surveillance and identity

Robot Readable World

2012-02-07T15:18:00.002Z

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

Apparently this is an 'experiment in found machine vision footage' by Timo Arnall Go look at the original page on vimeo to see all the sources.

Quick and dirty reaction? What you can see here are visualisations systems of meaning. How a particular form of meaning (what is important, what should be tracked, what can be disregarded, what is never-seen-in-the-first-place) is built up from computer processes. No system of meaning can encompass every detail of the world, so they have to be selective. Our systems of meaning limit what we can see. There's no perception with some cognition.

I don't know how similar this is to human vision, obviously we don't have glowing boxes around human faces (at least I don't). But we do have some similar biological/cognitive tricks, such as lateral inhibition. I also don't know if these visual traces are the result of programmed or evolutionary algorithms.

It might be my imagination, but there's something like a child's drawing to some of these images. You know how a child draws 'a house' as a red box with a blue roof, with smoke coming from the chimney, even when they live in a flat with central heating? The red box moving down the street? That's a 'car'.

Finally, I do wonder how many of these technologies use this sort of aesthetic visualisation because this is how surveillance systems have been depicted on film and tv for years now. Compare the above, with Mark Coleran's showreel (which I love).

Coleran Reel 2008.06 HD from Mark Coleran on Vimeo.

Adventures in Privacy

2012-02-02T11:25:00.001Z

Adventures in Privacy from StrangeStorm Films on Vimeo.

Book Release and Competition

2012-01-24T11:02:00.000Z

The Author copies of my newly published book Surveillance and Identity: Discourse, Subjectivity and the State arrived at the house yesterday to much celebration. There's a copy sitting on my desk now, and I'm rather pleased with how it looks. You can read the introduction here.

So, not being sure what to do with six identical copies of the book, I've decided to give one of these copies away to a blog reader or twitter follower. So if you want a chance for a free copy you'll need to do the following:

Send me a message telling me why you're interested in the book. This is a test to make sure that you're not a robot, and give me subtle ideas about what to write the next one on. You can do this on twitter (@dbarnardwills) or in the comments of this post.
Some time in February, I'll put all the entries in a hat, and draw one at random. I'll contact the winner and arrange to send them the book. If I can't get in touch with them, then I'll pick another winner, and so on, until somebody takes the book off my hands.*
I'll announce the winner on this blog and twitter.
If you win, and you'd like it, I can write something in the inside cover. Or if you're an undergraduate student, I can underline all the significant passages in highligher pen.**

You can also buy a copy of the book through the usual major places: Amazon, Book Depository or direct from the publisher Ashgate.

* If you're going to then put it on ebay, at least give it a read first.
** I will never do this

Smart Meters

2012-01-18T16:43:00.002Z

The UK Parliament yesterday published the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts report on Preperations for the roll-out of smart meters. (pdf)

The report suggests that many of the benefits of the installation of smart meters will acrue to the energy suppliers, and that it needs to be carefully managed to ensure that customers gain benefits. There are a few mentions of privacy, but more about cybersecurity. Privacy is a concern for consumers (represented by Consumer Focus' expert witness - with the concern than there are 'a huge number of unknowns in terms of how consumers are going to respond'. The energy companies themselves are wary of being see to have abused consumers' privacy. There are several references to the experience of the Netherlands, where, according to the report, privacy was not taken seriously enough and this resulted in a consumer backlash.

Responsible Innovation in ICT

2011-12-13T15:26:00.001Z

Last week I attended an afternoon event at the Oxford e-Research centre - the first wider network meeting for the Framework for Responsible REsearch and Innocation in ICt (FRRIICT). This is an EPSRC funded research project into how the ICT research community views and enacts responsibility. Part of the project will to be fund a series of case studies into responsible ICT innovation and store these case studies within an 'observatory' making them available to others and starting a growing resource on responsible innovation. The process was driven by the EPSRC's percieved need for greater research ethics guidelines (akin to those of the other funding councils) given that funded engineering and physical science projects are increasingly interdisciplinary and involve doing research with people and communities. The FRIICCT project will therefore feed directly into future research ethics guidelines.

Bernd Stahl from the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montford University gave an introduction to responsible innovation. The core of this was, for Stahl, communication with stakeholders (scientists, funders, policy makers, civil society) and the consequences of innovation. This issue was important now because of the uncertainty of the future, the severity and importance of outcomes, globalisation, and the fragmentation of authority. Important principles were those of ethics, human rights and democracy. Responsible innovation had two mechanisms, or points of contact: Product and Process. There was also discussion about whether responsibility was for or in ICT. Science was seen as 'systematically irresponsible', with a need to broaden the converation, encourage reflexive thinking in design, education and training of computer scientists including, for example, value sensitive design and building reflexive space into research proposals. Also important were the choices to be made in the application of technology (too often rolling from the military world to the consumer world).

Derek McAuley from the Horizon lab at the University of Nottingham gave a talk on Personal Information Repositories, an attempt to create a way for people to control their own data and make informed decisions about the ways and under what contexts they would disclose that information to companies or other requestors. He alluded to an important distinction between information we 'give' and information we 'give off', but also spoke about the use that granualar data about their lives could be of use to individuals, but could also be very sensitive. I didn't know this previously, but I also learnt that you can now get Mosaic geo-democraphic software on the iphone. The model presented involve the individual holding data themselves, and companies asking if they could run a supplied algorithm on it and return the result (if they wanted to). McAuley stated that informed consent has failed on the internet, and probably everywhere, and because of that other models (such as consumer protection) were needed.

In one of the group discussion sessions (which were generally informative and stimulating for me), one of the groups came up with a very interesting set of questions, initially applied to the Personal Information Respositories, but applicable elsewhere.

What things are being assumed about a technology in design?

about predictability and control
about users (who? how? diversity or discrimination?)
about usability (is the user bombarded with requests or information overload?)
about trustworthiness
about ownership (of algorithims, of the system)
about what the system is (a computer system or socio-technical system).
about the desired future (what futures are supported or closed down?)
about purposes and benefits
about flexibility (can we change the system if it plays out in a way we don't like?)
about responsibility (litigation, personal, co-responsibility)
about the problem?

I found this list really powerful, especially the idea of imagined futures.

Marina Jirotka from the e-Research Centre at Oxford spoke about Informed Consent. The main model game from biomedical research as the main mechanism for protecting individuals from the power of medical researchers, becoming codified as part of the Nuremburg process after the second world war. The applicability of this biomedical model to other areas of research has been critiqued -especially in the social sciences, which may have a different research tradition, but also a different (although not non-existant) set of power dynamics between researchers and participants. Social science might feature a lower order of risks, different processes where it is not possible or indeed feasible to predict all risks, and be more open ended and uncertain. Biomedical research is often one way and paternalistic, where the social sciences can involve ongoing and negotiated consent to participation. Social science also privileges the engagement with and movement towards dilemmas, rather than trying to anticipate and remove them all in advance. It has also been criticised as problematic in relation to massive data sets where getting individual consent from all individuals featured in the data set would be impossible. The purpose of valid consent and ethics review boards are to be mechanisms of protection, to fulfil the imperative to do no harm - however even the exact meaning of the latter can be uncertain. Jirotka felt it was important to avoid encouraging a tick-box approach to informed consent.

I our following group discussion about this, we played around with a set of alternatives (or supplements) to the role of informed consent as the central pillar of research ethics. These included some form of co-design (in earlier problem-identifying stages, allowing for failure of a research project, and the status of partner not participant, even if this meant partners carrying responsibility for ethical behaviour too), cultural norms and expectations which would be visible and accessible to non professionals, and mechanisms for challenging research projects on ethical grounds (both internally and externally).

This is not a Cyber War

2011-12-09T11:34:00.001Z

I've a new article out in the first issue of the new journal The International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism. The article is called 'This is not a Cyber War, it's a...?: WikiLeaks, Anonymous and the Politics of Hegemony' and is available here.

What I wanted to do with this article was apply Securitization theory from International Relations, Gramsci's theory of Hegemony, and Laclau's concept of Democratic demands to the back and forth hacktivism and contestation between WikiLeaks, Anonymous and various banks, financial services and governments in the wake of the diplomatic cable releases. The paper actually follows on theoretically from the forthcoming Securing Virtual Space article which will be coming out in Space and Culture in the new year. It should hopefully stand on its own though. It's in response to some of the more alarmist accounts of online conflict.

Envisioning Surveillance, Identity and Privacy

2011-11-22T11:48:00.001Z

Last Thursday the Cranfield part of the VOME project (www.vome.org.uk) recruited some friends to spend an afternoon with design artist David Benque thinking about the interactions between technology and humans from a narrative perspective. The idea behind this was to give David our perspectives on the stories we might tell about technology, particularly technologies of privacy, online identity and personal information. David took us through a series of exercises designed to pull these ideas out of us a way quite different to the traditional academic format.

Our warm-up exercise involved using Scott McCloud’s Story machine to develop a narrative from a series of random moves across a grid of relatively abstract pictures. It was pretty fun, collaborative storytelling, although like a lot of things it is really strongly driven by group dynamics or the first person to spout an idea. Hence one story turned out to be a Cornish-set retelling of At The Mountains of Madness by H.P Lovecraft, and a couple more about Von-Daniken inspired alien corn mazes. From the other side of the room came a delightfully taut social-drama piece about the interruption of a park BBQ by the daughter of a newspaper magnate.

Now in a narrative mood, the next exercise was to imagine how stories are told about privacy and identity in tabloid newspapers. Having done a bit of this for the representation of surveillance in UK newspapers paper I felt quite at home with this and the rhythm of the stories. We pulled images out of context from actual tabloids and wrote new headlines for them.

One article told of a minor celebrity who had signed up for a facial recognition access to nearly all areas of his life (including accessing his computer, bank account and picking his children up from school). The picture we used was actually from a hair-transplant surgery ad in the back of the paper. Our story was that the designers of the facial recognition technology had planned for men losing their hair (that fitting within their world-view of things-that-happen) but hadn’t accounted for people suddenly going from baldness to a full head of hair, thus cutting the character off from access to large areas of his life. This article was, in full tabloid style, full of hair-cutting puns.

Another story drew upon tabloid Europhobia to tell a story of the unexpected implications of an imaginary EU ruling that gave online identities protection and legal separation from their ‘hosts’. In an attempt to counter the effects of identity theft, data corruption, surveillance etc, we imagined a law that separated the person from their online data double – in effect a ‘limited liability’ for decisions others make on the basis of your ‘identity’. However, our spin for this article was the mistaken assumption that this might result in online avatars being granted personhood, with the spectre of both Osama bin Laden and Princess Dianna living on online. Part of the purpose with these stories was to step away from the technologically and legally accurate and thing about the confused and complex stories that emerge about these things.

The next exercise was to pick a information technology policy issue and do some forecasting at 5, 10 and 50 year intervals. Alongside Brian Collins and Kieron O’Hara we tackled the issue of tax in an information society, with complex portfolio working, extended lifespans, complicated pensions and the capacity for ‘real-time’ taxation on the back of debit/credit cards and online banking. Apparently, accountants are on their way out, to be replaced by expert systems, remaining only as a symbol of conspicuous consumption for the ultra-rich. On the other side, a real-time variable and enforceable tax regime could be a nightmare for planning anything, and a powerful tool of disciplinary government. The other group looked at identification, which culminated in a kind of ‘butlerian jihad’ moment in 50 years time, where non-persons were excluded from transactions of any sort in the wake of a digital financial actors going nuts. There were predictions of chipping for always accessible ID. Some of this was obviously futurism and sci-fi, but the purpose was not to predict the technology (there wasn’t anything obviously reality-breaking or game changing, and we stopped short of the technological singularity) but rather to think through some of the social implications of existing technologies given wide reign.

An interesting afternoon, and it’ll be interesting to see what David and his collaborators come up with in the end. I was reminded of some of the smarter indie games such as Shock: Social Science Fiction that also engage with this sort of activity. There are also some useful classroom activities that can be pulled out of this.

Unlawful Access video

2011-10-10T08:41:00.001+01:00

Some of Canada's leading experts on privacy and surveillance provide their perspective on upcoming cyber-surveillance legislation.

(un)LAWFUL ACCESS from The New Transparency on Vimeo.

UK News Media Discourses of Surveillance

2011-10-06T12:48:00.004+01:00

I have a new article out.

It's titled 'UK News Media discourses of Surveillance', and is published in volume 52, issue 4 of Sociological Quarterly. Link here - if the journal paywall is insurmountable, then contact me and we'll see what we can do.

This article examines the findings of a discursive analysis of UK newspapers to determine how practices of surveillance are represented. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, the article argues for the importance of examining the linguistic and enunciative components of surveillant assemblages. The article shows how representations of surveillance practices in the UK media are split between two evaluative schemas. One is a discourse of appropriate surveillance, which draws upon discourses of crime prevention, counterterrorism, and national security. The second is a discourse of inappropriate surveillance that draws upon discourses of privacy, Big Brother, and personal liberty.

It's part of a special section of the journal on Surveillance as Cultural Practice. Very happy to be a part of that.

Cultures of Surveillance

2011-10-06T12:36:00.000+01:00

In a moment of serendipity I find myself sitting down to write a report about a conference I recently attended at UCL, whilst also reading an editorial published yesterday, both of which address congruent topics - surveillance and culture

The conference was the 'Cultures of Surveillance' hosted by the Autopsies Group at UCL. It ran from the evening of Thursday 29th through to the evening of Saturday 1st. (website here). There were keynotes from Tom Gunning (which I sadly missed) and from Simon Cole. Cole engaged with the mythology of the 'CSI' effect, finding little actual evidence for the supposed threat to the US juridical system by the television viewing habits of its population, but rather a large institutional perception of a problem and a number of responses. What was fascinating was the way that the media appeared to be adopting the critical stance of public understanding of science scholars.

The conference was diverse, although with a leaning towards the humanities. You can see this diversity from the programme. There were presentations on photojournalism, visibility in court houses (both architecturally and increasingly through mobile phone cameras), the media presentation of judges, performance in espionage, surveillance and art, public images of Guantanamo Bay, the Ring of Steel in London, house numbering, German census boycotts, the sociological 'mass observation project' and several other topics. There was even a delivered-over-video presentation from David Lyon on 'surveillance cultures' (which you can see here). My own contribution was an attempt to look at the way that surveillance studies has drawn upon visual cultural approaches (art theory, photojournalism, art practice) and the ways that it can get stuck within a visual trap.

One of the questions repeatedly asked at various points during the conference was 'is this surveillance?' or 'how can we tell if this is surveillance or not?' Part of this may well be the sort of inclusion/exclusion activity that can mark interdisciplinary fields ("I'm fairly sure I'm working on surveillance, I'm not entirely sure that you are"). There certainly is a place for conceptual clarity on the way that surveillance is used, but I think there's been plenty of this within surveillance studies, which would be useful. I'm cautious about essentialist definitions, but rather see 'surveillance' as a conceptual concept that we can apply to practices in the world (or to elements of cultural products) as an analytical lens. That said, I've got a soft spot for surveillance as 'political epistemology'.

The editorial for a special section of Sociological Quarterly, by Torin Monahan is 'Surveillance as Cultural Practice'. I contributed a paper to this section, which looks at the ways surveillance is represented and discussed in the UK print news media, as well as making an argument about the importance of language in understanding surveillance (available behind a journal paywall here). I'd like to raise the editorial in the context of the UCL conference, because it speaks to several of things things I thought about during the event. Torin suggests that cultural studies of surveillance might be better placed to embrace reflexivity, and to be part of a useful expansion of the field beyond what he sees as its origins within sociological approaches and a focus upon institutional power dynamics. The article traces one version of the trajectory of surveillance studies, and it is a version which might well be useful to conference participants. The list of references would also be of particular use.

The conference also left me thinking about research methods across disciplines, and in particular how this might affect a 'transdisciplinary enterprise' as Monahan calls surveillance studies. I'm convinced that cultural depictions and representations of surveillance practices are meaningful and important. But I think I need to think more about the methodological ways to integrate that. I think I know how to do political discourse analysis, and feel comfortable looking at the way groups talk or write about a practice such as surveillance. I don't quite yet know how to integrate the analysis of a film in terms of surveillance. To what extent does this privilege the perspective of a particular director, and if it does, why are we privileging that over somebody who does not have the cultural and financial resources to produce art? I suspect there might be resources within film studies to help me answer that. It's the sort of debate a discipline has with itself, but that might not be the sort of thing an 'outsider' looking to that discipline for inspiration would encouter.

I'm encouraged by the spread of the concept of surveillance throughout a range of academic networks. Over the last couple of years I've been to conferences on surveillance where I didn't know most of the academics there, and its been exciting. I think it speaks to the purchase the concept has been getting in public life over recent years. Surveillance is a concern, but also potentially a paradigm. The other side of this diversity is that for many papers at such events, the particular work presented is often the author's first (and sometimes sadly last) engagement with surveillance. Without wanting to play at disciplinary gate-keeper (and not actually being able to) the danger is that such contributions tap up against the edges of the body of surveillance studies literature, appropriate the panopticon, or perhaps the synopticon, quote David Lyon, and then return to their own disciplinary home. Surveillance studies carries quite a few concepts and ideas that would be helpful - for example the discussions over the meaning of surveillance. My response would never be to exclude or disregard these contributions, because they've not read all the papers I've read. I think the role that those of us for whom surveillance is a core interests can play is to point such contributions towards those particular ideas and concepts that would help them the most. That requires engagement and participation. My suspiscion is that this works in both directions.

So my thanks to the conference organisers, for some movement in that direction - (and also for the lunches, the lunches were pretty good).

The Expanding Surveillance Net: Ten Years after 9/11 (Keynote and Panel One)

2011-09-13T17:00:00.002+01:00

The Expanding Surveillance Net: Ten Years after 9/11

Workshop

Queens University, Kingston Toronto

8^th-10^th September 2011

I was attending a workshop over in Canada lastweek. As it’s a workshop, full papers are not generally available (there’s area couple of pdf papers available on the conference website, but they’reprotected by a password). I’ll write a few notes here for those not able toattend. The keynote address and the first panel 'Government Control over Information Flows' in this post, and other panels to follow.

David Lyon (Queens University)opened the workshop with a keynote address, raising a number of issues aboutsurveillance post-9/11 and identifying a few problematic trends. Asking if 9/11was a ‘world historic’ event, causing the elevation of security to a toppriority, or an international cue for a demand for security, he found it thestart of intensification, an opportunity, a pretext, and reinforcement oftendencies that pre-existed the attack. These included seeking technologicalsolutions for political problems, the declaration of the attacks as an act ofwar, with a military solution, and the engagement of corporate entities intopartnership with government. This leads to a pervasive demand for personaldata, military budgets taking on a surveillance emphasis, and the belief thatexceptional circumstances justify these means. Systems were however, already inplace before 9/11, but there was not the political will to join them alltogether. Lyon also highlighted the importanceof fear in this political equation. Surveillance studies must scrutiniseassumptions about surveillance, including those that are ‘shallow mantras andpernicious lies’ (nothing to hide, nothing to fear, for example), it must beaware of the ways collective mentalities operate, and have an ethical purposein the revelation of the features of surveillance, and what is being done throughsurveillance. Pre-emption was important for Lyon,including early intervention, sorting, bringing risk discourses, actuarialdiscourse, and prudentalism into the blurred intersection between domestic andnational security.

He spoke about the oxymoron of ‘total targeting’ which canonly make sense in this type of atmosphere in which all are suspect. Anothertrend in the post 9/11 era is the lack of transparency of security andintelligence services (as revealed in the Washington Post by Dave Priest). Thisapplies to international cooperation and data-sharing, an area that badly needsmore oversight. In airports we have apparently moved from ‘checking objects’ to‘profiling persons’. This was associated with the belief that techniques andpractices are politically neutral and can be imported from abroad andimplemented anywhere, and are therefore also suitable for export.

