[Infowarrior] - Do Ubiquitous Networks Lead to Ubiquitous Surveillance?

[Richard Forno]

http://w2i.com/resource_center/the_w2i_report__weekly_newsletter/news/p/newsletterId_/id_216

06/05/2008

Do Ubiquitous Networks Lead to Ubiquitous Surveillance?


A few years ago, one of my sons went on a nature-study trip with his  
classmates. When he returned he asked us to guess the most amazing  
thing they had found in the Czech mountains. "No GSM signal! Can you  
believe it?" he marvelled. Apparently, this was the first time he had  
ever been beyond the reach of the wireless links that now tie us  
together. For him the norm is to have network access wherever he goes.

Japan's Nomura Research Institute claims to have formulated the  
concept of a "ubiquitous network society" in 2000. But actually this  
was foreseen when the Commerce Committee of the US House of  
Representatives evaluated Samuel Morse's telegraph in 1838. In  
ponderous phrases typical of the era, they wrote:

     "With the means of almost instantaneous communication of  
intelligence between the most distant points of the country, and  
simultaneously between any given number of intermediate points which  
this invention contemplates, space will be, to all practical purposes  
of information, completely annihilated... The citizen will be invested  
with, and reduce to daily and familiar use, an approach to the HIGH  
ATTRIBUTE OF UBIQUITY, in a degree that the human mind, until  
recently, has hardly dared to contemplate seriously as belonging to  
human agency, from an instinctive feeling of religious reverence and  
reserve on a power of such awful grandeur." [The CAPITALIZED phrase  
here was capitalized in the original report, too.]

That 19th century politicians marvelled at the notion of ubiquitous  
connectivity while my son marvelled at its absence shows a profound  
reorientation.

Still Nomura should be recognized for persuading the Japanese  
government to make creation of "a Ubiquitous Network Society that  
Spreads Throughout the World" the main aim of their national ICT  
strategy. To do that they had to come up with strong economic  
justifications and innumerable examples of services that the broad  
public would appreciate and corporations would willingly support.  
Their arguments proved influential outside Japan, too - e.g., the "U- 
Korea Strategy" adopted in 2005. The "U-society" seems like a  
juggernaut now. The big question is: can it be steered?

from http://www.art-for-a-change.com/News/eyes.htmRe-reading Nomura's  
early studies, it is clear that the ubiquitous services they described  
facilitate - even imply - ubiquitous surveillance. Yet Nomura glossed  
over the political risks and opportunities for abusing that power.  
Elsewhere, however, the relationship between ubiquitous networks and  
surveillance has been increasingly noted.

In 2002, The Guardian reported that the UK Ministry of Defence's  
Celldar project exploits ordinary GSM signals reflected by moving  
objects to "focus in on areas hundreds of miles away and bring up a  
display showing any moving vehicles and people... The radical new  
system, which has outraged civil liberties groups, uses mobile phone  
[emissions as a kind of radar] to allow security authorities to watch  
vehicles and individuals 'in real time' almost anywhere in Britain..."  
A more detailed report in Business Week added that since the technique  
is inexpensive, hobbyists could use it for their own purposes. Indeed,  
a session was devoted to it at the "What The Hack?" conference in 2005.

In The Transparent Society (1998), author David Brin postulated a  
"Moore's law" of video surveillance, with cameras "halving in size,  
and doubling in acuity and movement capability and sheer numbers,  
every year or two." In an earlier article for Wired magazine he wrote:

     "Today, in Britain, several dozen cities and towns have already  
followed the example first set by King's Lynn, near Norwich, where 60  
remote-controlled videocameras were installed to scan known 'trouble  
spots,' reporting directly to police headquarters. The resulting  
reduction in street crime exceeded all predictions, dropping to one- 
seventieth of the former amount in or near zones covered by  
surveillance. The savings in patrol costs alone paid for the equipment  
within a few months. Today, more than 250,000 cameras are in place  
throughout the United Kingdom, transmitting round-the-clock images to  
100 constabularies, all of them reporting decreases in public  
misconduct. Polls report that the cameras are extremely popular with  
citizens..."

That was 1996. By 2006 there were said to be 4.2 million surveillance  
cameras in the UK and a typical Londoner is seen by about 300 of them  
each day. ABI Research predicts that by 2013 the global market for  
video surveillance equipment will grow 340% - to $46 billion in annual  
sales.

Yet paradoxically, dramatic reductions in crime seem to fade as the  
cameras spread. Last month, Mick Neville, head of New Scotland Yard's  
Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office, told The  
Guardian that the UK's multi-billion-pound CCTV network has been "an  
utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There's no fear  
of CCTV..." and it has not had a significant impact on crime. A  
similar study of video surveillance in Berlin's subway - known  
appropriately as the U-Bahn - showed that there, too, the cameras "did  
not reduce the incidence of criminality, but in fact led to a small  
increase."

Meanwhile - perhaps due to the difficulty of mining video archives for  
useful information - the British security service MI5 is now seeking  
routine access to logs recording the movements of the 17 million  
people who use RFID "Oyster" cards in the UK's public transport system.

In a memorable speech at the Public Sector Forum last April, Spike  
editor Brendan O'Neill argued that

     "the real driving force behind the surveillance society is not a  
practical one at all; it is a political one. It is underpinned by an  
existential crisis, if you like, by a powerful and palpable sense  
amongst government officials that they are increasingly cut off and  
disconnected from the public. The surveillance and database society is  
an attempt by officialdom to reconfigure a relationship with the  
public, to engender a direct, functional relationship to replace the  
political, citizenship-based relationship that has eroded in recent  
years...

     "If you look at the rise of surveillance measures over the past  
10 to 15 years, you will see that it has occurred alongside falling  
voter turnout and heightened public disillusionment with officialdom.  
The more that government ministers and officials feel they do not know  
who we, the public, are - or what we believe and what we want - the  
more that they have moved towards watching, monitoring and recording  
our personal information...

     "The New Labour government’s surveillance society is not a dark,  
conspiratorial, Hitlerian attempt to police and punish wayward  
individuals - rather it is a quite desperate, instinctive effort to  
‘only connect’..."

Today's blog entry was inspired by an advertisement that sometimes  
appears in the right column of this web page: "Wireless-Enabled  
Digital Video Surveillance" - a Professional Development Seminar in  
Atlanta, 23 July 2008.

Much as I love radio and want to see it used more fully, if ubiquitous  
networks inevitably lead to ubiquitous surveillance, then promoting  
comprehensive wireless coverage may deserve a rethink.

Of course, if ubiquitous surveillance is actually less effective than  
more targetted deployments - and if it breeds less fear - the  
arguments get more complicated: it might not be such a bad thing after  
all.

Or the issue might be moot: Sun Microsystems' chairman Scott McNealy  
once coldly quipped, "You have zero privacy anyway... Get over it."