility are hardly going to he solved by trying to create an even more managed, automated and, fundamentally, desocialised and uncivil society. As the UK’s leading CCTV researcher, Clive Norris, remarked about the UK’s ‘shouting cameras’, introduced as part of the Blair’s ‘Respect Zones’, it is hard to imagine anything much more disrespectful of the public.

What’s particularly interesting in this story too is the way in which one form of surveillance can be used to justify another, producing an internal and self-replicating logic. The thinking is that as buses already have video cameras, then this is just the same thing, right? Stick a notice up saying you’re being recorded and all legal bases are covered. Well, no, I don’t think so. Let’s explore this further. I frequently record conversations that I have. Shocked? Actually, it’s part of my job as a researcher. I interview people and I record the interviews, but I do so with the full consent of the person being interviewed and if they do not want to be recorded, I don’t record them. However, there appears to be no room for consent around mass surveillance at all. It’s becoming clear that the (lack of) regulation of CCTV has set a dangerous precedent here, with consent being regarded as ‘impractical.’ It is really not enough in any accountable system of democracy to assume that the state can assume consent for surveillance measure on the grounds that to seek specific consent would be too hard. And in any case, the ‘acceptance’ of CCTV – even if one believes that the public does indeed ‘accept’ it rather than simply feel a sense of profound disempowerment with regard to video surveillance – does not mean that ‘anything goes’ as far as surveillance is concerned. An already dubious implied consent to one form of monitoring is not the same as consent to all monitoring. And of course, even if you did have some collective majoritarian consent, what does that imply for those in the minority? We already know that surveillance is targeted against minorities, so how can even a standard democratic procedure protect people here? Of course, this is what constitutional protections are for, and in particular in this case, the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution but the MTA appears to think that the precedent of CCTV means that this does not apply. Round and round we go.

This, in the end, is all about organisational risk management and simply treats the public as sources of risk and as potential offenders, not people with rights, and indeed people who either are generally or, given the respect and space they deserve, would be, good. But risk-thinking seems to override even those things we are used to seeing as foundational of our societies.

‘X-ray vision’ may not be so far away…

Fascinating and disturbing news from the MIT Technology Review blog that a team of researchers appears to have cracked the problem of how to produce cheap, effective Terahertz Wave (TW) cameras and receivers. TW are found between infrared and microwave radiation, and produce what we called in A Report on the Surveillance Society, a ‘virtual strip search’, as they penetrate under layers of clothing but not much further, and can thus produce images of the body ‘stripped’ of clothing. Thus far, they’ve been used on an experimental basis in some airports and not really any further afield.

This is largely because of the way that TW waves have been detected up until now has basically been a bit of a kludge, a side-effect of another process. This has meant that TW equipment has been generally quite large and non-portable (amongst other things).

However one Michel Dyakonov of the University of Montpellier II in France has followed up theoretical work he did in the 1990s, with a new larger team, to show that tiny (nanoscale) ‘field effect transistors’ can – and they are still not quite sure how exactly – both produce and detect TW. The details are in Technology Review, but the crucial thing for those interested in surveillance is that:

the output is ‘good enough for video’; and
‘they can be built into arrays using standard silicon CMOS technology’ which means small, cheap (and highly portable) equipment. This could be an add-on to standard video cameras.

I’m getting a genie-out-of-bottles feeling with this, but is it really as damaging to personal privacy as it feels? Does this really ‘reveal’ anything truly important? Or will it become something to which we rapidly become accustomed, and indeed with with which we quickly get bored? In some cultures, specially those that regard covering the body and modesty as being god-given, this is clearly going to present massive challenges to social and moral norms. It seems to me that there is also an immediate conflict with current constitutional and legal rights in several jurisdictions, not least the US Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to warrantless searches and the European Convention Article Eight on the right to privacy.

But it seems that unless such a technology is banned, or at least particular commercial implementations, we’re about to cross another Rubicon almost before we’ve noticed it has happened. Ironically bans on technology can only really be effective in states where intensive surveillance and state control of behaviour is practiced. In other places, I am not sure banning can be effective even if it were desirable, as in reality, a ban simply means reserving the use of the technology to criminals, large corporations which can afford to flout laws, and the state.

UK newspaper phone-tapping scandal

Back in the UK, the Sunday newspaper, The News of the World, known largely for its obsession with minor celebrity scandal has been itself the subject of rather more serious investigations, following revelations that it has paid out over £1 Million (around $1.4 M US) to people whose phones it secretly tapped in its search for dirt. Proprietor, Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, is known to satirical magazine, Private Eye, as the ‘Dirty Digger’, and given this showing, he seems to be earning his nickname.

The Guardian editorial highlights this as another threat to privacy, but there’s much more here. Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in the world and his company, News International, covers far more than just Britain – they recently bought the Wall Street Journal, for example. His more ‘serious’ newspaper, The Times of London (for whom, I should declare, I have written a piece once) was very vocal in the past in attacking the recently-retired Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, first over his comments on ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’ and then later on his attempts to bring newspapers under the same regulatory regime over privacy as other organisations.

At the time, it was hard to know what the agenda was; but clearly it was more than the supposedly ‘honourable’ position of acting to protect journalistic independence and the rights of their sources. Now, I think, we can start to understand a little more about the view The Times advocated – perhaps it was simply trying to deflect public investigation into the illegal, underhand and privacy-invasive surveillance practices of other parts of the News International empire.

We should indeed be worried by this, not just because of the activities themselves, but because of the attempts to manipulate public policy and undermine the authority of one of the few people who was interested in, and capable of, attacking abuses of surveillance by the media by an increasingly powerful global private company.

So, does News International own newspapers in your country? Do you know what they get up to? Someone needs to dig the dirt…

Court rules against police precautionary surveillance

In another chapter in the current struggle over the means of visual representation, the UK Court of Appeal has made an important ruling that could affect the future of police surveillance tactics. In a case brought by anti-arms trade protestor, Andrew Wood (no relation!), the judges ruled that the Metropolitan Police should destroy photographs taken of Mr Wood at the AGM of giant dataveillance conglomerate, Reed Elsevier ( the BBC calls them a ‘publisher’ but that’s a rather archaic and inaccurate term for what Reed Elsevier does, which is to collect, analyse, organise and trade in personal and business data of all kinds). Reed Elsevier had been involved with running arms trade exhibitions through a subsidiary at the time.

The ruling argued that the police should not take and retain pictures of people who were not suspected of any current wrongdoing, but whom the police considered might do so in the future. According to the BBC, the Met had argued that its actions “were reasonable in helping officers to detect crimes that may have occurred in the past or may do so in the future.” But that is exactly the kind of blanket risk-management-based way of thinking that allows almost any preemptive or precautionary mass surveillance to be justified, and it is quite right that the Court should have ruled that it should be controlled. It is about time that a ruling like this was made.

The one cautionary note here is that the Met will be appealing this to the House of Lords, and no doubt beyond if that fails, so watch this space…