Lyon argued that there wasnothing inevitable about the response to 9/11 and ways of acting. The currentstate is a combination of political and economic pressures, media amplifiedfear-mongering ordering concerns and persuasion. There is therefore a need todisrupt fatalistic or protected modes of surveillance. Security andsurveillance are not ends in themselves. We should order priorities fortechnology, not the reverse, work to de-abstract data, and consider ourattitudes to fear. Lyon again identified theimportance of a concept of ‘human security’ (something I’ve written aboutpreviously here). We need to question the ‘in technology we trust’ mantra, andrethink information practices which require contextualising in the frame ofhuman purposes. Introducing a culture of care for data and built in oversightwould also be productive. Lyon ended by statingwe needed to ask what society do we want, and build/work accordingly.

Workshop co-organiser Art Cockfield (Queens University) spoke aboutsurveillance and the law, arguing that the combination of post 9/11 reforms andnew surveillance technologies are turning government surveillance into law. Hementioned the recent privacy commission report ‘A Matter of Trust’ and drewupon the history of the state as an entity that watches, systematically androutinely. However the rise of the information state should also be consideredalong the lines of the rise of the safety state and the protective state (citedDavid Omand). Broad post 9/11 reforms have done three things: 1) encouragedpre-emptive info gathering and risk management, 2) relaxed standards forgovernment searches, 3) provided enhanced resources for surveillance. This iscombined with new generations of security and surveillance technologies, oftenproduced by military testing grounds in lawless areas of the world. Drawinginsight from liberal social contract theories, we should ask how doestechnology change previously protected interests (for example privacy). Thesecurity world, even with algorithmic surveillance, suffers from the problem of‘drinking out of the fire hose’ (too much information to process, side effectof it spraying everywhere else?), and there might be a point in helping them tofind the actual information which might actually catch bad guys rather than theperception that they need all information. Art concluded the point that lawacquires a greater role when technology and legal change undermines socialinterests like privacy.

Torin Monahan (Vanderbilt University) spoke about ‘Fusion Centres’a US DHS programme. These are new configurations of police, national securityand private intelligence. Monahan has conducted interviews with fusion centredirectors and analysts (and commented on the methodological considerationsinvolved in this). Set up to combat terrorism, the role of the centres hasexpanded to a range of crimes and hazards, as part of justifying theirexistence to their local settings. The provide assistance to policeinvestigations. Their location (within state law enforcement) are part ofMonahan’s concerns in that the pick up local prejudices and concerns. Monahanterms the centres ‘centres of concatenation (playing off Latour’s centres ofcalculation) that embody larger networks, sharing imperatives and with readyaccess. Data is drawn together as needed, invested with meaning andcommunicated to others, then erased – leaving little or no documentation of theprocess (especially for ‘quick searches’ communicated via phone or email). Asnodes they are largely passive, stressing detail over abstraction. The systemwas driven by the idea that a network (decentralised, information sharing, ‘needto share’) was necessary to fight a network. This network is physicallyembodied in a room of embedded analysts to facilitate information sharing withmostly free-flowing interaction. A large number of data bases are accessible fromthe centres, which also mobilise data from private aggregators that governmentmight not generally have access to. The prevailing attitudes to this byanalysts was that this was ‘just information’ and that they are ‘a channel’.The ambition was to be ‘Google, but for the police’. This involves somerelaxation in standards and thresholds for engaging in surveillance. Monahanconcluded buy suggesting security organisations acceding to imperatives of thesurveillance society to collect, share, analyse and act on data. Centres ofconcatenation response and leave little trace, producing a zone of opacity as ashield from accountability.

David Murakami-Wood(Queens University) spoke about the dynamics of opennessand closure in infowar, including the increasing reliance on open sourceintelligence but at the same time the restriction on open public access. Hemade the argument that beyond surveillance, there was a vitally importantpolitics to the whole nature of communication, a conflict that wouldre-configuring left-right politics, but that was only partly a result of 9/11.He asked a number of questions. Firstly, is this just about states? Highlightingthe agenda and role of private sector and networks as part of a broaderpolitical economy. He cited David Philips in relation to specific politics andchoice being reduced to a range of corporate alternatives. Corporate norms suchnymity, connection and transparency. There are similar discourses but verydifferent ends. Secondly, he talked about changes to the military-industrialcomplex, now best thought of as a security-surveillance industrial complex. Thepost-cold war environment had long term effects in terms of shock andalternatives. The alternatives persisted and started to come together. 9/11added information back into this. He draw attention to Mary Khaldor’s work onthe ‘Baroque Arsenal’ of the cold war – vast, complex, unworkable weaponssystems that even their operators do not fully understand. Thirdly, we can’tjust look at the USA and allies, but also to China and Chinese norms ofinformation control, analysts, security and corporations that has nothing to dowith 9/11 (unless leveraged rhetorically).Emerging economies engage in securityby with different norms and reasons. Some of these may be major challenges to US imperialismin the long term perspective. Chinais both a resource (a corporate learning experience) and a threat. There isincreasing innovation in online surveillance inconceivable in anotherenvironment – deep packet analysis, and projects out of DARPA, to looking at behaviourin World of Warcraft to try and detect terrorist activity. There are alsointernational interconnections, making state arguments self-referential andself-reinforcing, flowing from the EU to Canadato the US,competition between states on law and economy, as well as secret bilateral andinternational arrangements.

Murakami-Wood highlighted a number of trends inthis information war. Data warehousing, in which intelligence agencies attempt tofix uncontainable flows to take a picture of them. We shouldn’t over-exaggeratethis, it almost never works properly, but there are drives by private innovators.Web Censorship, used to prevent certain types of communication, is reframed foruse in western liberal democratic countries, look to the control of socialmedia in the Arab spring and Londonriots, leaving a thin line between lawful access and censorship. Data flows, ‘nationalsecurity’ is misleading in an environment of international flows andinformation sharing arrangements between intelligence agencies, as well ascampaigns around intellectual property. He also identified fears of an ‘opensource insurgency’. The Hacker Fight-back: wikileaks places transparency andaccountability in the same field as surveillance and control, with the need tofocus on what benefits us. There is possibility for a massive kickback. Thisincludes pirate parties where information is the primary reason for theirpolitics, not an addendum, as well as groups like anonymous and Lulzsec, wherepreviously anti-political hackers become anti-state and anti-corporate. Thiscan all be rebadged as ‘cyber terrorism’, but is also the beginning of apolitics of communication – the security environment serves to crystallisedebate. Murakami-Wood believes we are starting to move beyond the era of 9/11being all that matters.

IAAC Symposium

2011-09-12T17:42:00.000+01:00

I had a poster presented at the Information Assurance Advisory Council (IAAC) Symposium on the 7th of September. You can download it and other posters presented at the conference from here.
The title of the poster is 'Playing with Privacy: Promoting Online Privacy and Consent discussion through Game Design'

The back of the cards from the Privacy Card game

This is the first time I've produced a research poster, as I'm not totally convinced of their use as a tool of research dissemination as I rarely see people actually reading them at conferences - this being said, I recently saw a very good poster by Alejandro Velez Salas looking at the Metaphoring universalisation of 'terror'. I was willing to do a poster for this symposium because this is about a particular piece of VOME project research that lends itself to having a visual component: in the cards we're produced for the game, photos of people playing the game and the graphic design work already done for the card backs. More coming soon about the card game, read the poster if you want to know a bit more.

Endorsement for Surveillance and Identity

2011-08-10T11:04:00.001+01:00

Just found out that I've got an endorsement for my forthcoming book, I'm very happy about this:

These carefully selected fascinating case studies allow Barnard-Wills to chart the connections between emergent forms of identity, new technologies and governmental projects. The result is a valuable contribution to the our understanding of the contemporary politics of surveillance.

Kevin D. Haggerty, University of Alberta, Canada

Google's Big Tent (privacy, injunctions, disclosure)

2011-05-20T13:02:00.003+01:00

On Wednesday, I headed to the grounds of the Grove Hotel in Watford to a Big Tent erected by Google along with Privacy International and Index on Censorship, for a discussion on privacy and the role of information in conflicts. I'd gone for the first part mainly, but the latter was incredible interesting, and is going to get a post of its own.

The first panel was moderated by Channel 4's Peter Snow, and made up of broadcaster Peter Bazalgette, Privacy International's Simon Davies, and google privacy engineer Alma Witten. It kicked off with a video presentation, the main message of which was - we produce as much information per week as the entire information production of humanity up to 2003. I've not yet been able to find a verifiable source for this, so I'd advice caution before repeated (it was heavily retweeted on wednesday).

Peter Bazalgette suggested that in any circumstances where we have given personal data, we should be able to wipe it - using an example of David Cameron apparently buying copyright to a photography of him in the Bullingdon club as a control strategy. Anybody who has voluntary given up privacy should be able to get it back. He called this the tabular rasa principle. He couldn't say with confidence that this process happens in large organisations. He also wanted commerce and public benefit discussed whenever privacy was debated. He gave a first example of NHS release data in order to improve health care more broadly, and a second (slightly more shakey) example which assumed that targeted advertising was (in itself) a great service to us which we happily give up information to get it - The more we give in the more we get social benefits. The NHS anonymisation protocol was seen as a good practical example of the way to get benefit out of data whilst still protecting the individual. This principle could be applied in the commercial world, and individuals would sell personal data in return for content.

Alma Witten wanted to address privacy as part of the larger space of safety, security and free expression, commerce and innovation, economic benefits. When all these elements are addressed together, she felt it leads to healthiest conversations. There are benefits of us sharing our personal information, and good things that can come from that.A lot of powerful computer science information tools, for Google, are built upon information from people, but not necessarily about people. She felt it important to keep focus on this distinction – information about the world that came from me.

Simon Davies spoke about the relationship between privacy and innovation, and the way that they are often rhetorically opposed. He said this was a denial of history. Every time there had been an evolution of human rights and thought, there had always been a claim that innovation and commerce will suffer, due to interference of rights. Never have. Strengthen trust, which sparks innovation, public behind, then markets. He asked if anybody could come up with an example where privacy had prevented innovation. He identified the hypocrisy of any company that talks about how privacy can stifle growth of innovation, when innovation is more routinely stifled by corporate practices leveraging the law(presumably copyright practices). Heather Brooke later argued that privacy had stifled investigative journalism quite frequently. Privacy was not enforcable for individuals, but if you have enough money and power, it could be used against the public interest.

The question and answer session was fairly active. When asked what any national government could practically require of a global organisation (such as Google), Witten suggested this was practically limited due to the nature of net services. Google would desire (and be supportive of) globally consistent standards and expectations. China's position was seen as a particular challenge. Davies stated that privacy regulation in Europe was a 'dog's dinner' - inconsistent, uncoordinated and not understanding of the technology involved. His desire would be for a regulatory environment that did what it said it would, that was coordinated, resourced and innovative and took its job and public interest seriously. Systems were inevitable going to be fragmented across the globe, but countries like China see this fragmentation and its allows them to boycot more easily. We don't need more codes, but we do need national regulators who understand and act. His path to this was to get people angry about funding regulators who are not doing their job. The public has been angry at providers for some time, but should be angry at the regulators who don't use laws already in existence - for example the pressure on ICO to reform itself.

The discussion then moved to the interaction of superinjunctions and twitter, and in doing so displayed more of the dominance of privacy discussion in the uk by the antagonism between journalists and celebrities. Bazalgette's comments suggested he beleived people had power over their own lives and didn't need major regulation on this issue, but that there would be data on the internet that would be in conflict with domestic law. Davies said he had no objection to people tweeting injuncted material, and that this simply demonstrated a flaw with the injunction law, which had recieved very little attention from parliament for some time, and might be redrafted. He also critised the way that the injunction process was largely secret and could be opened up and made more transparent and accountable. It was suggested that the law is an ass in this respect and out of synch with public sensibilities, which change over time. If a law is not respected then the public will flaunt it. John Snow suggested that the solution to the superinjunction lay with this - if they were functionally broken by the internet, then nobody will seek them in future.

Regarding the idea of a European right to be forgotten, Alma Witten made some very useful points that were almost entirely absent from the Westminster Media Forum event I attended recently. She said that it was obviously impossible to delete all copies of a piece of information on the internet - for example if an external actor had scrapped a copy of your Facebook profile. However, this absolutist/perfectionist position stopped discussions of practical ways in which individuals could be given more control, and ways in which legitimate organisations could enact data deletion if requested. Google has itself pushed for this through the google dashboard and data liberation movements. She also linked this to threat modelling in information security - where you don't plan for the attacks of the omnipotent, omniscient attacker, with infinite resources and time, but the likely threat. Davies felt that the right to privacy was a natural part of the progressing evolution of privacy law. Witten later added in response to a question about data portability, that Google wanted people to stay with the company because they wanted to, rather than because they had made it too difficult to leave.

Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group asked about the economic benefits of privacy, and raised the difference between 'big facts in the public domain' and data processing - in which the economic power of individuals vis-a-vis large companies is small. Infomation about us increasingly exponentially – and weneed some strong rights around controlling that, and an economic incentive to start controlling that – we should reassert some of our privacy and get economic benefits from it. He pointed out that privacy often a fundamental fact for our transactions with socity.

In discussion of the problems of the Playstation Network, Bazalgette pointed out that there will always be accidents in the future, and that part of being media literate is anticipating and understanding this. This is contextual however, and whilst you should expect sharing of your information on facebook, this should not be the case with online banking or commerce.

In response to a question from a representative of Mydex, asking about ways to technially control individual personal information online on individuals terms, Simon Davies praise the mydex project stating that technology trumps the law, and if you can find technological solutions to problems like privacy, then you don't need legal ones. He stated he regarded online contracts as one of the biggest jokes of recent legal history. Witten believed that it was important that such tools were being built, but also important that it was not google who were building them.

upcoming events and calls for papers

2011-04-20T12:17:00.002+01:00

There are quite a few upcoming events around themes of surveillance, privacy, civil liberties, technololgy politics etc.

‘The Future of Expert Evidence’

9 June 2011 at 1.30pm. Queen Mary University of London, Criminal Justice Centre conference. London House, Goodenough College. Programme (pdf)

Sociological Imagination Day School: Social Media and Academic Practice
an as yet undisclosed day in June.
University of Warwick
link

Statewatching Europe: Civil Liberties, the state and the European Union
Saturday 25 June 2011 (10.00-17.30)
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
celebrating Statewatch's 20th anniversary
Programme and Registration form: http://www.statewatch.org/conference/conference.pdf
Book Online: http://www.statewatch.org/ordering/order.html

“Cultures of Surveillance”: An Interdisciplinary Conference,

sponsored by The Film Studies Space: The Centre for the Cultural History of the Moving Image, UCL (University College London), 29 September - 1 October 2011

Human Security Vs National Security and the implications for Surveillance Studies

2011-04-20T11:51:00.003+01:00

A version of this article was originally presented at the 'A Global Surveillance Society?' conference last year. It was written in response to the concept of 'human security' starting to crop up in various places within surveillance studies, potentially as a counter-narrative to national security. Whilst I was sympathetic to this, the term has its own baggage within International Relations which might complicate this usage. I think it's worth highlighting and I'm not really doing much else with the paper, so I'm going to make it available here.

Introduction

There is an established literature in International Relations Security Studies that investigates the concepts and practices of ‘Human Security’. This idea, stemming from the 1994 UN Human Development report, argues that the realist perception of security as an issue solely involving the interests of nation states is inadequate. This contested concept attempted to bring a range of threats and dangers to human life (poverty, food scarcity, health, environmental degradation, internal political violence and repression) under the ambit of security politics, in an attempt to redress or prevent harm.

Surveillance practices (of the state) are frequently rhetorically justified on the basis of national security. This paper attempts to investigate the implications for research into surveillance from the Human Security perspective and assess the possibilities this perspective offers for countering drives towards increased state surveillance on the basis of national security. The paper is cautious about the potential human security offers in that it risks bringing more issues within a politics of (in)security, and serving potentially as a rhetorical device for security interests.

However, the paper argues that human security might serve the function of raising developmental issues in surveillance studies and drawing attention to the global dimension; a politics of arms and technology transfers and security sales, and the problem of developing states attempting to meet security concerns before issues of welfare, health or education. The paper draws upon international relations, and critical security studies perspectives. Given that both national security and human security can be understood as discourses, the paper draws also draws upon discourse theory. The paper first examines the traditional perspective on security as national security, drawing upon the international relations literature in this area, as well as the perspective on national security that can be drawn out of existing research on surveillance. It identifies a number of ways that the concept of national security has been strongly and thoroughly critiqued from both perspectives, and substantial overlap between the two perspectives in this area. The paper then moves on to present an overview of the concept of human security, its origin and development, including a number of key debates surrounding the concept. This account should be sufficient to serve as a ground from which to examine the potential influences upon surveillance theory. This paper examines the potential for human security to provide a point of interaction between surveillance theory and international relations/international security more broadly; an analytical tool as an alternative way of thinking about security; and as a normative political perspective, from which to resist the expansion of surveillance generated by the privileging of national security. Finding more potential in the former two contributions than the latter, the paper examines ways in which surveillance studies might impact upon human security, and potential alternatives that might serve similar functions for surveillance studies. Whilst human security perspectives might provide surveillance theory with an additional understanding of security, it is argued that a further engagement with other strands of critical security studies might be more productive. As a normative and political device, human security offers little to surveillance theory, whilst bringing with it substantial rhetorical baggage and potential for co-option. As an analytical perspective however, some work in human security can sensitise surveillance studies to the role of international institutions, and to the need to conduct research on empirical experiences of insecurity at the local level.

The paper deliberately adopts a broad, encompassing understanding of the scope of ‘surveillance studies’ as a heterogeneous and interdisciplinary developing field of research. Therefore when writing about the interactions between fields of research, the paper pays attention to both the sensitivities and orientation of its sources, and to where those sources have been located by their authors, and by commentators.

National Security in International Relations and Surveillance Studies

Traditionally, National Security has been understood as ‘the ability to withstand aggression from abroad’ (Luciani, 1989:151), ‘relative freedom from war, coupled with a relatively high expectation that defeat will not be a consequence of any way that should occur’ (Bellamy, 1981:102) and that a nation is secure ‘to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged to maintain them by a victory in such a war’ (Walter Lippman, cited in Buzan, 1991:16).

National Security is closely linked with the principle of national sovereignty (Kerr, 2007), the monopoly the state holds on the legitimate exercise of violence within a territory, and a conception of the international order as anarchic, with limited supra-governmental institutions, and dominated by inter-national competition. In IR theory this positions claims the name ‘realism’. The combination of security and the state seemed ‘natural’ for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, becoming contested when social changes drew the justification of the state into question (MacFarlane & Khong, 2006:23). The state was for much of its history conceived of as an answer to individual and group security needs.

The nation-state as an imagined and constructed community, although one with potentially some historical weight behind it, serves as the referent object for security activity. That is to say that the state is the thing to be secured, and that it is the state that experiences insecurity. This activity is primarily couched in the language of war – attack and defence, aggression, defeat and victory. In this conception, national security is primarily a zero-sum situation. Given that to be secure, a state must be capable of defeating its opponents through military activity, then one state gaining such superiority means that other states have lost the capacity. They are now vulnerable. Combine this with the assumption that capacity for defence strongly correlates with capacity for attack, and the result is what traditional international relations has long conceived of as the ‘security dilemma’. This militarised security focuses upon organised violence (rather than the violence of individuals or of structural economic violence), privileges concern with armed threats to and by states. (Herring, 2007:130)

Discourses of National Security are not static and unchanging however. In the terminology of the UK government’s National Security Strategy national security is expanded, whilst providing security for the nation and its citizens remains the most important responsibility of government (Cabinet Office, 2008:3). This concept of security has taken into itself the language of concerns about population that, as shown later in this paper, is at the core of the human security approach. The obligation here is to safeguard the nation, its citizens, ‘our prosperity’ and ‘our way of life’

“The scope and approach of this strategy reflects the way our understanding of national security has changed. In the past, the state was the traditional focus of foreign defence and security policies, and national security was understood as dealing with the protection of the state and its vital interests from attacks by other states. Over recent decades, our view of national security has broadened to includes threats to individual citizens and to our way of life, as well as to the integrity and interests of the state” (Cabinet Office, 2008:3-4).

There is still significant room for critical purchase on this vision of national security. It assumes a unitary homogeneity of ‘our way of life’, claiming the power to speak for the variety of the nation for the government, and playing down internal conflicts about what is the best way for ‘us’ to live ‘our’ live as a collective.

The understanding of national security has also broadened in a number of other ways. The UK national security strategy remarks that no state is seen as directly threatening the UK. There are, however, a diverse range of interconnected threats and risks, including conflicts and failed states , pandemics, international organised crime, climate change, competition for energy (Cabinet Office, 2008:3)

This can be understood as a non-critical broadening, that simply brings a wider range of threats into the ambit of security politics, without challenging the way in which that politics is conducted, what the distribution of power is, which actors are involved, and what measures are taken to gain security. For example, environmental security is increasingly becoming an issue. However, if this only encompasses preparing to fight the next world war over water supplies, or anticipating destabilisation and war as a result of population migrating in the face of rising sea levels (Homer-Dixon, 1991 & 1994) it fails to escape the paradigm of traditional national security thinking. Alternative ways of framing these issues are lost (Waever, 1995)

Whilst a distinction can be drawn between national security and homeland security - the latter being a subset of the former, specifically focused upon the protection of national territory from terrorism but expanding to incorporate a diverse range of threats (Wilkinson, 2007:) - the two terms are similar enough, especially in contrast to Human Security, as to be considered together in this paper.

Surveillance studies has engaged with the concept of national security, and the role of both the nation state, and the demands of security have played in the development and functioning of surveillance practices. It is clear that the state is no longer the sole agent of surveillance (if it ever was), and not all state surveillance is motivated by national security concerns (Whitaker, 1999:29). It is not controversial however to identify the state, and its national security concerns as important nodes in many a surveillant assemblage. Nor is this to argue that the state is monolithic and homogeneous, rather that government occurs across a range of actors and institutions, drawn together by shared discourses and mentalities of government (Dean, 2010). This very perspective further serves to deconstruct the concept of a single, cohesive ‘national security’, and focus our attention on the way that security threats and the privileged responses to those threats are constructed. National security can then be seen as a particular discourse – a mentality structuring the activity of government.

Graham (2006) argues that military power is an often neglected domain in surveillance studies, and that military surveillance is often seen as disconnected from sociological surveillance. Webster (2003) argues that the ‘leading edge of surveillance’ is the state in pursuit of its security concerns, attempting to watch the enemy (with or without), and that the most sophisticated surveillance technologies emerge from the military domain. Similarly, Dandeker has shown how historically, the armed services are in the vanguard of developments of surveillance, with the military serving as a model for other forms of administrative power (1990; 2007:225). However this inspiration moves both ways with militaries increasingly looking towards the private sector for knowledge, technology and services.

Lyon argues that military demands for discipline and intelligence have been one of the major ‘tributaries’ of the spread of global surveillance, and that the mobilisation of the population for large scale war had numerous spin off measures carried over to the general peacetime population (2007:29). In an age of information technology the policing of urban areas takes inspiration from military techniques (Haggerty & Ericson, 2001), whilst attempts to deal with numerous social problems take on the language of ‘war on’. Lyon states that:

“It takes little imagination to see that in North America and Europe, particularly post 9/11 developments in national security have tilted surveillance sharply towards control in a number of areas.” (Lyon, 2007:133)

National security initiatives, such as the USA PATRIOT act in the USA, have clearly had major implications for surveillance. USA PATRIOT, For example, expanded the remit of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, introduced delayed notice search warrants and extended the use of National Security Letters – providing the executive with greatly expanded surveillance powers under the rubric of national security (Donohue, 2008:233). Furthermore, a range of intelligence agencies have expanded their domestic surveillance. As well as re-framing legal systems, the demands of national security can have a constitutive and forming effect on developments in technology and science. As P.W. Singer shows in ‘Wired for War’, national security agencies such as the Department of Defence, DARPA and the Office of Naval Research have played significant roles in funding and encouraging research activity and technology development in the field of robotics, which includes the development of unmanned aerial surveillance drones (Singer, 2009: 140-143)

Surveillance studies is well positioned to understand that states themselves are often the perpetrators of violence and the cause of the insecurity of their population. Populations subjected to social sorting, or the criminal justice system can be placed in a position of fundamental uncertainty and vulnerability. Finn has demonstrated individuals’ identities as threats to national security can change depending on the deployment of data as part of the National Security Entry-Exit registration system (NSEERS) established in 2002 in the US (Finn, 2005). These insecurities need not be driven by national security imperatives. For example, Gillom has shown how restrictive welfare programmes coupled with tight surveillance of recipients can lead to substantial economic hardship and insecurity (2006).

The concept of human security is one of a range of responses to the inadequacy of traditional models of human security. It is related to, but not congruent with other attempts to broaden the scope of security studies within international relations (Krause & Williams, 1996). The principle characteristics of the position, some of its key debates and its impacts are outlined below.

The Human Security approach

In 1994, the United Nations Human Development Programme published its report ‘New Dimensions of Human Security’. This report argued:

“The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation-states than to people. The superpowers were locked in an ideological struggle - fighting a cold war all over the world. The developing nations, having won their independence only recently, were sensitive to any real or perceived threats to their fragile national identities. Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives. For many of them, security symbolized protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards.” (UNHDP, 1994: 22)

The report highlighted four essential characteristics of human security. It was a universal concept, applicable to all people, in all nations. Its component parts were interdependent, with dangers not limited by national borders. Human security was seen as easier to achieve through prevention rather than later intervention. Finally, human security was people centred. Whilst acknowledging linkages between the two, the report drew a clear distinction between human security and human development.

“Human development is a broader concept-defined in previous Human Development Reports as a process of widening the range of people's choices. Human security means that people can exercise these choices safely and freely - and that they can be relatively confident that the opportunities they have today are not totally lost tomorrow.” (UNHDP, 1994:23)

Furthermore, the report identified two components of human security, the ‘freedom from fear’, and the ‘freedom from want’, and argued that whilst both of these components had been part of the UN mission from its origin, organisational priorities had been tilted in favour of the former at the expense of the latter. Human Security was part of an attempt to redress this imbalance.

Human security securitises as it broadens its scope, not only making the individual the referent of security rather than the state, but identifying a broader range of issues as security threats, beyond violent aggression (Newman, 2010: 81).

The human security approach has not fully rejected the relevance of state-centric arguments, and the importance of protecting the state from external military violence, but rather posits that these considerations are not the sole considerations of security, or that indeed they should be dominant (Kerr, 2007). The 1994 report introduced the idea, with potentially wide ranging implications, that a secure state, as traditionally conceived, could still be inhabited by insecure people (Thomas & Tow, 2002:178)

“the primary objective of human security is not to enhance state centric security per se, but rather to ensure that people do not suffer from those version of state security that ignore internal violence and its causes.” (Kerr, 2007: 101)

In ideal circumstances, the state acts as guarantor of human security, but the approach recognises that this is not always the case.

Human Security is not a cohesive and complete doctrine. There are multiple theoretical origins and multiple interpretations of the approach. The former include the natural rights and the rule of law traditions, and humanitarian initiatives. The latter are customarily defined as the narrow and broad approaches to human security. The 1990s and early 2000s saw a continued debate about the extent to which security politics could be broadened.

The broad school of human security encompasses the full range of security threats from the 1994 UNHDP report and occasionally more than this, whilst the narrower approach attempts to limit what can be understood as security issues. Debates about the extent of security, and how the various concerns of human security could be considered security issues encompassed a demand for analytical clarity contrasted against a desire not to exclude important political issues. The assumption here was that a narrow definition would favour state interests over those of people. Critics of the broad approach argued that it allowed no way to make policy decisions – if all issues were security issues, then how could any particular issues be prioritised, and how would the theory provide any guidance for action.

Thomas and Tow, amongst others, argued that a more narrowly defined conception of Human Security would have more analytic and policy value (2002:178). Human Security allows the transcendence of sovereign prerogatives and allows actors to more effectively address trans-regional threats. They argued that an issue should be considered a human security threat when its implications cross borders, with internal issues best considered as development concerns. They argue that a fundamental requirement is that human security must provide ‘tangible threat parameters against which relative security environments and situations can be measured’ (2002:181). Their approach has been strongly criticised by Bellamy and McDonarld as being largely inconsistent with the normative agenda inspiring human security approaches, retaining the state as the main referent of security, and risking any emancipatory potential in the discourse. For Bellamy and McDonald, ‘policy relevance’ is problematic, allowing realist ontology and the pre-eminence of states in policy making, to trump concerns of individual security (2002:373)

“A discourse of human security that does not delegitimize states when they act as agents of human insecurity, does not de-value sovereignty when it protects the perpetrators of human wrongs, or does not challenge the moral value of an international economic system and structure of states that creates and perpetuates most of the globe’s insecurity has, at best, a very limited utility. At worst, it helps to sustain the very practices and structures that cause human insecurity in the first place.” (Bellamy & McDonald, 2002:375-6).

Newman argued for the explicit normative stance of the human security approach, which would sit poorly with a limited perspective solely focused upon the utility of the theory to the security practices of states:

“Human security is normative; it argues that there is an ethical responsibility to re-orient security around the individual in line with internationally recognised standards of human rights and governance. Much human security scholarship is therefore explicitly or implicitly underpinned by a solidarist commitment, and some is cosmopolitan in ethical orientation” (Newman, 2010:78)

Impact of Human Security

The human security perspective would have limited use outside of academia if it was an unsupported and un-adopted perspective. For it to have relevance for surveillance studies is partly contingent upon it having some impact in policy communities and in international organisations. Therefore, a brief examination of the impact of the human security perspective is in order. Ewan argues that:

“Since the publication of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 1994 (UNDP, 1994), the term ‘human security’ has been associated with a potentially transformative project that deconstructs traditional national security discourses and practices and seeks to reinvent the theory and practice of security.” (Ewan, 2007:182).

Similarly, the UNDP itself was an attempt to shift the post-cold war focus of development away from simple indicators of GDP. Osler Hampson argues that the debates around human security echoed their contextual milieu, with uncertainty about the international environment and the role of international institutions at the end of the Cold War (Osler Hampson, 2007) and the erosion of the narrow state-centric paradigm in policy and academic circles (Newman, 2010:78)

The primary organisational incarnation of the Human security approach is the Human Security Network (http://www.humansecuritynetwork.org/). It does not have a very large membership, and is composed of thirteen of what the international relations literature deigns to call ‘middle power states’ such as Norway and Canada. Initially supporting both the freedom from fear and the freedom from want agendas, the HSN fell back to focusing upon Freedom from Fear in 1999. In an examination of the Human Security Network, Agathangelou and Ling (2004), found that whilst the language of the HSN included both concepts, its policy objectives tended towards the narrower end of the human security spectrum, including a focus upon light weapon proliferation and land mind. The Human Security Network has been involved in the Ottawa convention on anti-personnel land mines and the establishment of the International Criminal Court. They also find that ‘the discourse and practice of human security is now a durable feature of the international landscape, in part due to the efforts of the HSN.” (2004:66)

Benedek is broadly positive about the impact of the human security approach on international law. He argues that the ideals of human security have influenced a wide range of treaties, brought about normative changes in the international legal order, and been influential in the activities of government departments, research centres, and human rights groups (2008:11). Thomas and Tow see that human security has been part of a wider ‘embedded humanitarianism’ with the UN (2002:180) whilst Owen finds that the concept has ‘permeated virtually all aspects of post- Cold War discourse on international security’, however, it has failed to enter into the policy or theory mainstream (Owen, 2008: 113).

Clearly, the United Nations, and specific UN bodies such as UNHDP, UNESCO and the UN University are key actors in this field. Owens argues that the UN has acted as an ‘incubator’ for human security at the institutional level (Owen, 2008:113). However he also finds that support for the concept has reduced over time since its introduction, due to the dominance of traditional security thinking, the reluctance of many states to support human security, and also the failure to clearly articulate what is meant by security. Owen provides a chronology of the use of the term human security in UN documents and speeches by secretary generals, and finds that its use had waned considerably, suggesting that the concept had somewhat fallen out of favour by 2005 (Owen, 2008: 113). Human security also plays a role in EU security policy, the Barcelona Study group report in 2004 proposed a ‘Human Security Doctrine for Europe.

It is arguable that the human security approach has had more impact on an institutional and policy level than any other critical security perspectives. However it has been argued that this has come at a cost. In the search for policy relevance on the part of practitioners, non-governmental organisations and human security academics, and in wishing not to alienate policy-makers, Newman argues that human security has not pushed its core commitments in a sufficiently critical direction. He also examines the scepticism towards human security by critical security scholars who are concerned the perspective might be a hegemonic and co-opted discourse. Human Security is situated with ‘problem solving’ research and researchers rarely engage in epistemological, ontological or methodological debates, limiting the development of the field (Newman, 2010: 77). This illustrates a tension in all research with potential policy relevance, and a set of decisions that must be made in varying fields, and by individual researchers far beyond human security. A knee-jerk critical stance may result in isolation from policy fields where decisions are made despite the critique, whilst engagement runs the risk of having to frame questions and responses in terms that are intelligible to dominant mentalities of government.

‘Utility’ of Human Security to Surveillance Studies

There are three areas in which human security might interact productively with surveillance studies. These are the use of human security discourse as a normative political stance; the use of human security as an analytic tool to further surveillance research and add conceptual tools; and finally using human security as a point of interaction with security studies, and international relations more broadly. These are examined in turn.

Normative position

Assuming national security logics and discourses drive a substantial amount of contemporary surveillance practices, could a shift towards a human security model either reduce that drive, or even encourage a reduction in socially harmful surveillance practices? Human security appears to have laudable normative goals associated with the lived daily lives of all people around the world, and can serve as a reminder of the importance of universal norms. As a concept it has achieved a degree of institutional buy-in and support rarely seen in other non-traditional understandings of security politics. Might such an approach provide an alternative rhetorical strategy for those concerned by the proliferation of national security initiatives, and the permeation of national security discourse through all layers of society?

Of the seven strands of human security, it is ‘political security’ that seems to offer the most to the normative anti-surveillance campaigner. The 1994 UNHDP report argued that ‘one of the most important aspects of human security is that people should be able to live in a society that honours their basic human rights’ (UNHDP, 1994:32). Political Security also includes protection against state repression, the recognition that police forces are often agents of repression, and that governments may seek to exercise control over ideas and information. One of the indicators of human insecurity in the report is the proportion of government expenditure on policing and armed forces in contrast to other sectors of government. A strong component of political security therefore seems to offer protection against surveillant infringement of human rights.

However, the rhetorical potential of the discourse should not be over-estimated. It has had limited impact beyond the United Nations, which also seems to be distancing itself from the phrase. The concept has been in existence for sixteen years. The terminology brings with it an institutional baggage, an association with interventionist policies in some parts of the world, and is widely understood as being conceptually diffuse. Existing actors may therefore have their own idiosyncratic interpretation of what human security means. Understanding ‘human security’ as a floating signifier should caution us as to the possibility of it being re-articulated in different ways as part of a diverse range of political projects. Furthermore, the limited critical potential of human security, as discussed by Newman and others, may limit its applicability for some within the surveillance studies community.

The very aim of human security discourse is to motivate existing actors that make a claim to provide security to address themselves to a range of different concerns that are normally outside of their purview. It is an attempt to allow non-traditional security issues such as the environment and health to compete for more policy attention and resources (MacFarlane & Khong, 2006:227) Human security discourse retains a central role for the state in the provision of security. This is combined with the ‘obligation to protect’ the concept that national sovereignty is made conditional upon the security of the population. Add in to this mix a development trajectory in which the use of up to date technologies of government and security is seen as a sign of a modern, effective state, and the stage is potentially set for a state to move exactly the same tools and strategies that it has used in pursuit of national security into the field of human security. Raising the profile of human security might simple create another market for the vendors of surveillance technologies to move into. Elden’s analysis of Foucault’s account of plague and the clinic provides a clear example of the operation of surveillance in the name of what could be interpreted as ‘Health Security’ (Elden, 2003). Lyon suggests a close relation between politicians and technology corporations. The political economy of this allows politicians to been seen as active and responding, whilst technology companies provide high technology solutions (Lyon, 2007:195). The extent to which human security has been able to move resources away from national security is an empirical question, but appears limited. A security technology designed for human security might appear and function differently to one designed for national security, however human security might simply be an addition to an already existing project. The unintended consequences are likewise unknown.

MacFarlane and Khong caution that one of the dangers of the human security approach (and with all attempts to apply the label of ‘security’ to other issues) is that it can lead to militarised solutions to non-military problems (2006:238). Terming an issue a security issue, even a human security issue, suggests that certain agencies, with characteristic methodologies should be oriented towards the issue. In governmentality theory, critical attention should be paid to the construction of political problems, as these constructions often delimit the space of potential solutions. Problematisations are made on the basis of particular regimes of thought, forms of knowledge and languages (Dean, 2010:38) MacFarlane and Kong also argue that discourses of human rights and civil liberties have had significant achievements without making use of the ‘security’ label (2006:258). To reply upon such a label might be to operate in a discursive field already structured by a near-hegemonic discourse, and to apply the techniques of ‘security’ to concerns we can understanding in terms of ‘hunger’, ‘poverty’ or ‘repression’. Benedek argues that human security, human rights and human development all have strong overlaps due to their common source in the importance of human dignity. Therefore the best way to achieve a the goals of human security is through the full and holistic realisation of human rights (Benedek, 2008:13)

Unfortunately, there can be no a priori assessment of the results of a normative use of human security discourse. However, it could be the case that a model that was inherently grounded upon the concerns of large parts of the population, rather than narrow state concerns could be more emancipatory than an uncontested discourse of paramount national security and war on terror . The intrinsically broader referent of human security might enable us to avoid the closed world of national security, which is traditional opaque and removed from normal channels of political accountability, particularly with regard to counter-terrorism.

Analytical Tool

A human security perspective also provides an alternative focus for security studies with sympathy towards surveillance studies. Human security highlights a blind spot in traditional approaches to security. Fierke argues that rather than trying to fix a definition we need to pay attention to how human insecurity is produced in practice (2007:147). This would be a greater focus upon those most insecure in the international system; bringing into surveillance studies a greater indigenous perspective on security, rather than a top-down focus predicated upon the security needs, insecurities and activities of the nation state. In essence this echoes substantial calls for a greater understanding of the lived experience of being under surveillance, but in this case, as part of a wider understanding of experiences of human insecurity, and from an international perspective.

A global survey conducted by the Human Security Centre/IPSOS-Reid in 11 countries found that crime and terrorism were not the biggest concern for people across the world. Social and economic issues took precedence, whilst the concerns highlighted in the survey also frequently differed from the priorities of those citizen’s governments. (Human Security Centre, 2005:50).

Key principles in human development include a bottom-up approach, partnerships, local ownership and participation. It is arguable that these should apply more to security policy as well. Kaldor argues that including those affected by violence and insecurity is both a moral issue and an effectiveness issue. An attitude of communication, collaboration and dialogue, rather than ‘we know best’, as well as an awareness of gender issues, is a requirement of a human security approach (Kaldor, 2007:189). These goals are also echoed in the Barcelona study group report.

Does the Human security approach offer anything further for understanding surveillance, beyond this injunction to understand the local? This author is sceptical about the potential here. As discussed previously, human security has not developed a particularly strong set of theoretical concepts, suffers from somewhat fuzzy concepts, and can lead to causal confusion regarding the causes of human insecurity (MacFarlane and Khong, 2006). It does however, highlight that national security discourse is not the only security discourse in operation in international politics. Human security has been strongly critiqued as an act of ‘securitization’. In the securitization model of the Copenhagen school in International Relations, issues fall into three types: non political, politicized, and securitized. Non-political issues are not seen as requiring state intervention and are not frequently included in public debate. Political issues are resolved through normal governmental mechanisms, whilst securitized issues require urgent action beyond standard political practices (Buzan, Waever & de Wilde, 1998:23). Securitization is the rhetorical act by which a political issue is articulated as an existential threat. A successful securitization involves the acceptance of such a threat, and of the use of special measures. It can be related to Agamben’s concept of the state of exemption (2005) and is a critical concept because if demonstrates how debate around certain issues is closed down, and specific strategies and responses are selected. By making humanitarian or development issues into security issues, the language has the potential to move these issues out of the realm of contestable, open and democratic politics.

It is therefore possible that the critique of human security discourse, from a critical security studies perspective is a more important contribution to surveillance studies, than is human security itself. Buzan (2004) argues that human security’s critical insights are already encompassed by the Copenhagen school of international relations concept of societal security. Attempting to compare and potentially combine the work of human security and critical security studies, Newman (2010) argues that human security must go beyond its relatively uncritical position if it is to make a lasting impact.

Point of Interaction with International Relations and (critical) Security Studies

Theoretically, taking on board elements of the human security perspective in surveillance theory has some potential to act as a stepping off point for a fruitful cross-fertilisation of surveillance studies and security studies as part of the broader discipline of international relations.

Surveillance studies has yet to substantially engage with many of the structures and institutions of international governance. Whilst there are accounts of surveillance which focus upon warfighting and the use of surveillance systems in conflicts (Graham, 2006), there are fewer accounts of surveillance at an international level in the more routine activity of international governance – for example the various agencies and bodies of the United Nations. An attention to human security necessarily invites a greater engagement with this level of analysis. Thomas (2000:9) suggests that Human Security it useful if it draws our attention towards the system, and the importance of scrutinising global processes. Surveillance studies can profitably engage with issues at the international level of analysis as shown by Stanton’s work on the role of the International Civil Aviation Authority on the spread of biometric passports (Stanton, 2008).

MacFarlane and Khong argue that the vast majority of international security analysts and researchers continue to think and write in national security terminology. Critical security studies is, at times, far from the mainstream of security studies. National security approaches dominate key journals and have attempted to exert an ‘inclusionary control’ of broadening agendas in security studies (2006:234). For example, underdevelopment is seen primarily as a cause of conflict, and responded to through strategic or military defences against that conflict.

An area where surveillance studies and international relations can fruitfully interact is the question of borders. Borders in a non-militarised sense seem oddly lacking from international relations, which in its traditional form assumes a relatively homogeneous state interacting with others. This interaction occurs at a political level, which tends to obscure the day to day operation, construction, and policing of international borders. The location of a border becomes an issue of international relations, in a way that its functioning is not. Surveillance studies has on the other hand paid substantial attention to the operation of the border (Zureik & Salter: 2005, Bigo:2006). In an age of hyper-mobility for a kinetic elite, combined with an assumption that mobility and fluidity are vital for economic growth even in an age of terrorism, the border becomes a site of modulated control and the management of flows, a site of substantial social sorting. This includes data sharing agreements between states and an increasing move to conducting the sorting ‘upstream’ from the border (Lyon, 2007:132). The differential permeability of the border and the technologically-assisted social sorting that occurs there have implications for human security.

Conclusions

This paper has aimed to provide an overview of the discourse of Human Security, and to examine what potential interactions there might be between human security, and the wider field of international relations security studies, and the field of surveillance studies. The paper set out an account of the traditional national security discourse from both an IR and a surveillance studies perspective, and how human security emerged in the 1990s as a response to the perceived failings of this dominant discourse. It then assessed the impact of Human security, and found that although it had achieved some impact on international policy, perhaps more than any other critical security studies approach, it has not moved national security from the dominant position, and seemed to be falling from favour even in its institutional incubators. In assessing the potential roles that human security could play in contributing to surveillance studies this paper found that it’s normative and rhetorical value was ambiguous. The terminology of human security brings institutional baggage, continues to securitize, and is a security discourse that could potentially be articulated in such a way as to legitimise and encourage state and military surveillance activity. This paper argues that a concentration on human rights would match most of the potential of human security without this concern. A further alternative approach would be De Lint and Virta’s argument for ‘security in ambiguity’ (2004) which advocates the ongoing re-politicisation of security, in which security politics is constantly pulled back into the realm of political contestation. Analytically, the concept does draw attention to competing discourses of security at the international level, it also supports a focus upon those experiencing insecurity in the world. However, the theoretical potential of the concept is lacking in comparison to other critical security approaches. The paper also finds that there is room for surveillance studies to engage with the international level of analysis, with the functioning of international organisations, and with critical security studies more broadly.

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Westminster Media Forum - Social Media, Online Privacy and the Right to be Forgotten

2011-03-23T12:11:00.003Z

London, March 22^nd 2010

This event yesterday morning, took place in response to drives from the European Union to consider a ‘right to be forgotten’ in relation to personal information online. It comprised three keynote addresses and three panel sessions with shorter speeches. The twitter backchannel for the event was #wmfevents, which I think included about seven or eight of us actively. It was an interesting event, although a bit too brief in places and of course coloured by the media slant – which does produce some odd artifacts in discussions of privacy. Direct quotes from memory and scribbled notes.

Richard Allen – Director of Policy EU, Facebook

Richard spoke about three main things. 1) what a social network is for, 2) what FB already does in relation to privacy and 3) the right to be forgotten. Social networks exist to enable people to connect and share. Things on them are by definition shared (things you don’t want online, you shouldn’t put on FB. He distinguished between created content (putting your soul on show) and found content (often advertising driven) but both were used by people to define who they are. Allen believes we are experiences a massive democratisation of public speech. Previously the ability to have a significant voice was limited to actors with substantial resources. The early days of the digital environment mirrored this exclusivity, with computers being massive and expensive. The problem is that much of our regulatory environment is built for this (data protection, libel etc). The 1990s saw democratisation of thet his, but blogging was still limited to a ‘technorati’ and geeks. Now technical expertise and cost are no longer a barrier to having a voice online, with the capacity to speak to the world. A mass of data is published by individuals and this is increasing.

Secondly, what does Facebook already have in place for privacy? For Allen this was primarily a contest and tension between complexity and simplicity. They want to allow individuals to decide the audience for any item of content, which is granular but also complex. Other people should just be able to decide on a broad attitude (exhibitionist or private) and be able to do that simply. Facebook believe they have the balance broadly right, but that this is an are that they will have to continue to iterate in (this might be shorthand for ‘expect more changes in privacy settings in the future’). The information challenge is how to help users and communicate what is going on. A fully transparent account of how the service works results in a massive (and unwieldy) privacy policy, demanded by regulators. However few people read this. An ever growing legal document as the service grows in seen as inevitable. Facebook are trying to create a simpler layer on top of this, with their privacy guide, simple and pictoral, with click-through for the full legal document. They are also trying to use consultation (and the ‘robust’ feedback they get from the user base every time they change anything) to guide this. The whole industry is apparently grappling with this tension. The increased take-up in mobile services is apparently affecting this given the small screen size – this might include graphical representations of activity.

Allen also pointed out the deletion function, for individual items of content and full accounts, however he cautioned that deletion of this data was limited to Facebook servers and not third parties (and that putting information online with no privacy settings was equivalent to publishing it fully on the internet).He also identified the download function to allow users to back up their data but also allow them to move to alternate services.

In regard to the right to be forgotten Allen cautioned that hard cases make bad laws, and that he was concerned that the extreme tail might be wagging the mainstream dog. The basic idea of user control over their own data (post, amend, review, delete) was supported but was concerned about an ‘overly prescriptive’ right. For most people, he argued, their main concern was that their data would remain accessible over time, and that far from fearing youthful indiscretions reappearing online, most people looked forward to being able to look back on their youth through social network records. Users wanted guarantees about data availability more than privacy/deletion. He was also concerned about the tendency to shoot the messenger, in which individuals with concerns about content went after the site where the content was shared rather than the source of the content.

Allen concluded by stating that we had explicitly designed networks to share stuff, and that most people were happy with this, and most people can resolve conflicts in this environment. There were however a few cases in which this was not possible, but that these were exceptional cases and should be handled as such, rather than being the basis for policy.

Panel Session.

Tessa Mayes largely reiterated her guardian comment is free article from a couple of days ago (which I’d read this morning) in which she critiqued the right to be forgotten on the basis that a claim for disengagement was antithetical to a democratic society in which engagement was necessary and valuable. Personally I think this misses the point, and creates a straw man version of the legal claim being made (which is not really about ‘oblivion’ but much more about revocation of consent (Caspar Bowden made much this point in the following questions).

Jim Killock from Open Rights Group spoke about the difference between our sense of ourselves as public people but also with private selves. There are differences online, but individuals should still have the right to choose which one they are being. There are expectations of control over private spaces. To demonstrate this he contrasted twitter (public) and facebook (created with an expectation of privacy which is has then moved away from). He also highlighted the need to retain and determine our creative work from a copyright perspective, and some very unequal bargains between services and users, with a tendency to arbitrarily change the terms of those. The right to be forgotten was not to be seen as right to disengage entirely from society but based on a perception of an extreme imbalance between powerful corporations and individuals, and that individuals should have more rights in this relationship, including the right to take back their information. For Killock the issue of one of power balance and the loss of control over how our identities work. He was concerned that are getting more fragmented regulation, with two more commissioners outlined in the freedom bill.

Chris Pounder suggested that the right to be forgotten is not a privacy issue, but a publishing one, and that mistaking it for the former is misguided. He argued that what is in the public domain cannot be considered private and that we are dealing with data protection rather than privacy. He stated that a right to be forgotten would not work unless it could be made international (and that he didn’t expect this to happen).

Georgie Nelson from Which? Spoke about a study the organisation had recently conducted on consumer attitudes towards targeted behaviour advertising, comparing this with social networking as one of two ways of monitising personal information online. She pointed out the need for choice and transparency, but that consumers generally didn’t have enough information to be able to answer key questions. She believe this was eroding trust online and keeping some people from using social networks.

Q&A session

Questions were asked about the balances between education and legislation (linked to personal information and for example, job applications). The Earl of Errol suggested there was a need for people to be more tolerant in judging others. Chris Pounder suggested that transparency and rights to be informed of decision making processes (for example in job applications) were better protections than rights to object on DP grounds. There were also questions bout terminology regarding the right to be forgotten, and its balances with freedom of speech. One questioner suggested that naivety online was simply no defence. Tessa Mayes suggested that social networks were akin to private members clubs, or chatham house rules in which participants agreed to abide by some informational norms. This didn’t go down well with elements of the twitter conversation, but it has some potential merit. It’s reminiscent of Nissenbaum’s contextual and normative account of privacy and information. Caspar Bowden suggested that facebook was not the substantial problem, rather the multitude of other, less well known data processing which had no mechanisms for redress. The Earl of Errol suggested that rather than a right to be forgotten a relaxation of the right to object related to publication to a criteria of distress rather than having to prove substantial harm, would allow a balancing of interests in privacy/publication under law and some sort of tribunal system. Tessa Mayes distinctions between being a data controller, and commenting on the data of others wasn’t particularly clear and didn’t seem to have much of a basis in information theory. In response to question about educating publics, Chris Pounder suggested this was difficult primarily because people did not experience privacy, but only the lack of privacy, and when this happened it was too late.

Keynote - Baroness Buscome, from the Press Complaints Committee argued that there was always a public need for a system of speedy and hopefully cost free redress. The PCC, she said, has stood the test of time because it serves everybody. Indepedently enforced self-reguation is a workable model, with its success measure by the invisible, and reflected in the articles which do not appear. The public apparently prefers swift apologies rather than heavy fines which require lengthier processes. This process requires a significant amount of buy in, and rules agree with the media not imposed from above. Regulating online conduct is problematic. The idea that privacy is not a social norm is not true, and the online environment possibly provides an opportunity to better define (through settings and the like) exactly what we want public and what we need to keep private. Journalists now have the added resource of non-journalists. The Baroness advocated a voluntary code and guidance developed from case law. The PCC test for the use of internet published material contains five points

1) quality of information – how private is it in itself

2) context of the information (in what way was it published?)

3) who uploaded the information or consented to its upload

4) how widely available is it already? (what privacy settings is it behind?)

5) what is the public interest.

It is permissible to use information behind privacy settings in some circumstances, however, only if the public interest overrides the individual interest in privacy. The law cannot be expected to keep up with both the market and technology developments.

Panel Discussion

Peter Murray from the National Union of Journalists spoke about the privacy tensions between uncovering misconduct on the part of the powerful and projecting the work of journalists. This included the danger to the journalistic defence of sources presented by routine monitoring by the state through surveillance technologies. He also argued that the Freedom bill does nothing to remove much of the routine surveillance and that rights to privacy are therefore still under serious threat.

Clarence Mitchell, spoke about his experience as legal counsel for the McCann family. His perspective was that it was easy for people to become journalists online without knowing the law, but that this wasn’t a protection. The target for legal action was when online comment was taken up by more structured journalists. People generally needed to be made more aware of their responsibilities in an area of mass publishing.

John Naughton, professor of the public understand of science, Open University argued that the idea of right to oblivion was completely inoperable the way it was currently framed, and that it was not a productive line of thought. The bigger problem is state surveillance. He suggested that the net sat somewhere between Orwell (we will be destroyed by what we fear) and Huxley (we will be destroyed by what we love) and that it could do both. He drew attention to the implications of the media ecosystem in which more computing was conducted in the cloud, with faustian bargains for free services. Secondly that mass of ordinary people can act as publishers, without understand what this means, and can all become public figures when on Facebook. This was an architectural problem, but there was an option to hold our own data on our own servers and set rules to manage it. This might be too geeky for everybody however.

David Allen Green (Jackof Kent) spoke about his own method of journalism, which he felt was only possible with the advent of social media. He put forth a typology of three privacy situations. 1) public statements, 2) situations in which an individual may or may not have a subjective or objective expectation of privacy, 3) situations in which an individual has a substantive legal right to privacy enforcible in a court (these are rare). There is no Tort of privacy invasion, an actual act of invasion of privacy is not actionable, only the misuse of personal information, not its acquisition. The question is therefore what to do in the middle situation? With a potential right that should be respected by others. Spoke about the Sarah Baskerville case and the ‘character assassination job’ by the Daily Mail and argued that just because a single tweet might be retweetable, it did not justify a paper digging through all previous tweets. He felt newspapers could not automatically use online information, even if it was not protected by privacy settings. Republication must show still show respect for individual privacy. He concluded that on the basis of this case, and its handling by the PCC, he would not longer advise people with a complaint to bother with the PCC, but rather hire lawyers and threaten a privacy suit.

The Q&A session at this point mainly focused on different interpretation of the Baskerville case and the extent to which twitter should be understood as a public medium. Because tweets can be re-tweeted without consent, it was argued, it cannot be considered private. There was also some substantial critique of permission creep and data retention creep under RIPA by Professor Naughton in response to a question (I think from an ACPO representative) about the protections supposedly built into RIPA. The costs and benefits of RIPA were never publicly discussed. There was also a discussion about what it means to be a journalist (if everybody can publish). This included some observations that a lot of the European model is based upon ‘certified’ journalists, a model which does not apply in the UK. The Earl of Errol conclude this session with an observation that any approach that involve criminalising many more people was probably the wrong way to go.

Keynote – Christopher Graham, Information Commissioner gave a talk about data protection challenges online which was fairly consistent with ICO publications and communications of recent months and years. What was interesting was quite how close it maps to a responsibilisation agenda in which individuals are placed at the heart of managing their own personal information, with a responsibility to ‘take steps they need to to keep themselves safe and secure in the online world’. What I hadn’t picked up before was how wedded the Information Commissioner is to the idea that the market will regulate and provide a competitive advantage to online firms that provide better privacy protection. I’m honestly sceptical about this – I just don’t think online service users get the feedback from the privacy costs and harms clearly enough to be making economic decisions about it that are sufficiently reflected in the market (this is also why privacy is a hard discussion topic). He stated that he doesn’t think that personal information management is too geeky for most people, and believes it is ‘coming’. He did identify opportunities in those technologies that allow greater control and specification of personal information handling. Graham suggested that not all privacy is data protection, and not all data protection is privacy; that what the law is sometimes differs from what we think it should be, and what people want; and that good practice is more than strict compliance with data protection act. The commissioner provided notice of new electronic communications regulation on data breach disclosure and tracking cookies coming in about 40 days time. EU institutions expect changes in the law to lead to changes in behaviour around informed consent, and believe it very desirably to give more control and transparency to the consumer. ICO recognises the difficulties. The ‘Personal Information Online code of practice’ is not a self-regulatory document but guidance written with data controllers in mind. It attempts to clear address questions such as ‘is an IP address personal information’. The Data Protection act is seen as showing its age, and Christopher Graham made the point that he should not be attempting to be King Canute (he had a picture of him on his office wall) or King Lear.

Panel Session

Philip James from legal firm Lewis Silkin had many more points to make that the time for his speech allowed. In brief, he suggested that at the moment ICO’s statements were ‘guidance in the form of a code’ and that they might be better placed as one or the other. He also suggested the possibility of a privacy association, promoting privacy ‘leaders’.

Bob Warner from the Communications Consumer Panel spoke about a research report they are currently finalising, which might be worth looking at when its published. The report looks at how consumders feel about making their data accessible. 6 out of 10 were concerned about their personal data, which increased when using mobile technology. The consumer council don’t wan tto see this undermining consumer confidence and preventing some people from using the benefits of the internet. So far, so Digital Britain. The interesting bit, that fits with the ICO statements on responsibility (and the whole identity management thing) is that 70% of consumers in the study believed that they carried the primary responsibility for securing their own data, with companies second, and government and regulators 3^rd and 4^th. Bob Warner felt this was a sign of a relatively mature understanding of the difficulty of the area. One might be tempted to see it as a result of several years of people being told they needed to manage and protect their personal data. The effect though, according to Warner, is that companies need to do more than keep the regulators happy – they need to be more open with the customers, as they see themselves as the decision makers with primary responsibility.Customers understand that they are making a deal when they provide information for services. Warner identified three conditions for consumer empowerment – firstly informed judgement about data disclosure, secondly an easy means on controlling this, and finally confidence that companies will respect data in the way agreed. He argued that we would need all three of these for a mature e-commerce environment. Companies need to promote a greater understanding of why personal data is collected and the benefits it will bring.

Caspar Bowden, speaking in a personal capacity rather than as a Microsoft representative was critical of the belief that market forces would correct privacya buses. He was sceptical of this and suggested that he’d seen data that the average impact on share price from a privacy scandal/abuse issue was about two weeks (I don’t have this written down, and it might have been two months – still relatively short). He was also sceptical about the capacity of increased consumer awareness to prevent privacy issues. The speed and development of the issue puts individuals in a very difficult postion in regard to assessing privacy risk, meaning they can rarely have enough information to make sensible decisions and to genuinely choose the level of privacy risk they are happy with. This should place more weight on the regulator. However there is a problem where a regulator (ICO) does not engage with an issue because it does not belive it is of concern to the public. Caspar’s belief is that the chieft weakness of the current data protection act is that the meaning of personal data is a problem, it is much narrower than the European definition, including only personally identifiable information identifiable by the data controller. It ignore the potential for collusion to reidentify. ICO has been silent on this issue, and Caspar believes that the position of the UK government will be influential in the EU renegotiations of updated data protection. Caspar spoke about how the computer science of reidentification has moved on in the past five years where what might have counted as ‘satisfactory anonymisation’ no longer was, given the relative ease with which a rich data set with inter-personal connections in it could be re-identified. He spoke about a data set of all UK telephone calls exported to the US with only this cursory level on anonymisation, which had not been reported on.

The final Q&A session included a response by the information commissioner highlighting an upcoming anonymisation seminar to address the issues Caspar Bowden had brought up but that also they the ICO role to enforce the law as it currently is, rather than as they might wish it to be. There was a discussion about the level of consumer awareness of privacy issues, and how this might be rising (although perhaps not with young people). There was also discussion about the relative weight and importance (or lip service) given to data minimisation. ICO identified child protection as a very important area for them. Finally, there was discussion about the difference between EU directives (which require interpretation into national law) and EU regulations (which become applicable in UK law directly).

The Earl of Erroll concluded the session with a suggestion that there was probably no solution to these issues, but that we had to work at them anyway, and there was a dynamic tension rather than a balance. The speed of change was just starting, and we were always going to have both too few and too many rules. He again repeated his call for increased tolerance as we increasingly learn more about one another that we might otherwise have liked.

VOME Artists Workshop

2011-03-06T14:27:00.003Z

Watching and Being Watched - CFP - Postgraduate conference at University of York

2011-03-01T11:36:00.001Z

CALL FOR PAPERS - WATCHING AND BEING WATCHED, The University of York Centre for Modern Studies (CModS) Post-Graduate Conference, Saturday 18th June 2011

Watching and being watched are experiences that constantly shape modern experience. This one-day interdisciplinary post-graduate conference will explore themes of observation and surveillance across the arts, humanities and social sciences from a range of literary, philosophical, artistic, sociological, theoretical and historical perspectives.

The CModS PG forum invite abstracts for papers from post-graduates working in any of the humanities and social sciences disciplines. We would welcome interdisciplinary papers, and submissions from panels. Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

Ethics and anonymity on the internet; theories of the 'other'; interrogation and interaction; the non-voluntarist vs. voluntarist approach; changing attitudes to the 'surveillance society', including cameras, ID cards, databases; small government / big society; spying and surveillance (modern and pre-modern; in popular culture; in terms of gender); masquerade; street life and its representation; ethics of witness; documentary, realism, reality television; and social networking.

Abstracts for papers should be 300 words in length, and the deadline for submissions is Monday 4th April 2011 at 5.00pm. Please send abstracts to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk - if you would like more information about the conference or the forum, don't hesitate to contact us at this address, or visit our website http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/postgraduate-forum/

Cafe Scientifique

2011-02-23T13:04:00.003Z

On Monday night I gave a talk at the Leamington Spa Cafe Scientifique on the topic of online privacy and surveillance - although mainly about the various reasons why privacy online is hard (but important). CS is a public event, intended for anybody who is interested in science issues. It was quite enjoyable to do, and I managed to make an audible recording of my bit (although not the stimulating discussion that followed afterwards).

Cafe Scientifique talk (.wav)

Journal of Information Technology and Politics

2011-01-04T12:12:00.003Z

This post is just a little mention for the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, which has a new issue out. The journal is the offical journal of the Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. The aims of the journal are to:

Promote a better understanding of how evolving information technologies interact with political and governmental processes and outcomes at many levels.
Encourage the development of governmental and political processes that employ IT in novel and interesting ways, and
Foster the development of new information technology tools and theories that can capture, analyze, and report on these developments.

There are currently two freely available articles from the current issue, and also you can read the top five most-downloaded articles for free.

New Issue of Surveillance and Society out

2010-12-20T11:31:00.002Z

There's a new issue of Surveillance and Society just out (Volume 8, number 2) on Surveillance and Empowerment. It makes interesting reading.

My tiny part in this is a book review (look, down there, at the bottom) of David Lyon's 'Identifying Citizens'.

Delivering Public Services Online - VOME Workshop

2010-12-10T17:29:00.000Z

This Tuesday, the Visualisation and Other Methods of Expression project on which I work hosted a workshop at the British Museum. The topic of the workshop ‘Delivering Public Services Online’ resulted from the work the project has been doing with public service providers, especially in Sunderland, and some of the work we’ll continue to do in future. It was intended to examine some of the implications, especially surround privacy, for a general shift towards delivering public services online. This was occurring in a shifting environment.

One of the Speakers included Ollie Bray, the National Advisor for Learning and Technology Futures at Learning and Teaching Scotland. His talk touched on the technology available to open up learning. He made the argument that kids today are different to previous generations, as a result of social change and digital technology. They have access to any information that they want (although maybe not knowledge) but they may not be emotionally ready for this information. The role of the educator is to promote trust, but also to protect children. Schools can be ill-prepared for these responsibilities (how many kids have net access at home, what is a social network) There are problems around language – for 11-12yr olds, ‘friend’ is somebody you have made a connection with online – pretty much anybody with a shared interest, not necessarily the old definition. Language shifts over time – concepts such as ‘e-learning’ and ‘e-safety’ are a problem in themselves (in the same way that an ‘ICT area’ in a school is) in that they suggest ICT is separate from children’s lives – we should talk about safety and learning. Ollie also spoke about the use of games in education. He referred to a Futurelab study on this. Games are competitive, but non-threatening.

Ollies believes that with regard to technology ‘solution is in the problem’ which is currently an under-investment in technology and in teacher training. Technology infiltrates all areas of lives apart from formal education. Teachers need to get involved in informal information gathering. In speaking about the keys skills that he thought young people needed, he identified the notion of the digital footprint, including the tension between privacy and having a profile (a necessity for some careers, especially music, art, design etc), and that privacy doesn’t exist any longer, in the form that it might have in the past. Ollie advocated a broader critical literacy, helping young people to recognise persuasion and assess the reliability of information and credibility (which is in national curricula), but that fully includes digital critical literacy. Wikipedia was identified as a good tool for teaching this, due to the notes and change logs.

Ollie also identified some of the barriers to achieving this integrated, critical use of technology in education: 1) fear that children will misuse technology – which they will, but you have to teach responsible use, 2) need for training in the technology – but the technology is getting easier to use, 3) time taken to teach information technology – but if properly used, tech can save time, especially in engagement, 4) digital divides – the real digital divide is between the west and rest of the world, generally, as a society, we are in a good place. 5) motivation is the biggest barrier and often occurs at the highest level of organisations – the recent teaching white paper didn’t even mention information technology.

New Publication: The Terrorism of the Other

2010-12-10T16:13:00.002Z

An article that I co-wrote with Dr Cerwyn Moore, of POLSIS, University of Birmingham has just been published in Critical Studies on Terrorism. It's titled 'The Terrorism of the Other: Toward and contrapuntal reading of terrorism in India', and available (behind the paywall) at Informaworld

The abstract is as follows:

This article advances an argument for a contrapuntal reading of terrorism using the case study of India. In recent years, the work of Edward Said has received some attention in the field of international relations. As yet, however, most readings of terrorism, either in its traditional form of terrorism studies or in the guise of critical terrorism studies, have not addressed the interface between terrorism and security, drawing on the work of Said. We take his work as a point of departure, enabling the analysis in this article to critique the 'clash of civilisations' thesis whilst also exploring the relationship between mass casualty terrorism and crowded places. In doing so, we draw attention to the instantiation of a series of attacks in India. The final section of this article pulls the analysis together so as to question the relationship between poverty and resilience.

Surveillance and Privacy Christmas List

2010-11-30T11:53:00.004Z

It's snowing outside, it's nearly December, and the Christmas lights have been up for weeks. Alongside this seasonal joviality, I've been noticing some odd trends in toys and games recently. They're showing signs of reflecting our cultural obsession with all things surveillance. Let's see what we're putting on Big Santa's christmas list this year (remember kids, he knows if you've been naughty or nice).

Playmobil Airport Security.

Almost a classic, being available for a couple of years now. Your children can exerience the fun of being a (minimum wage) airport security worker. Coming next year, the playmobile nudotron scanner and enhanced pat-down kit, which a lot of people are already exited about.

Lego Police Car

Lego have had police for a long time, but it's good to see them keeping up to date with modern surveillance technology. This patrol officer has a handy speed camera! Thinking about resistance to this? Motorists Against Detection playset sold seperately. Unfortunately the police helicopter is being phased out and replaced with an unmanned drone, boo!

Webcam Barbie

Barbie updates her traditional christmas role of reinforcing gender stereotypes and creating body-image problems with this new variant, incorporating a web cam in her...decolletage. Probably not the sort of empowering exhibitionism written about here.

Spy Gear Lie Detector Kit

Spy Gear Lie Detector Kit - "Whether you're working for the police or the government you can now use this fantastic lie detector test to find out whether your suspect is guilty! A perfect toy for the budding police officer; it also encourages imaginative play and creative thinking. Find out who's telling the truth and who's not by giving your suspect a lie detector test. Attach the sensor to your suspect's finger. Ask tough questions to really make'em squirm. The indicator lights light up when your suspect isn't telling the truth-busted. Batteries required: 2 x AA (not included). For ages 6 years and over."

The best thing about this toy? It doesn't matter if it actually works or not, just like the real thing!

So that's presents for Michael, Helen, Hille and Andy sorted. But on a more serious note, I'm not sure how I feel about these. Intuitively, it feels weird to give kids something that encourages them to play-act being security agents, or to put their friends through an interrogation (and the barbie-thing is just a bit mental). On the other hands, these things are part of our contemporary culture and I'm sure kids will want to engage with that. These toys may also be labratories for subversion and resistance, and who knows what use might be made of them in creative and imaginative play.

We might also think about toys and games that might help young people to make sense of their current environment in playful ways. There's some stuff out there already, for example The Curfew game from Channel 4. But what would 'my first encryption set' look like?

I don't know, why can't kids have an old fashioned toys? Like a telescope for example.

New Publication: Public Sector Engagment In Online Identity Management

2010-11-26T12:02:00.002Z

A paper I co-wrote with Debi Ashenden has just been published in the journal Identity in the Information Society. As befitting such a topic, it is available through Open Access, so should be free and accessible to all.

You can get the paper here.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 3rd Identity in the Information Society Workshop, held in Rome earlier in the year, and participants at that workshop were helpful in refining the arguments. It looks at the way that the government is attempting to engage with the public around the issues of online identity management - incorporating privacy, personal information managament and some basic information security. It looks at websites such as Get Safe Online, and ID fraud prevention advice. Our broad practical conclusions are that this isn't particularly effective or useful, evidences a narrow perception of the 'user' and is primarily didactic.

Theoretically, the paper makes use of governmentality theory to understand the role of government as a provider of advice, guidance, and 'best practice', through wide coalitions of actors held together through shared discourses.

ECIW 2011 - cyber conflict mini-track

2010-11-11T11:25:00.002Z

10th European Conference on Information Warfare and Security
Institute of Cybernetics at the Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
7-8 July 2011

Conference Chair: Vahur Kotkas, Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
Programme Chair: Rain Ottis, Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, Tallinn, Estonia

CALL FOR PAPERS, Action Research, CaseStudies, Work in Progress/Posters, PhD Research, Round Table Proposals, non-academic Contributions and Product Demonstrations

Mini Track: Cyber Conflict
Mini Track Chair: Debi Ashenden Defence Academy, Cranfield University, UK

There have been a number of calls recently for research, debate and public engagement on cyber conflict in order to better understand the domain. Even deciding on the title for this track is problematic – should it be called cyber security or cyber war? In the end we’ve opted for cyber conflict to encompass both but no doubt views will differ and we would like to give those views an airing.

The argument is made that without such discussion any policy formulated will be narrow and short-term. There is a recognised need for research that crosses disciplinary boundaries if we are to develop an intellectual framework for discussing cyber conflict. The aim of this track is to stimulate discussion, to start to explore strategic issues and to encourage debate that crosses legal, political, ethical and technological disciplines

Submission details are given below. Topics for submissions to this mini track may include, but are not limited to:
The lexicon of Cyber
The problem of attribution
The differences between attack and exploitation
Citizen involvement and patriotic hackers
International partnerships
Other topics

As well as full academic papers, the following submissions are also welcomed:
Research in Progress: Researchers may submit current projects whilst they are still in progress
Case Study Submissions: Submissions should be written to publishable standards.
Poster Submissions: Welcomed in any of the areas identified in the Call for Papers.
Round Table Proposals: Topical subjects proposed for discussion.

This call for papers and further information about the conference is available online at:
http://academic-conferences.org/eciw/eciw2011/eciw11-call-papers.htm

Royal Academy of Engineering: Privacy and Prejudice

2010-10-29T14:56:00.002+01:00

The Royal Academy of Engineering has released the report from it's research project into young people's attitudes towards towards electronic patient records. Privacy and Prejudice (PDF).

The research used a novel methodology which included touring a play ('Breathing Country') that engaged with the topic of electronic patient records, their potential implications and consequences, as well as some of their positive uses in research and medical development. This was supported by community researchers - groups of young people who were supported in conducting their own research in their schools, a 'deliberative conference' and focus groups. The play incorporated electronic voting technology to pose questions to the audiance before, during and after the play. The report suggests that this methodology was able to get participants to engage with topics more deeply, to provide information without being too dry, and that it tended to develop rather than substantially change attitudes.

The report finds that privacy is highly important to young people, even if they do post things on Facebook. Concerns primarily revolve around issues of control of personal information and how young people can exercise this. Facebook is not seen as violating their privacy because there is a choice to engage, and a choice about what to post online. Unease over sharing information is related to the type of information, and who might have access to it, as well as to the consequences from sharing information.

The report finds an initially low level of understanding of EPI and some assumption that health information is already kept electronically or online, as well as low awareness of current confidentiality rights. There were also many concerns linked to the security of a records system, including human falliability (both in terms of a lack of skill, and a tendency to pry). Control over one's health information includes being kept up to date with the workings of the system and how best to use it. This requires a communication strategy across a range of media, including those that young people are likely to engage with, whilst at the same time listening and responding to the specific concerns that young people have identified. Young people in the study were happier to trust the NHS with their data than the government as whole. The 'wrong hands' into which data might fall included commerical and private companies, advertising agencies, people who wanted to sell the data, insurance companies, potential employers, the media, and sometimes government. Interactions between young people and their parents were of particular importance.

If this report gives an accurate perspectives on the concerns of young people over EPR, when they are honestly and openly engaged with, then I'm quite impressed by the issues that the young people who participated in this process engaged with, and the level of maturity in the questions they asked (for example, concern about records being permanent and being 'labelled for life). Based on this, I'm included to support their calls for control of their own data at a young age, rather than this being the sole preserve of their parents until age 18 (all participants from 14+ felt they were old enough to handle their own data).

Identity Documents Bill

2010-10-06T13:15:00.004+01:00

The identity documents bill is now through to the House of Lords. A few months back I wrote and submitted a memorandum to the Public Bill Committee of the House of Commons as it was examining the bill. Now that they committee has finished with the bill, they've published all the memoranda here (scroll down). I'm in august company - Liberty, Justice, The Equality and Human Rights Commission, ICO, and the LSE Identity Project - oh, and some people who want the £30 they paid for a card back). I'm not totally sure about the impact of this, but I think its very important for academics with an informed perspective on an issue currently going through parliament to contribute to evidence processes. Especially, if we continue to make a claim for public funding of research.

My submission is here. Generally, there's some interesting process documents scattered around these parliamentary webpages, downside is that a lot of the committee discussion has been about the entitlement of people who signed up for a card to their money back, some maintenance of the ID card system until their cards expire, or some similar special pleading. Part of this would be the structure of the committee, which is to look at the legality and appropriateness of the legistlation set before them - not to come up with innovative solutions to contemporary identity issues.

Recent Twittering

2010-09-21T10:26:00.004+01:00

I started using twitter a few months back (@dbarnardwills) Since then I've found it useful for keeping up to date with things happening in the technology, privacy, and political worlds. Not perfect - I've not given up journal alerts, or subscriptions to UK Parliament email, or the Surveillance JISC mailing list - but it has certainly introduced me to things I might not have otherwise come across. The key to this seems to be finding the right people to follow. There is no one idea person, but to my mind they would combine knowledge of a subject area, unique or specialist sources of information, and some form of filtering. I like to follow specialists the best. You can find out who I follow here: https://twitter.com/DBarnardWills/following

A good proportion of my own twitter feed is retweets that fit with my own interests: Surveillance, privacy, technology and politics, international and cyber-security. There's also the occasional one that happens when the touch-screen on my phone is a little imprecise... I see the main function here being to collate information that I think interesting, as well as adding in material from other sources, that others might find useful. As an academic working in the above areas, I'm a specialist, and I use twitter as such. I also find it useful to retweet when I'm away from the office, so that I can highlight the content to myself later.

The twitter feed is summarised over on the right of this page, but retweets don't always show.
The following is a summary of some of the recent material that useing twitter has exposed me to:

There's been quite a bit of interesting material on the surveillance of young people online. We're working in this area as part of the broader privacy and consent project. News in this area has included a new Wall Street Journal investigation. This looked at the most popular children's websites and examined the amount of behavioural tracking and targeted advertising they were doing - finding that that children were more under surveillance online than users of a typical website. This follows a study (conducted by a net security company) that teens lack privacy skills. I've got some ideas on why this might be, arising from the research I've just finished on 'e-safety education', but for the time being there's a great resource now available on active citizenship for young people.

In Privacy, there's a guide to translating a privacy policy (which is something else we're looking at). A new website called 'Dark Patterns' aims to demonstrate the underhand persuasive techniques used online to try and influence web users into signing up for, buying, or giving away more personal information, than they really wanted to. In related news, apparently web privacy start up companies are having a hard time getting people to pay for privacy. Also, a burglary ring in New Hampshire, using facebook to work out when people are not at home.

Very importantly, the Future for Privacy forum has produced a list of 'privacy papers for policy makers' - the necessary reading for people making political decisions about privacy (and academics in that field). Patient Privacy rights has released a paper arguing the case for informed consent in regard to patient privacy. Also, here's a potentially interesting paper on an 'automated privacy dictionary' that attempts to identify privacy markers in discourse. There's also a new journal coming from Oxford Journals next year 'International Data Privacy Law'.

In Cybersecurity, 4Chan's Anonymous takes down anti-piracy websites, whilst US Cybersecurity plans lag due to legal and privacy concerns. This is at the same time as the head of the NSA and US cybersecurity chief highlights the importance of privacy. Here's a short article on differing approaches to web censorship, and

In UK politics, there are plans for a crowdsourced map of government public sector budget cuts.

Conferences and calls for papers

2010-09-17T13:15:00.007+01:00

Given that I managed to miss the very interesting looking Political Economy of Surveillance conference at the Open University last week, here's a list of three up and coming conferences and calls for papers on surveillance, and surveillance-related topics.

Covert Cultures: Art and the Secret State 1911-1989
4-5th February 2011

The early years of the twentieth century saw the birth of the age of the covert state. Crises of international relations, nationalisms and revolutionary politics led governments to create secret institutions whose activities would long remain hidden from citizens, while those same governments sought through stricter legislation to map and control the flow of their own sensitive information. As the century progressed, espionage and surveillance moved to the centre of popular culture, while real intelligence agencies became more advanced and more powerful, using cultural
production as a weapon in the ideological battles of the Cold War. More recently, covert activity has returned to the public consciousness, with espionage, secret weapons programmes, torture and civil liberties again at the forefront of debates on the conduct of the modern state.

This renewed interest has coincided with the centenary of British intelligence services, and has been well served by the flourishing field of intelligence history. Yet the relation of this new, clandestine world to art has remained relatively under-examined. From the spy novels of the First World War to the CIA’s secret funding of art exhibitions and Encounter magazine in the 1950s, visual art, film and literature have acted in complicity with, as well as in resistance to, the aims of secret state action. This conference – which will take place in the centenary year of the 1911 Official Secrets Act – hopes to investigate the terms on which art and intelligence meet, and the cultural ramifications of that interaction. We invite twenty-minute papers from researchers in the fields of intelligence history, art history, film studies, geography, sociology and English and European literatures.

Topics of discussion will include, but are not limited to:

- Restricted Spaces
- Cultural Complicity and Manipulation
- The Visual Culture of the Secret Services
- Berlin: Intelligence East and West
- Defection
- Torture
- Surveillance
- Spy Fever and Public Paranoia

Submission guidelines: Declarations of interest with an abstract of no more than 300 words, and accompanied by a brief resume, should be sent to the organisers at covertcultures@gmail.com as soon as possible and no later than Friday 29 October 2010. Accepted papers will be announced on Friday 5 November 2010. Finalised papers should be submitted by Friday 7 January 2011 and will be circulated to participants prior to the event. The organisers will also actively solicit papers.

4th International Conference, Computers, Privacy and Data Protection
European Data Protection: In Good Health?
25-27 January 2011

Computers, Privacy and Data Protection – CPDP 2011 is a three-day conference organised by academics coming from all over Europe, with the ambition of becoming Europe’s most important forum for academics, practitioners, policy-makers and civil society where they can meet, exchange ideas and discuss emerging issues of information technology, privacy, data protection and law.

CPDP is organised by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Namur, the Universiteit van Tilburg, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique and the Fraunhofer Institut für System und Innovationsforschung.

SUBJECT

CPDP has progressively been growing since its inception both in terms of speakers, participants and panels and the ambition for its upcoming fourth consecutive edition is higher than ever. Determined to exceed the positive feedbacks received from speakers and participants, which range from ‘excellent’ to ‘brilliant agenda keeping’, this year’s conference offers twelve panels, a pre-conference, a philosophy reading-panel and a PhD-evening. The previous edition of the PhD evening proved to be one of the most intellectually stimulating moments of the entire conference, with the active participation of key speakers and participants of the conference.

The regular panels include both the presentation of stakeholders’ agenda and intense debates around key issues in the field of privacy, data protection, technology and society. In addition, specific sessions will be dedicated to the issues of e-health, surveillance and law-enforcement, privacy in on-line service models and data breaches notifications. Finally, the philosophical panel will focus on privacy and due process after the computational turn.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The CPDP Scientific Committee invites position and academic papers from PhD students, post-docs and early career researchers in the fields of law, political sciences, social sciences and computer sciences for the PhD evening session, which will take place on 26 January 2011.

Suggested topics include, but are not restricted to:

-Review of the Data Protection Directive (directive 95/46/EC)
-Data Retention
-Behavioural Profiling
-Private Firms’ privacy strategies -Information Security
-Surveillance and Strategies of Counter-Surveillance
-Privacy Advocacy -Data Protection and Law Enforcement
-Ambient Intelligence
-Multidisciplinary Studies in Privacy.

For position papers, authors must send the entire paper and identifying information by 16 November 2010. Notification will be provided by the 15 December 2010.
For full papers, authors must provide a 200-word abstract by 16 November 2010. Notification of acceptance will be provided by 30 November 2010, and accepted full papers are due by 21 December 2010.

Position and academic papers will be peer reviewed by members of the Scientific Committee and other independent reviewers (where necessary). In order to guarantee the process of double-blind review, identifying information should be removed. Please send in a separate Word attachment with the following information: Title, affiliation and author’s name and contact details.

Abstracts, contributions and identifying information should be sent by electronic mail in word documents to Ronald Leenes (Tilburg University) r.e.leenes@uvt.nl

Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: An international workshop
May 12-15, 2011, University of Toronto, Canada

Digitally mediated surveillance (DMS) is an increasingly prevalent, but still largely invisible, aspect of daily life. As we work, play and negotiate public and private spaces, on-line and off, we produce a growing stream of personal digital data of interest to unseen others. CCTV cameras hosted by private and public actors survey and record our movements in public space, as well as in the workplace. Corporate interests track our behaviour as we navigate both social and transactional cyberspaces, data mining our digital doubles and packaging users as commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Governments continue to collect personal information on-line with unclear guidelines for retention and use, while law enforcement increasingly use internet technology to monitor not only criminals but activists and political dissidents as well, with worrisome implications for democracy.

This international workshop brings together researchers, advocates, activists and artists working on the many aspects of cyber-surveillance, particularly as it pervades and mediates social life. This workshop will appeal to those interested in the surveillance aspects of topics such as the following, especially as they raise broader themes and issues that characterize the cyber-surveillance terrain more widely:

social networking (practices & platforms)
search engines
behavioural advertising/targeted marketing
monitoring and analysis techniques (facial recognition, RFID, video analytics, data mining)
Internet surveillance (deep packet inspection, backbone intercepts)
resistance (actors, practices, technologies)

A central concern is to better understand DMS practices, making them more publicly visible and democratically accountable. To do so, we must comprehend what constitutes DMS, delineating parameters for research and analysis. We must further explore the way citizens and consumers experience, engage with and respond to digitally mediated surveillance. Finally, we must develop alliances, responses and counterstrategies to deal with the ongoing creep of digitally mediated surveillance in everyday life.

The workshop adopts a novel structure, mainly comprising a series of themed panels organized to address compelling questions arising around digitally mediated surveillance that cut across the topics listed above. Some illustrative examples:

We regularly hear about ‘cyber-surveillance’, ‘cyber-security’, and ‘cyber-threats’. What constitutes cyber-surveillance, and what are the empirical and theoretical difficulties in establishing a practical understanding of cyber-surveillance? Is the enterprise of developing a definition useful, or condemned to analytic confusion?
What are the motives and strategies of key DMS actors (e.g. surveillance equipment/systems/ strategy/”solutions” providers; police/law enforcement/security agencies; data aggregation brokers; digital infrastructure providers); oversight/regulatory/data protection agencies; civil society organizations, and user/citizens?
What are the relationships among key DMS actors (e.g. between social networking site providers)? Between marketers (e.g. Facebook and DoubleClick)? Between digital infrastructure providers and law enforcement (e.g. lawful access)?
What business models are enterprises pursuing that promote DMS in a variety of areas, including social networking, location tracking, ID’d transactions etc. What can we expect of DMS in the coming years? What new risks and opportunities are likely?
What do people know about the DMS practices and risks they are exposed to in everyday life? What are people’s attitudes to these practices and risks?
What are the politics of DMS; who is active? What are their primary interests, what are the possible lines of contention and prospective alliances? What are the promising intervention points and alliances that can promote a more democratically accountable surveillance?
What is the relationship between DMS and privacy? Are privacy policies legitimating DMS? Is a re-evaluation of traditional information privacy principles required in light of new and emergent online practices, such as social networking and others?
Do deep packet inspection and other surveillance techniques and practices of internet service providers (ISP) threaten personal privacy?
How do new technical configurations promote surveillance and challenge privacy? For example, do cloud computing applications pose a greater threat to personal privacy than the client/server model? How do mobile devices and geo-location promote surveillance of individuals?
How do the multiple jurisdictions of internet data storage and exchange affect the application of national/international data protection laws?
What is the role of advocacy/activist movements in challenging cyber-surveillance?

In conjunction with the workshop there will be a combination of public events on the theme of cyber-surveillance in everyday life:

poster session, for presenting and discussing provocative ideas and works in progress
public lecture or debate
art exhibition/installation(s)

We invite 500 word abstracts of research papers, position statements, short presentations, works in progress, posters, demonstrations, installations. Each abstract should:

address explicitly one or more “burning questions” related to digitally-mediated surveillance in everyday life, such as those mentioned above.

indicate the form of intended contribution (i.e. research paper, position statement, short presentation, work in progress, poster, demonstration, installation)

The workshop will consist of about 40 participants, at least half of whom will be presenters listed on the published program. Funds will be available to support the participation of representatives of civil society organizations.

Accepted research paper authors will be invited to submit a full paper (~6000 words) for presentation and discussion in a multi-party panel session. All accepted submissions will be posted publicly. A selection of papers will be invited for revision and academic publication in a special issue of an open-access, refereed journal such as Surveillance and Society.

In order to facilitate a more holistic conversation, one that reaches beyond academia, we also invite critical position statements, short presentations, works-in-progress, interactive demonstrations, and artistic interpretations of the meaning and import of cyber-surveillance in everyday life. These will be included in the panel sessions or grouped by theme in concurrent ‘birds-of-a-feather’ sessions designed to tease out, more interactively and informally, emergent questions, problems, ideas and future directions. This BoF track is meant to be flexible and contemporary, welcoming a variety of genres.

See also an accompanying Call for Annotated Bibliographies, aimed at providing background materials useful to workshop participants as well as more widely.

Timeline:

2010:

Oct. 1: Abstracts (500 words) for research papers, position statements, and other ‘birds-of-a-feather’ submissions.Nov. 15: Notification to authors of accepted research papers, position statements, etc. Abstracts posted to web.

2011:

Feb. 1: Abstracts (500 words) for posters;Mar. 1: Notification to authors of accepted posters;Apr. 1: Full research papers (5-6000 words) due, and posted to web; May 12-15 Workshop

Sponsored by: The New Transparency – Surveillance and Social Sorting.

Organizing Committee: Colin Bennett, Andrew Clement, Kate Milberry & Chris Parsons.

Identity Theft self-help

2010-09-02T15:18:00.002+01:00

Came across this kit in the stationary shop today. I've yet to open it and find out what sensible advice it has about sorting out identity theft, but I'm looking forward to it. It had been reduced down to 99p, and there was quite a stack of them available.

online privacy - chanel 4 news

2010-08-19T09:39:00.002+01:00

Dylan Sharpe from Big Brother Watch and blogger Ollie Olanipekun have a chat about online privacy on Chanel 4 News, in response to comments from Eric Schmidt about young people changing their identities to avoid embarrassing things they posted online.

danah boyd and Jeff Jarvis debate privacy

2010-08-12T14:43:00.001+01:00

Interesting discussion on privacy featuring danah boyd and Jeff Jarvis, talking at the Supernova forum - http://supernovahub.com/

Google's widening reach.

2010-08-10T13:35:00.003+01:00

This is quite neat, over at the Wall Street Journal, an animated graphic of Google's use of information from it's various sources for targetting adverts. Go have a full look. From a data visualisation perspective, the circular form is a bit exaggerating (it suggests Google is using more information as time goes on because the width of the segment increases), but it looks nice.

Contemporary Violence

2010-08-10T11:40:00.003+01:00

I'd like to make a plug for a new book by Dr Cerwyn Moore, Lecturer in International Relations, University of Birmingham. Contemporary Violence: Postmodern War in Kosovo and Chechnya is published by Manchester University Press, and will be available from October.

Disclosure: Ces Moore was the Principle Investigator on the project I worked on whilst I was at Birmingham, and I had the good fortune to read advance drafts of this book and get an insight into the publication process.

The book draws upon some of the detailed fieldwork that Ces conducted in the Balkans and in Chechnya, and makes use of some very contemporary theories in criticial international relations.

The most important aspect of this book is the use of narrative approaches to international relations to show the importance of stories, myths and foundational narratives in contemporary violence, something often ignored in theories of 'new wars'. This adds a level of complexity to international relations accounts of conflict.

Digizen

2010-08-09T17:52:00.002+01:00

Digizen is a website, created by Childnet International. It features some quite handy resources and pages. It's a bit more engaged that some of the hyperbolic 'fear the internet kids' material that's out there, and might encourage a bit of critical thinking. At least, that's the aim:

The Digizen website provides information for educators, parents, carers, and young people. It is used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship is and encourages users of technology to be and become responsible DIGItal citiZENS. It shares specific advice and resources on issues such as social networking and cyberbullying and how these relate to and affect their own and other people's online experiences and behaviours.

On the site you can create your own 'digizen' a little icon that you can embed with some hopes for digital citizenship. It's aimed at young people primarily, but there's no harm in experimenting.

EPSRC funding call

2010-08-07T12:30:00.003+01:00

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council had put out a call for participants in a research 'Sandpit'* entitled 'Who do You Think You Are?' as part of the 'Global Uncertainties' research strand. This one hopes to:

Develop new research concepts to address problems associated with establishing and maintaining confidence in identity.

“Who do you think you are?” will investigate the problems associated with the ever-increasing range of media (such as video, voice, the internet and other data networks) which allow people to interact with each other or with devices and systems of varying complexity. The interactions these media support may be face-to-face, but increasingly they are carried out remotely. Indeed, remote interaction may often be the only way in which we deal with someone or something, or through which we can access a service of some kind.
The establishment and maintenance of confidence in identity is important if a service is to benefit all and be free from abuse. The key question to be considered at the workshop is how we both establish confidence in the identity of the person or entity with which we are interacting and, just as importantly, how we maintain that confidence over time.

I can't currently apply, not being elligable to be an EPSRC primary investigatory (I'm on a fixed term contract). Which is a shame, because I think I could have contributed.

*Sandpits are a type of event where they get lots of people from different fields together in a hotel or something similar for several days and get them to come up with outlines for collaborative research projects, pretty much then and there. Both the Reslient Design, and VOME projects that I've worked on came out of these type of events

Link to the call here
global uncertainties here

Top Secret America

2010-07-22T08:33:00.003+01:00

Washington Post investigation 'Top Secret America' pulls a lot of information together about the world on intelligence, covert law enforcement and the like. There are also some pretty good visualisations helping to make sense of this information. It's worth a look.

I'm oddly amazed by the amout of space these intelligence operations need, as well as the Posts focus on absolute numbers. The size of these operations touches on something I was thinking about yesterday - intelligence gluts surpassing any analytic capability because of the sheer amount of data produced by contemporary surveillance systems.

Additionally, Wired magazine has reported on the role that congress played in the large numbers of contractors involved in intelligence, and the claims that publishing this information puts US national security at risk (the list of sites was first run past people in US intelligence services to check this wasn't the case, and some of the locations are vague).

Wonder if there'll be something like this for the UK any time soon?

ISA 2010 conference

2010-07-19T08:49:00.003+01:00

Last week, I attended the International Sociological Association world congress in Gothenberg Sweden. I was presenting a paper on UK news media representations of surveillance as part of a panel on Culture and Surveillance, organised by Torin Monahan and David Lyon.

The conference programme can be searched here. ISA is an absolutely huge conference, running from Monday through to Saturday (I did Wednesday to Friday), with multiple panels running from 8.30 in the morning, until around 10.00 at night. It was a bit of a struggle to navigate at times, but I managed to get along to some interesting sessions alongside our own. I thought I'd write about them here for people not lucky enough to have taken a trip to Gothenberg (which I really liked as a city).

Surveillance and Popular Culture (link)

Ariane Ellerbrok (Uni. Alberta) presented about her research on face recognition systems and their shift from a security focus to a use in various commerical, convenience, and playful applications. She argued that the previous justificatory rhetorics that the face recognition industry has had to provide at each turn (national security, citizenship administration etc) are being shifted as useable, consumer technology using face recognition emerges - for example, the face recognition automated tagging of faces in the latest version of Picasa, or the in-progress Recognizr. Ariane suggested that the status of these technologies (Which are still full biometrics linked to verified personal identities) as toys has the effect of silencing the need for justification and makes traditional logics of critique problematic, and called for more examination of the role of play in facilitating more serious surveillance technology.

Nelson Arteaga Botello, Universtad Autónoma del Estado de Mexico, spoke about H1N1 Influenza Surveillance Systems in Mexico: An Approach from Biopolitical and Cultural Studies. This focused upon the one year state of emergency applied by the Mexican government in the 'swine flu' outbreak and the moral panic surrounding this. He analysed this through a governmentality framework, focusing upon the visibilities, tactics and strategies and the creation of a security dispositif. This presentation raised for me a thought about governmentality and it's applicability to different nations. You would have to incorporate public attitudes towards government problematisations (in Mexico, apparently, the public tends to be immediately sceptical to any problem that has been identified by the government).

I was up at this point, presenting a description of the two frames found in UK news media discourse that are used to evaluate and make sense of surveillance. The idea is that news media is a site of political contestation and also forms a source of interpretative resevoirs people use to make sense of surveillance more broadly. There are two frames, one broadly positive, and another broadly negative, but neither is quite the enlightened critical discourse we might be seeking. The paper went well, coming in on time, and I got a couple of good questions. Quite enthused about writing up this research further and trying to get it through into print.

Lorna Elizabeth Muir (Uni. of Aberdeen) gave a talk on Assemblages, Data Doubles and Deleuze’s Dividual: Cinematic Representations of the ‘Control’ Body. She looked at depictions of surveillance the control/discipline shift in cinema, finding that whilst there was some critique, many film directors were also fairly complicit in the process. Her theoretical framework was an engagment with Deleuze's control society model and examined the difficulty of representing data based surveillance, with the result that all imagery seems to focus upon the level of the human interface (text and graphics onscreen)- the visual being actually unecessary for the surveillance machine. Lorna looked at Enemy of the State and how this film shows the data double whilst at the same time destorying the real life. The ace phrase she used here was 'extracting info from the human whilst discretely rendering its obsolete' Lorna's big question is what are the alternative futures being marginalised by these Hollywood blockbusters? As illustration below, I've added Mark Coleran's showreel. He's a graphic and interface designer responsible for a lot of the surveillant images in contemporary cinema.

Coleran Reel 2008.06 HD from Mark Coleran on Vimeo.

Andre Mondoux, Quebec University brought the panel to a close speaking about Television and the Banalisation of surveillance, using examples from various television shows (24, Paradox, Battlestar Galactica, and faked reality shows) to illustrate his talk (delivered from an iPad no less). Surveillance is banalised in these depictions because it becomes the background, and in presenting ideology as non-ideological. Andre also spoke about hyperindividualisation, and the idea of totally free subject, freed by itself, for itself, and for which all discourses are equal. The pragmatic takes over the symbolic and the way to create meaning it to look at things.

Technological Futures (link)

This was a really interesting panel. the first paper Michael Strassnig (Universitaat Wien, Austria) presented on Technologies of Imagination: Rethinking Spaces for Negotiating Nanofutures. This was a research project aimed at looking at the co-production of technology, understanding the dynamics of expectations and how these impact on the future. The case study was research on nano-technology in Austria. They used a system called Play Decide, derived from an EU FP6 research project, which looks really interesting, and something we could potentially harness for VOME. They based IMAGINE workshops on this which allowed people to take advantage of exerpt information on cards, whilst having the experts physically absent and thus allowing open discussion and contestation. The cards can be used to assemble a range of different narratives about nano-science.

Carlotta Bizzarri spoke about the use of Robots for educational purposes in a research project where the took lego mindstorms robots into several schools in Spain, using participant obversation to see how it effected education. Apparently, there was some destabilisation of power relations as some students were more knowledgable about the technology than their teachers. However, it looked like gender dynamics remained important in the mainstreams schools with students identifying boys but not girls as experts on the technology.

Daphne Esquivel Sada presented on Synthetic Biology or 'the route towards the engineering of life'. This examined the evolution of bio-engineering, kitchen-sink biology, and the modularisation of bio-bricks based around open source ideologies. This egalitarian logics allows anybody to contribute and upload genetic designs to communal databases, avoiding duplication of work, and allowing relatively amateur scientists to participate. There was the familiar discussion during the question regarding if this was 'democratisation' or not.

Michelle Robitalle (Montreal) presented on transhumanist political ideology in her paper entitled "Self-Determination and Optimization of Individual Capacities: Towards a Brand New Self-Made Body?". She did a really interesting analysis of the way that transhumanism took a series of liberal and libertarian rights and interpreted them in a particular technological way. So for example, the right to the body, because a right to improve the body through technological means. There were interesting discussion about the role of the state in this, and to what extent other people should pay to support these 'rights'. The transhumanist idea is based upon the three views of the body as perfectible, informational and obsolete. It would be interesting to take a Freeden inspired conceptual morphology look at Transhumanism.

Visual Methodologies (Link)

Collecting and Producing visual data and methodologies of analysis was crammed into a small room with a large number of people, suggesting that this topic might need more face in future given the interest that it attracts. I was interested in visual methodologies for various reasons involved with the VOME project, our use of video elicitation and also the surveillance theory perspective and my personal interest in photography.

Dario Da Re (Padua and Veron) presented on the visual tool kit. He advocated the use of computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (and suggested looking at Surry's offering in this area). He argues that manual analysis is impossible with video material, but that it can often be data heavy given the file size. Video, he argued, are particularly effective for understanding Proxemics (the way humans structure space, placement in social actions and social status) and Kinescics (body language, non-verbal polysemics, only 30-35% of communication is through language). He recommeded the use of ATLAS.ti based on a VISE principle (visualisation, integration, serendipity and exploration) for its ease of coding, retrieval, and memo functions.

Maciej Frackowiak presented some methodological and theoretical insights from his research project using photo elecitation to examine the boundary between erotica and pornography. He identified the challenge of non-stable imagery, where context is highly important in making the distinction. An image taken off the internet and rendered in the same format as a glossy art print destablises supposedly settled boundaries. He argued that images are a window and a puzzle. Maciej stated that photographic elicitation is a cultural practiced based upon a particular definition of a photo, and that the atmosphere of an interview is (as always) very important.

Lukasz Rogowski gave a very interesting talk on iconoclasm - the destruction of images. This was not limited to religion but drew in further examples of this tension, leading him to the argument that iconoclasts do not doubt the power or effectiveness of the image, but rather they are fearfully aware of the power of the image. He identified several types of iconoclasm. Transformative iconoclasm such as the destruction of the Berlin wall, or pulling down a statue of a dictator are used to mark epochal change. Everyday iconoclasm is where an individual would destroy photos to mark a change in their life, often done in solitude and silence. Digital/Virtual iconoclasm includes spoof sites and parodies online, pictures showing destruction and the digital creation of damage (end of the world images). This talk triggered off a lot of questions from the audience. It made me think of the fear of iconoclasm that drives resilience planning in the UK, and the on-going contestation over photographers rights in public spaces.

Dennis Zuev presented on an analysis of youtube video used for political purposes by activists in the Uyghor nationalist movement in China and how resistance occured in the fields of popular music and culture rather than in the open. He also showed how internationalised the Uyghor diaspora was and how it interacted in this online video conversation. It reminded me of the Chechen diaspora's use of the internet for political communication.

(mis) Understanding the Internet

I also got a brief introduction to Socio-Cybernetics courtesy of the Socio-Cybernetics research committee's panel on Understanding Cyberspace and the Internet. I went along, because I've got a take on understanding cyberspace and the internet that's currently sitting in the paper on cyber security. I didn't get too much from this panel, and the cyberspace/cybernetics link is possibly only an etymological one.

One paper was an intro to philosophy of science, featuring Kuhn and , the need to start science again from the beginning (?!) and the utterly solipsist claim that everything was happening inside the head of the presenter. I'm not sure. I felt painfully, really present. The one paper out of three that had anything to do with cyberspace and the internet used a generational analysis, arguing that the 'gameboy people' basically had different ways of thinking, and that this was problematic for developing critical thinking skills - they (we?) see the world as a screen, and can always start a new game if they loose the current one. The presenter asked 'what kind of political discourse is possible in 140 characters). The presenter suggested that he (and his generation) simply couldn't undestand why young people put personal information online.

The trick is not to assume it's because they're young, or have 'different minds' but to do some detailed examined of the infrastructure encouraging information sharing, the educational environment in which young people develop information literacy, and in the best case - ask them.

Sociology of the Military

This is an area with some overlaps with Security Studies in International Relations, which I used to teach at Birmingham, and still maintain a strong research interest in (especially where it overlaps with surveillance studies), so it was interesting to see it from a sociological perspective (and again it suggested there's not too much real space between the two disciplines). The one stand out presentation that I saw was from Orna Sasson-Levy, Edna Lomsky-Feder and Yagil Levy from Israel, presenting on their work with transcripts of the Breaking the Silence interviews. Breaking the silence is a group of Israeli former soldiers, who publish annoynmously the statements and testimony of Israeli soldiers of their abuses (and abuses they witnessed) in the occupied territories. For the first time, Breaking the Silence had published a report using the testimony of women soldiers. Making use of the interviews from this, the academics have done their own analysis (which I recommended they should share back with the research participants). They identify the particular way that women soliders would often criticse childish and immatures male behaviour (over-enthusiastic) in the military, whilst holding on to their own rationality in the face of accusations of emotionality. They identified a potential shift from 'republic motherhood' to combat experience as the standpoint for female critique of military practice. Finally, the idenfied that breaking the silence was unable (for reasons they saw as endemic to Israeli society) to critique the occupation per se, but only the way in which it was being carries out.

I popped into a couple of other sessions, but they're not relevant to the purpose of this blog. It was interesting to be a politics type spending time at a sociology conference, and could to spend a little time thinking about a broad range of sociological issues and themes. There were also plenty of ideas that I could apply back to my own research. Finally, I really liked what I saw of Sweden.

the facebook republic

2010-07-12T17:03:00.003+01:00

website Visual Economics maps out facebook applications and pages as if they were a set of countries.

ICS Book review: Goold and Neyland

2010-07-08T11:23:00.002+01:00

My review of Ben Goold and Dan Neyland's book 'New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy (Willan: 2009) has been published in the journal Information, Communication and Society.

(There's a typo in the first line that snuck in since my last proof-reading)

New Issue of Surveillance and Society - Surveillance, Children and Childhood

2010-07-08T11:11:00.002+01:00

There's a new issue of Surveillance and Society just published on the topic of surveillance, children and childhood. This is a really interesting topic, which I'm taking a bit of a look at currently in terms of privacy/online safety education for kids. I was switched on to the issue of surveillance and children by listening to two presentations that were part of the ESRC/Surveillance studies network seminar series 'The Everyday life of surveillance'. Mike McCahill and Rachel Finn's work is featured in this journal issue in an article 'The Social Impact of surveillance in three UK schools: Angles, Devils and Teen mums'. Also worth mentioning in this field is Torin Monahan and Torres's edited book 'Schools under Surveillance' (reviewed in the issue) and also Emmeline Taylor's work in the area of surveillance in schools.

The Curfew - surveillace 'edugame'

2010-06-25T08:51:00.005+01:00

The day after I start looking into educational games for discussing and learning about privacy, I find out about this. 'The Curfew' - a game about surveillance and authoritariamism from Channel 4, launching this summer. For young people 14+. The 'Shepherd Party' video (below) is chilling in its excellent graphics. www.thecurfewgame.com. I'm looking forward to seeing more of the subtance of this.

Social Network Bill of Rights

2010-06-24T11:08:00.002+01:00

Derived from the conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, this is doing the rounds at the moment. It does a good job of summing up the issues involved in social networking.

Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service
Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand
Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification
Empowerment : Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies
Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others
Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first
Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data
Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised
Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions
Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data

Steve Graham at LSE - video & audio

2010-06-14T11:30:00.003+01:00

Steve Graham gave a talk at the LSE last week 'Cities under Seige' about his new book. Worth watching. Video and Audio

Unauthorised Access

2010-06-07T10:52:00.000+01:00

A Film by Annaliza Savage, 1994

Surveillance in Wired - July 2010

2010-06-05T13:04:00.002+01:00

I've got a subscription to Wired magazine. This might be very old fashioned way to access the content - in physical form, but I like it. I'm a big fan of the magazine (and it's various websites - especially the Danger Room and Threat Level blogs), especially now that it has a UK edition. It's pretty useful for keeping a handle on tech culture issues and developments.

and it's all about surveillance.

Well, it's not. This may just be the way that I'm reading it, with a particular interest and motivation, and a tendency to see surveillance issues in many things. However, there is a strong association between information technology and surveillance, which has been remarked on by many. Wired occasionally investigates the surveillant dimension of information technology head on, and at other times it comes up as part of a story written from a different perspective. Given the subscription, I thought I might pull out some of these topics, with a little commentary from each issue.

You're being tracked - Amber Marks (34-35) a neat graphic example of various attempts to create 'malevolent intent' detection - a lot of these coming from various university departments. These things thing that by detecting some sort of 'leaky signal' from the body, that you can spot somebody who is up to something malicious. Or more likely, the vastly more numerous population of people who are stressed, angry, upset, tired, late for work etc. Amber's the author of HeadSpace.

Shred the Evidence - Guy Martin (p.124-133)
An examination of attempts to digitally recover and re-create the shredded archives of post-soviet Eastern European secret police and intelligence services, including in East Germany and the Czech republic. These archives were truely massive. Whilst the article focuses upon the technical challenge of pulling thousands of sacks of shredded paper and mangled digital tape into something readable and searchable, there is some analysis of the way that this reconstruction is threatening to those people who had been state agents during the Soviet era, who may still be involved in political life. Its an interesting issue because of the competing imperatives of privacy (the archives were created as a tool of control, and probably contain a lot of information on the subjects of state surveillance), and the desire to undestand how the various systems of oppression and control functioned, and the desire to bring to justice those who participated in them (finding out who the agents were and what they did). The plans to open up certain archives in a fully searchable web-accessible form is interesting, as is the worry that the published databases are being hoovered up by the still functioning intelligence services of other states. Not mentioned in this article is the historical reality of the way that databases and files from one regime are often appropriated and used by their successors, conquerers, or 'liberators'. I was recently told how start up private military contractors in Iraq worked very rapidly to acquire records from Iraqi state ministries following the fall of the Sadam regime, upon which they started to develop databases now used for vetting Iraqi workers on US bases.

Space Jam - Evan Schwartz (pg.100-103) In this article about the sheer amount of junk floating in orbit around the earth (or rather hurtling around it at extremely high speed), and various attempts to remove some of it, we learn about the 'Space Surveillance Network' a USA military unit run by the Joint Space Operations Centre, whose job is to track as much of this space debris spinning around the planet as they can, to try and anticipate the major potential collisions. It's a nice little account of surveillance of the non-human (although with implciations for our use of space for communication, navigation, mapping etc). The 'big sky theory' (the idea that space is big (very big) so it doesn't matter what you dump in it, is a mistake with hindsight, but aren't we sort of still treating the sea in this way?

The Great Check-in Battle - Neal Pollack (pg92-97)
looks at the competion between location based social networking services (Gowalla and Foursquare) . Not read all of this yet, but there are clear surveillance implications for the increase in location-based services, and the sort of self-monitoring and revelation to friends pushed through a centralised social network service, that presumably gets its market share from doing something with that data, which mirrors what we've seen with facebook, but with an increased spatial component. John Battelle writes about how the 'check-in' adds an extra layer of detail to collected models of intention (the search, the purchase, the query, the social graph and the the status update).

A Robot that Spies (pg80) - a wi-fi controllable spy robot with webcam, microphone speaker etc. Controllable over the net, and even works as a VOIP phone. Can I have one of these please?

IDIS 2010

2010-06-05T12:58:00.002+01:00

I attended the 3rd Interdisciplinary workshop on Identity in the Information Society (IDIS 2010) held in Rome, the week before last.

I've got very complete notes on the presentations, keynotes and question and answer sessions. However, the purpose of the workshop was to present and gain feedback on works in progress, so given that a lot of the papers need a bit more work before publication (my own contribution very much included), I'm not going to post those notes here.

I presented on public sector engagement in online identity management. We've looked at how various complexes of actors are coming together to produce educational and guidance material on how people can manage their personal information. It's part of the wider VOME attempt to examine how people think about privacy and consent online - Our hunch is that these guidance material (in the form of websites such as Get Safe Online) will play a part in shared understandings of personal information, privacy and consent online (although in a far from deterministic sense).

There were some interesting keynote presentations on Smart data agents, privacy by design and the future of subject access requests from George Tomaki, The Privacy commissioner of Ontario and Microsoft's Caspar Bowden respectively.

And I got to go to Rome.

Tate Modern: Exposed: Voyerism, Surveillance and the Camera

2010-06-01T12:25:00.002+01:00

There's an interesting new exhibition on at the Tate Modern in London
quoting from the website:

Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the pictures present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on iconic and taboo subjects. ...
The UK is now the most surveyed country in the world. We have an obsession with voyeurism, privacy laws, freedom of media, and surveillance – images captured and relayed on camera phones, YouTube or reality TV.
Much of Exposed focuses on surveillance, including works by both amateur and press photographers, and images produced using automatic technology such as CCTV. The
issues raised are particularly relevant in the current climate, with topical debates raging around the rights and desires of individuals, terrorism and the increasing availability and use of surveillance. Exposed confronts these issues and their implications head-on.

I think I'll try and get down to this.

Lib-dem - Conservative coalition agreements

2010-05-12T15:17:00.002+01:00

The coalition comitments between the Conservative and Liberal democrat parties have just been published: here - This idea of a Great Repeal bill has cropped up a few times this morning. There are some hopes for it to be the first wiki-bill. It would put a hell of a lot of things in a single bill, and not all of it is civil liberties inspired - on that page there's a lot of 'this burdens business' too.

"The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.

This will include:

A Freedom or Great Repeal Bill.
The scrapping of ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database.
Outlawing the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.
The restoration of rights to non-violent protest.
The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
Further regulation of CCTV.
Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences."

checklist?

'Human-flesh Search' in China & JS Mill

2010-05-11T14:47:00.005+01:00

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times about a Chinese trend of groups of internet users conducting a distributed form of investigative surveillance to focus upon suspected wrong-doers, find out information about them, and conduct vigilantte campaigns to get them fired from jobs etc.

There's a court case in progress about it relating to the suicide of the wife of a 'human-flesh search' target. Story about that here.

This isn't entirely new, and not isolated to China, although it's been given a name now (although one that sounds very creepy and body-horror to my ears). web-fora such as 4Chan or something awful have demonstrated quite substantial capability in this respect. What would occasionally happen was that commentators making use of the supposed anonymity of the web to make comments that in some way angered a critical mass of forum participants, would find that any online detail was being worked out - traced back along a pathway from their online username and comments they had previously made. Often this involved finding any potentially embarrassing material and firing it back at them in the forums, either to counter claims made (about identity or expertise e.g. 'I'm a former soldier' 'I'm a published writer') or simply in an attempt to embarass. However, in contrast to the Chinese cases discussed in the stories above, my impression is that in these cases, retreat from the forum signalled defeat, and the end of the investigative effort, nor were authorities involved, given the oft-anarchic (or at the very least irreverant) slant of some of the sites.

Here's one example that went a bit further here, the p-p-p-powerbook prank.

It's quite easy to find information online. That we probably all know. We're aware of state surveillance, and we're becoming fairly concerned about the data organisations like facebook, google or amazon might have about us, but there's this third strand where we might become the object of collective attention. It's synoptic but not quite in the way described in that article.

The most obvious political perspective that appears with regard to this is J.S Mill's understanding that society (as well as the state) can be sources of oppression. One of Mill's core contributions to political theory was that society can potentially be more oppressive because of it's willingness to judge and disapprove of individual conduct. The internet is interesting in that it can be potentially supportive of a lot of individuality, allowing people with relatively niche interests (or habits) to find others, establish communities etc, yet at the same time, has the potential to expose us to distributed peer-over-peer surveillance. Marc Andrejevic on lateral surveillance here. There's something here about the importance of compartmentalised identities (both online and offline) and the danger posed by easily linking those identities up online.

[thanks to Chris T for the p-p-p-pointer]

Facebook Privacy + data visualisation

2010-05-08T12:40:00.003+01:00

Two things of high interest to me and this blog, combined in one. Matt Mckeon has a visualisation of facebook's default privacy settings, the amount of people your data on facebook is likely visible too. The picture above is a capture of single frame of it - the full version found here animates and is interactive. Very nice work.

Times Square bombings

2010-05-05T10:58:00.004+01:00

There's a discussion article in the New york Times about the failed bombing attempt in Time Square the other day. It rapidly turns into an assessment of the value of video surveillance in counter-terrorism.

Richard Clarke is surprisingly stoic, suggesting that we shouldn't panic, or assume that this means counter-terrorist efforts are failing. Steve Simon falls into the 'even if CCTV doesn't prevent this, we should still have more of it' trap and then goes on to use the UK as a positive example of how the United States should deploy CCTV. His argument is based upon post-event investigation. The 7/7 bombing investigation, although it is frequently visualised with the images of bombers getting on a train to London, was much more reliant on other, less visual investigative techniques. Evidence from the UK also suggests that the evidence value of CCTV is pretty small. Other research suggests that if many CCTV cameras were people, they'd be legally blind. Michale Black and Paul Eckman get this somewhat, although the former is pre-occupied with calibrating cameras so that they can spot people who are already on some list or database of potential suspects. Noah Shactman highlights the ease with which camera surveillance can be avoided (by a potential terrorist - it's still pointing at the vast majority of innocent people moving through the city, who perhaps shouldn't have to hide their faces).

The effect of video surveillance is often taken as almost axiomatic by security policy-makers. Kevin Haggerty recently called this the 'post-justificatory moment' in surveillance - where there doesn't have to be an explanation or justification for how and why a surveillance technology will effect a social problem - it is obvious that it will. In this case, obvious that video surveillance with help to counter-terrorism. There is something about the spectacle of the visual that makes video surveillance particualrly strong in this 'moment' (although the database is almost equally powerfully accepted - as Oscar H. Gandy's most recent book shows). Schneier points out that video footage of the bombing attempt "make for exciting television, but their value to law enforcement officers is limited."

Schneier highlights the importance of focusing efforts on investigation and effective post-event response, rather than on trying to identify specific targets - this was a problem that emerges in attempts to build in resilience. Firstly, a strong case had to be made that a specific site was a target for terrorists, and that this risk was high enough to merit the extra costs of building in counter-terrorism resilience. This case could rarely be made, firstly because of the low incidence of terrorism (it rarely happens, the chances of it happening to particular given place are extremely low, outside of some very high profile exceptions) and secondly because of speed with with 'targets' can change. The worrying response here would be to attempt to secure all locations (which at times seemed to be on the agenda).

Update - this bombing attempting has already been called 'The NY FAILbomb' in part because it was rubbish; a 'Rube Goldberg contraption' made of propane tanks and fireworks, made by somebody with 'more desire than ability'.

facebook's eroding privacy timeline

2010-04-30T15:10:00.000+01:00

from EFF an account of how facebook's privacy policy has changed over time

a better use for CCTV?

2010-04-28T09:56:00.003+01:00

A sneeky jab at our culture’s obsession with security cams, this birdhouse looks like it’s watching your every move. Hang it near your house and your neighbors won’t dare steal your garden hose! Deter burglars while keeping Tweety birds well-fed and happy! It’s a great gift with a goofy sense of humor for the bird lover in your life. The model is called 'Wolfgang S.' a reference to the hawkish German Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schauble who likes spying on everyone in the name of security.

Thanks to Jason Pridmore for the link

Creative Disruption

2010-04-27T12:45:00.003+01:00

I just came across the blog of the forthcoming book 'Creative Disruption' by Simon Waldman (Director of Digital Strategy for the Guardian Group). From the summary on the website, the book is looking at how established business interests are coping with, or engaging with new technologies. It's got a business focus, but the summary made me think about the potential implications for states, government departments, political parties, militaries etc. The 'established interests' of the pre-digital political world. (So this is a politics and technology post rather than a pure 'surveillance' one).

"Businesses that have to deal with the internet are fundamentally different
to those that are the products of it. It is great to look at Google; great to
admire Amazon, and Wikipedia is as fascinating a social and creative phenomena
as you can find. But if you are running a business that is profoundly
structurally challenged, you share very little of their corporate DNA.

Yes, everyone needs to know about their world, but thinking you can just
graft on the bits you like from them in a hope that you will ‘get digital’ is no
more likely to succeed than putting on a flashing bow tie and hoping everyone
thinks you have a sense of humour."

Waldman describes 'creative disruption' as being driven by three things, digital physics (digital files infinitely copiable, anything online is global, storage space cheaper and faster), changing consumer behaviour (desire to create, connect, challenge and control), and new entrants and entrepreneurs (where encumbants have little incentive to innovate, low barriers for entry, sparks for new ideas). He suggests that just tinkering around the edges is not enough, and that responding to these disruptions - which undeniably exist in the field of politics, will require creative thinking, agility and an ability to restructure in fundamental ways.

Govt requests to Google

2010-04-22T10:07:00.001+01:00

Google is now publishing (with 'some limitations') the number of requests it recieves from national governments for information on users, or for removal of information.
It's available (on a map) here.

Digital Economy Act

2010-04-19T10:54:00.003+01:00

The Digital Economy Bill recieved royal assent the other week, becoming the Digital Economy Act 2010. (pdf). The bill was passed during the 'wash-up' period at the end of the parliamentary session, meaning that it recieved limited scrutiny.

Particularly objectionable sections are the provisions in the Act for the disconnection from the internet of households where the connection has been accused of downloading material that infringes copyright. This has potentially servere implications for the digital inclusion agenda of the government. It also assumes that anybody who signs a contract with an ISP has the technical and social resources to police their family's internet useage (more info here) Writing for the Guardian, John Naughton argues:

How did this fiasco come about? Mainly because legislatures (both here and abroad) deal with intellectual-property issues in ways that are corrupt, irresponsible and inappropriate for modern technology.

The Act also appears to treat all 'internet service providers' equally in terms of measures to prevent copyright infringement. This is something that will be particularly onerous for the cafe on the corner with free wi-fi. To the point that they'll probably have to stop.

The Labour party had it's rebels: Tom Watson speaks to the Open Rights group about his opposition in Parliament to the Bill and the future discussions about online activity, rights, and copyright, and about how this is the beginning (video). "when an issue is debated in parliament, the argument has already been had". Mark Lazarowicz also voted against the bill, and gives his reasons here. He thinks that the campaign against the bill drew more attention to it from MPs, and exposed the flaws in the 'wash up' process.

What is interesting about this area is that it seems that a number of people without much exposure to the mechanics of the political process, but with IT/technology knowledge have paid attention to that process during the passage of the bill. It might be worth keeping an eye on this area - there are surely going to be further contestations over digital rights policy. This scrutiny seems to have generated a lot of anger and irritation. For example VoteThemOut.co.uk is a site where you can find out how your MP voted on the bill. There was also a fair amount of scorn poured on MP's for technological mistakes or ignorance. This letter from 'Science in the Open' sums up some of this concern. Cory Doctrow takes it as a declaration of war

From a political science perspective, most votes in the House of Commons are determined by party position, rather than by individual stances of MPs, and most of the time, the chamber is occupied by far from the majority of MPs. Furthermore, MPs are generalists, rather than specialists, and there's no requirement to know much about the policy area they vote upon. That said, technology policy is an area of concern, with some structural issues.

There's definately work to be done on the politics of expertise. It would be applicable to both technological policy, environmental policy, and security/terrorism policy. All three areas where the ability of the generalist politician (and especially the public) to have decent information about the policy area is limited. It's a problem for democratic systems, and leads to a reliance on experts. However the question then becomes - which experts, and under what structures of accountability and oversight. In CT policy, this often the preserve of 'security experts' or classified reports from intelligence agencies. In environmental policy, it's probably the best developed, the experts are public and decisions can be made on the basis of the scientific method and peer review. Digital copyright policy just got written by experts working for the big industry players.

Parliament of hypocrites

2010-04-16T13:29:00.002+01:00

campaigning group 'Power 2010' has published a document entitled parliament of hypocrites in which they argue that UK politicians have been playing 'fast and loose' with the personal data of the public, whilst safeguarding their own by excemptions in freedom on information practice.

parliament of hypocrites (pdf)

A Global Surveillance Society?

2010-04-12T09:43:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll be attending (and currently very much looking forward to) the surveillance studies network/living in surveillance societies conference 'A Global Surveillance Society?' at City University, London.

The theme of the conference is as follows.

Surveillance is a ubiquitous feature of living in the global north, with citizens routinely monitored by a range of sophisticated technologies. Increasing levels of surveillance are typically justified by the threat of terrorism, crime and disorder, and to improve public and private services. However, surveillance is also a feature of developing societies, and manifests in different ways, with different rationales, purposes and within different systems of governance. In this conference we would like to expand and relativise understandings of surveillance as a trans-national, trans-border and trans-cultural phenomenon.

I'm really glad to see that not only is this an international conference, but that a strong theme of it is international. This is a point that I've tried to make in a paper with Ces Moore that's currently been resubmitted to a journal. That surveillance practices exist at an international level of analysis, as well as at a local level. Comparative studies are good (and necessary for working out the dynamics) but some more attention needs to be paid to the flows and interactions. For example, when looking at terrorism in India, and the surveillant responses that were being discussed, many Indian commentators looked to the use of CCTV in the UK (and its representation) as something which they should emulate to counter-terrorism. These flows of security and surveillance practices cross borders. In doing so they change, combine or discard material - being abstracted.

I'm giving a paper on thursday on the implications for surveillance theory (and practice) from the 'human security' vs 'national security' debate. It's coming from an explicitly international relations perspective. I've noticed that the idea of 'human security' has been cropping up in a few places in surveillance studies of late. This paper came out of teaching a class or two on Human Security whilst at the University of Birmingham. There's quite a literature (and practice) based around the concept, and whilst it is a different way of thinking about things to 'national security' its got some baggage - which is what the paper's about really.

There's a joint plenary session on wednesday, that I'm really interested in hearing. David Lyon and Didier Bigo will be talking about the commonalities between surveillance studies and security studies. I'm really excited about this because that's often where I find myself situated - at least when I was working at Birmingham. Security studies is much familiar ground, or at least a way of explaining my work, to people within Political Science. So it'd be great to have their perspectives on this. Personnally, I'm temtped to think there is a large degree of overlap, with some caveats - not all surveillance is security for example, and not all security politics are surveillance - but there's a lot of common logics, in addition to the important international dimension mentioned previously.

There's a section in my own paper where I try to engage with some of these questions regarding international relations/surveillance studies overlap. I'm happy with the position I've taken with that, but if some good points are made, then I'll surely be taking them into account.

I love a last minute re-write, during the conference dinner. Which has a celidh, so I'll be sitting away from that pretending my lack of co-ordination is some form of principled avoidance of what appears to be a barn dance.

I'm also happy to be chairing two panel sessions. One on politics and the other on regulation . On Tuesday afternoon, Darlis Mojarrieta Castenada, Catarina Fois, and Minas Samatas, and then Paul de Hert, Thomas F. Ruddy and Rozemarjin Van Der Hilst.

And when I can get to them, I'll be keeping an eye on the various panels and papers looking at online surveillance, given how central that is to the VOME project.

Erasing David

2010-04-09T15:30:00.001+01:00

A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT PRIVACY, SURVEILLANCE AND THE DATABASE STATE

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear a decision that changes his life forever. Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy and the loss of it.

Definately looks worth watching. Might also be useful for prompting discussions in the VOME project. http://erasingdavid.com/

A Critique of ‘Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case’ by Amitai Etzioni (Joint Forces Quarterly, Issue 57, 2nd Quarter 2010).

2010-04-01T14:29:00.002+01:00

Etzioni attempts to make the case for the targeted use of unmanned aircraft systems to kill what he calls ‘abusive citizens’ – those combatants (terrorists or insurgents) who ‘abuse their civilian status’ to attack ‘truly innocent civilians’ and prevent military and security forces from performing their duties. This article is framed as a discussion of the ethics of these actions, but fails to do this on a number of counts, and rather is an attempted justification of the practice, that relies heavily upon un-argued assumptions and ideological foundations. This response highlights a number of these failings, initially dealing with broader concerns about the ethics of targeted killing, then focusing upon the specific impacts of unmanned aerial weapons systems.

The paper ‘Unmanned Aircraft systems: the moral and legal case is available to read here. (.pdf)

Etzioni’s paper makes an unsustainable essentialist distinction between ‘truly innocent civilians’ and ‘those that abuse their civilian status’. Because of their actions, this latter category have forfeited their rights and can be targeted for killing. The population surrounding these actors are also of security concern – they are ‘part time spies, lookouts and providers of services such as accommodations and medical care to the terrorists’ (70) To the extent that these civilians provide services voluntarily, Etzioni argues they should be treated the same as combat service support personnel. This is exactly the logic that Osama Bin Laden used to justify attacks on the World Trade centre and Pentagon, and is likewise faulty in any complex society or interconnected world economy. Applying this provision widely, would also draw attention to the large number of private sector contractors supporting western armies, and the defence industry that supports this. P.W. Singer, in his fundamental work on robotics in war raises questions about the ethics of situating drone pilots far from warzones, and asks if their combat activity makes them viable military targets despite being located ‘amongst a civilian population’.

Like many contemporary analysis of ‘asymmetric’ warfare, the article inverts the broader asymmetry, ignoring the vast technological and resource potential of one side, whilst focusing on the advantages the other side gains from their informal nature. A response to this is to revert the asymmetry and argue that the US military use their military status to their advantage, to use military force legally and openly, supported by substantial resources, logistic chains, technology and equipment. Etzioni argues that “the issue would be largely resolved in short order if the abusive civilians would stop their abusive practices and fight – if they must- according to the established rules of war “(67). Similarly, he states that ‘the main fault lies with the abusive citizens who refuse to separate themselves from the local population’ – arguing that the responsibility for any collateral damage lies with the combatants hidden amongst the population who refuse to line up neatly in open terrain to be obliterated by their technologically superior antagonist. The merging of combatant and civilian populations is in part a result of US military and technological dominance of the conventional battlespace. Far from being at the mercy of insurgents, the particular theatre of conflict is determined by their massive beneficial asymmetry in all others.

This argument that derogation from the laws of war on the part of one party somehow allows derogation from the laws on war by the other part (which boils down to crying ‘no fair!’ ) is a non started. The laws of war should not be thought of simply as rules to a game, but rather as ethical and moral constraints on right and proper behaviour. Etzioni works entirely within a utilitarian paradigm, where options should be selected purely due to their effectiveness is maximising US combat power.

Etzioni basically dismisses the legal question of the use of UAVs for targeted killing. His argument boils down to it being either legal, due to congressional authorisation to hunt down those responsible for 9/11 or that it does not matter, because international law is vague and can both US and International law changes and can be re-written to accommodate. (70).

The paper attempts to break down the distinction between UAS/UAVs and other technological weapons of war. In this it is somewhat successful and to a certain extent correct. Etzioni argues (but does not provide evidence) that there is no reason to believe UAS cause more collateral damage than bombing or attacks by special or regular forces (70). This may be true individually, however, Singer suggests that the low risk to military forces through the use of a drone aircraft may increase the willingness to order an attack. This may increase the cumulative number of attacks, and unless the UAS are proportionally more accurate and cause less collateral damage, a greater cumulative level of collateral damage. If UAV killing was replacing traditional methods of assassination, then this point would have more merit. The real concern is that the use of UAV is opening up more opportunities for assassination.

This is where the question of technology becomes apparent. One of Etzioni’s arguments on page 68 can be restructured as follows

1) Extra judicial killing is bad (he accepts this, and highlights that legal process is preferable, if possible, furthermore extra judicial killing should be regulated, with lots of oversight and command authority).
2) Terrorists and insurgents exist, and they hide among the population
3) Something must be done to prevent terrorist actions (security demands it)
4) Prevention requires either catching or killing
5) It is not possible to catch and prosecute these terrorists (too difficult or costly)
6) It is possible to kill them (because of the weaponised UAV technology).
7) If we caught the terrorists, we should grant them all human rights
8) But because of 5) we cannot catch them.
9) Because of 6) we can kill them
10) Therefore it is morally acceptable to use the weaponised UAV to kill the terrorist (providing it is regulated, based on intelligence, and the collateral damage is not too great).

The involvement of the technology is as follows. We wouldn’t have tried to capture them before, because it was unfeasible. A technology has been invented, developed and put into service that allows the possibility of killing targets. It is now feasible to kill at a distance in a way that was not possible before. The impossibility of capturing the target is actually morally irrelevant to killing them with remote weapons. The article make the un-argued for assumption that security requires prevention of terrorism rather than prosecuting the perpetrators after the attack.

Keeping up to date with privacy policies

2010-03-31T11:14:00.003+01:00

A good number of the websites we use have a privacy policy. The supposed function of these is to let us know what those sites are doing with our personal data. If you are a cynic, they're a legal covering exercise so that when they do something with our data, they can point to their privacy policy and say 'you should have read that'. Some of these policies are delightfully vague - warning you that your personal information might be shared with 'third parties' for 'purposes'.

However, these policies often change, keeping up to date can be a hastle - even if you're a full-time researcher on privacy.

A reader-tip on lifehacker today suggested using a third party RSS feed generator to keep track of changes on. That way, any changes to the privacy policy page, should be updated to a suitable feed reader.

Which of course leaves you with the problem of what you're going to do about the changes, given the site likely has a lot of personal data on you, and is probably providing some service or utility.

the suggested feed generator page2RSS is here. I haven't used it, can't vouch for it.

Living Places

2010-03-30T17:02:00.003+01:00

My wife Kat Barnard-Wills (aka Kate Barnard) has just had an article published in the national arts publication 'Arts Professional'. In the article, she talks about some of the work that she's been involved with over the last year and a half in her role at Arts Council England. The culture and sport planning tools that she played a leading role in the development of should help to ensure positive changes in the way that culture and sporting infrastructure is planned, funded and delivered across the UK

You can read Kat's article 'Living Places' in Arts Professional, here.

The culture and sport planning toolkit can be found here and information on the arts and museums standard charge here. The toolkit is a set of information, tools and resources for planners, developers, and cultural professionals. The standard charge is a robust methodology for establishing required levels of arts and museums infrastructure. This should help make the case for developer contributions and other funding streams towards arts and museums. The idea here is that developers building large numbers of new housing stock should contribute to making sure areas has sustainable cultural and sporting infrastructre - making them better places to live and work.

Good stuff!

Russian Counter-terrorism - a critical appraisal.

2010-03-30T10:55:00.004+01:00

Asaf Siniver's edited collection 'International Terrorism Post 9/11: Comparative Dynamics and Responses' has just been published by Routledge

Ces Moore and I contributed the chapter 9 - 'Russia and Counter Terrorism: A Critical Appraisal'

to quote the blurb:

This multi-cultural study of counter-terrorism strategies identifies common lessons from failed and successful attempts to counter the terrorist threat and provides guidelines for an effective counter-terrorism strategy. The book explores the changing dynamics of terrorism from a range of perspectives – from the global threat posed by home-grown terrorism in North Africa and the larger security dimensions in the Middle East, to the various strategies employed by western and non-western societies in their efforts to develop effective counter-terrorism strategies. Core themes in the book include the divergent dynamics of the phenomena categorised under the 'terrorism' label, and the domestic, national and regional variants of international terrorism. As such, the book offers in-depth analysis of the relationship between the local and the global, both in the root causes of, and responses to, terrorism since 9/11.

With the chapter on Russia, we brought together Ces' research on the Caucasus, with an attempt to look at the role of technology in the process. It turns out that some of the Chechen groups were early adopters of web communication to try and gain support for their causes. Also that Russian counter-terrorism efforts have taken this into account, combining traditional military strategies with efforts to shut down servers and the like.

No doubt, Russian counter-terrorism efforts are going to be in the news at the moment, with bombings in Moscow. NY times & Guardian reports.

Update: Ces has written an article on the recent bombings for The Guardian, it identifies the context and the history of these attacks.

Speed Camera Resistance presentation

2010-03-16T10:57:00.002Z

Identity & individualism

View more presentations from davidbarnardwills.

These are the slides from the presentation I gave for the Department of Informatics and Sensors internal seminar a week or two ago. I was talking about the research Helen Wells and I had done on resistance to speed cameras that was published in surveillance and society last year. It went well, and we had some interesting questions and discussion at the end.

how the internet is changing politics

2010-03-16T09:24:00.004Z

Quite interesting article here from Mark Pack, who ran two general election internet campaigns for the liberal democrats. He was giving a talk at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham as part of their practitioner series. Would have quite liked to have seen this. [full disclosure, I did my PhD in this department]. His broad argument is that the things analysts talk about regarding the internet and campaigning are not always what practitioners are concerned with.

On a related note, the School is running a blog about the forthcoming election, which is drawing upon the expertise located in that department to provide some very useful commentary on the election, that should differ from the mainstream commentary in the press. I like this a lot. It's pretty important that the knowledge that academics have be made available and useful to a broader audiance, with a quicker timespan than the two years it can take for a journal article to get published.

School of Politics and IR.... It is about time.

charlie brookers on passwords

2010-03-02T10:43:00.002Z

Nice piece by the ever acerbic Charlie Brooker in the Guardian which cuts to the core of some of the 'identity management' problems that currently exist with online security.

In this age of rampant identity theft, where it's just a matter of time before
someone works out a way to steal your reflection in the mirror and use it to
commit serial bigamy in an alternate dimension, we're told only a maniac would
use the same password for everything. But passwords used to be for
speakeasy owners or spies. Once upon a time, you weren't the sort of person who
had to commit hundreds of passwords to memory. Now you are. Part of your
identity's been stolen anyway.

spy laptops in schools

2010-02-23T10:58:00.002Z

This is in the news a fair bit, and here's some good investigative work on it.

http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2010/02/spy-at-harrington-high.html

yet more surveillance of kids (from boing boing) on 'how google saved a school' - egregious surveillance at about 4-5min into this clip

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html?play

Westerminer Legal Policy Forum - comment

2010-02-22T14:02:00.002Z

[after the conference last wednesday, every delegate was given the opportunity to contribute a short article to the forthcoming publication. I wrote and submitted the following]

Privacy is a social good. Whilst privacy is important for the individual in terms of self-development, autonomy, personal dignity, and the exercise of fundamental human rights, this is not the extent of the concept. We are increasingly becoming aware that a lack of privacy, increasing surveillance and a vulnerability to a wide set of social harms arising from poor handling of personal information handling have negative social impacts. This can include chilling effects in political debate and social life, a loss of a presumption of innocence, and a reduction in trust towards government and institutions, including the private sector.

As Charles Raab argued, understanding privacy as a social good means that we can then look to evaluate one set of social goods against another, rather than weighing individual rights against social good and inevitably finding the individual interest lacking in weight.

However, mechanisms for mitigating harms focus upon the individual. As James Backhouse showed, responsibility for protecting their personal information is increasingly being placed upon the individual, exhorted to conduct themselves appropriately so as to mitigate the worst of a wide set of information harms.

Ongoing academic research suggests that many ordinary people are not well placed to secure or manage their own personal information. They are positioned in an information architecture determined by more powerful actors, over which they have little control. The actions they are encouraged to take, such as shredding personal information, or protecting their PIN, are of little impact when information about them is lost from large databases or traded around the world.

Engaging the public is important, but is must be done in terms that make sense to the public. Anna Fielder correctly suggested that language is of fundamental importance here, as is identifying how people think about their privacy and their personal information in the real world, outside of policy and technological circles.

Understanding personal information as a property of the individual, as seemed to be at the heart of Conservative party proposals to roll back the surveillance state, is also problematic. This continues the individualisation of privacy and ignores the social harms. It also misses the increasingly relational nature of privacy, as is made most visible in online social networks. We are more and more digitally interconnected, and this leaves traces. What I may choose to reveal about myself can expose those to whom I am connected to information harms.

Furthermore, the proposals do little to address surveillance and information insecurities arising from the private sector, a significant actor in contemporary surveillance. Privacy harms are currently often an externality that can be ignored by business.

It is possible to design information systems that are privacy and personal information protecting by design, or that allow individuals the ability to choose the degree of personal information they reveal. However, there is currently relatively little incentive for the private sector to invest in research and development of these technologies. There is a role here for government and legislation to encourage the development and implementation of privacy protecting information systems and practices.

Update - this was published, and part of the above was quoted by the LeftCentral blog